Short Story

I have a scar above my left eyebrow from when I fell from a tree when I was five years old. I landed face-first on a particularly pointy rock. Now, you 're probably thinking, "Where were this kid 's parents?!"

Oh, my dad was nearby, sipping on a Corona in a lawn chair (as he does). Once I saw the blood, I bawled my eyes out. My dad, on the other hand, calmly walked over, examined my wound, and told me it was just a small cut, which it absolutely was (the branch I fell from was only five feet high). To make me feel like I wasn 't overreacting, my dad butterfly-stitched my bloody face with two Band-Aids.

If my five-year-old had fallen from a tree onto their face, I would have rushed them to a hospital. I would have dramatically held them in my arms in the waiting room while quietly sobbing about the oh-so-real possibility of a

You know, I probably wouldn 't have let them climb the tree in the first place.

My dad 's the complete opposite. He hardly ever stresses out. He 's cool, calm, and collected. And in my junior year, he had to spend a few nights in the hospital due to high blood pressure.

They said the cause was most likely stress. Stress from what? I thought to myself. He was a stay-at-home dad. For the most part, he takes it easy, eats healthy, exercises regularly, and doesn 't have anger issues. There really wasn 't a reason for him to be stressed out, let alone have high blood pressure due to stress, but he did.

I was very distracted when he spent those couple of days in the hospital. I struggled with my homework, I was distant, and I wasn 't eating very well. The medical issue my father had was so common. It could also kill him. How could we not know the cause of the stress? I thought about this extensively. It felt completely hopeless.

I snapped out of it once I figured out what I could do about it. In the face of adversity, the worst a person can do is dwell. I was stuck on the hopelessness of the situation. The solution? Become a doctor,