Health Care on the U.S.-Mexico Border

Decisions have never come easy for me. I have trouble letting go of the road not taken.

There was, however, one decision that was amazingly easy for me.

When I started college, it was my goal to become a physician. I was -- and am -- fascinated with human physiology and the brain. When you're a pre-med student, they urge you not to focus upon a specialty before you get to medical school, but I was interested in the brain. I was thinking psychiatry, but I'm betting that I would have ended up in neurology.

All was going well. I was checking things off the pre-med checksheet.

Until one day my wife was sick. A routine cold, I think. Perhaps a flu. We went to see her primary care physician.

As she was called back to see the physician, I sat there for a moment looking around the room. There were people of all shapes and sizes -- and degrees of cleanliness. They coughed, sneezed, and generally were sick.

And that it hit me.

I DON'T LIKE BEING AROUND SICK PEOPLE!

My would-be career in medicine died that moment. And I have never looked back.

Yet sometimes I am fascinated by how the turns of life bring us back again to where we once were.

Sometime about three years after that fateful day in the waiting room, I was hired to cover education and health care for the Las Cruces Sun-News. It was now my job to explain medicine although I had no formal training in it.

I liked this job. I care about sick people. I care about making it better. I just don't want to actually touch the sick people (my friends and family are laughing as they read this).

A promotion and then a bigger circulation paper took me away from that job.

Six years or so later, I found myself in Annie Lang's lab at Indiana University studying cognitive science and performing funded research on health communication.

That scratched my brain itch.

Now a few years later I'm sitting in West Texas increasingly thinking about health communication. Texas Tech is aggressively seeking full funding for a new 4-year medical school in El Paso, which borders Mexico.

And the more that I think about it, the more that I realize how much I care about border health. Perhaps it's the old health care reporter in me.

In the TTU Health Sciences Center's institutional goals, they say, "we must position our new four-year medical school in El Paso as the national leader in border health. No other medical school in the nation is as well-positioned or ideally suited to impact border health, which is quickly becoming a health disparity issue with enormous national implication."

I left medicine behind in that waiting room more than a decade ago. Somehow, however, medicine keeps finding me.