Personal Narrative: My Personal Statement

The advice that was given to me about writing my personal statement is that whatever I wrote, it must be a statement that came directly from the heart. I’ve found that in order to do this, I must actually write about my heart. When I was born, doctors discovered that I had a ventricular septal defect. The defect needed to be repaired, or I would have been wheelchair-bound and not lived past my fifth birthday. The experience of my heart surgery was not only life-altering for me, but for my parents as well. I was their first-born child, and they had just purchased their first home. It is hard enough to learn the ropes of becoming a parent - but to be the parents to a very ill child was something they had never prepared for. They always …show more content…
The idea of helping those experiencing illness was still enticing to me, but I also knew that I wanted to be a lawyer. I didn’t feel that I could adequately repay what had been done for me if I was a lawyer, and I expressed that to my mother. She responded that if weren’t for lawyers, the surgeons would not have been able to save my life. I thought that I had known the full story behind my heart operation, but at nineteen years old, my mom told me a much different side to the story. The health insurance company at the last second decided not to cover the heart surgery. The cost of the surgery was seventy-five thousand dollars, and as middle-class people who had just spent their entire savings on a house, there was no way they could afford the surgery. They not only had to worry if I would be healthy post-operation but also now had a battle to fight with the insurance company. To our luck, a lawyer stepped in and took on the case pro-bono, and he was able to get the procedure covered. I was shocked – a lawyer had been behind the scenes of this event in my life, ensuring that my family and I were treated justly in the midst of that horrible time. They made it so that my parents could choose for me to live and be healthy without taking on a humongous debt for making the choice to save my