Emily R.'s previous work for The Toast can be found here.

At the start of medical school we all had great aspirations. Vague notions of oncology research, of cracking open chests in the emergency department, saving the day, transplanting hearts. But gradually over four years it became clearer that those things were harder, and less glamorous, than they seemed in the abstract. A month in oncology was emotionally like being hit

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For years and years, since I was a little girl, what I really wanted was to be an architect. Specifically, what I wanted was to renovate and restore old houses, to find crumbling unloved buildings and patch them up. Oak floorboards, high ceilings, polished staircases, duck egg blue walls; I wanted to play with windows and light. I wanted to clear out the tangled gardens and strip back the plaster to the original bricks, sand…