Hello! I had a couple of unique circumstances, but I'm not sure they qualify for this essay? I don't want adcoms to think I am just making excuses for my performance...but these things really impacted my performance (and my person). [trigger warning for suicide]
1. Rescuing best friend/boyfriend during suicide attempt.
My and my mother drove to my university city after discovering boyfriend had been lying to me and his family about where he was, stopped responding to anyone's texts or calls, had cause for concern before this happened. Ended up busting down a door to find him drinking and taking drugs and cutting his wrists with razor blades. Convinced him to let us call paramedics, kept his parents updated, and held him while he broke down and we waited for EMS. I felt completely dead inside, just pure shock and sadness.
Why it matters: this happened three weeks before my MCAT. I was pretty much unable to continue studying after this and was not in a great mental place on the day of the *longest test ever* ugh. I performed way below what I expected based on practice tests.
2. Health Issues
My sophomore year of college I started having debilitating bladder pain. At the time, I thought it was vaginal pain and saw 3 OB/GYNs who all told me I looked fine and that these things just "sometimes happen". Also went to urgent care maybe 4-5 times thinking it was chronic UTI but they never found anything except blood. During these pain episodes, I would be constantly urinating and everything burned from the inside - I could literally barely walk but also couldn't sit still. They'd last 3 -6 hours usually and then I'd be fine. Could happen anywhere between once a month to 3 times a week. They impacted my ability to study and, worse, my ability to go to class. Since I didn't have a diagnosis, I couldn't be accommodated by my school's disability services, and wound up losing full letter grades in 3 class for attendance (A-->B) and even had to drop one class due to complications with this. It took me until this past fall (after graduation) to discover it was almost certainly bladder related and I now have a urologist who is pretty sure that it is interstitial cystitis but we are ruling other things out now. So far, her suggestions to change in diet have been SO helpful, but I didn't have any real help during undergrad. idk how to talk about this in an essay, especially because it doesn't really have a cure and I will have to deal with it in medical school as well.
