Episode 27: Nancy Wei

October 6, 2019

I’ve always been inspired by my mom. She’s a family doctor and runs her own practice in Queens. After graduating medical school in China, my parents came to the states to do research and eventually residency. Somewhere along the way, I was born, and my grandparents took me back to China so my parents could focus on work. A year into their residencies, my dad got an offer to start a company with a friend back in China, and my parents made the difficult decision to drop their residencies and head back. But my mom soon got to the point where China just didn’t feel like home anymore, and she decided to come back to the US by herself. By then, she was already in her 30s, older than most graduating medical students, with several gaps in her CV, and an abandoned first residency. For program directors, there were red flags everywhere. But my mom was resilient, and she was accepted into the Family Medicine program at St. Joe’s. The downside was that she had to retake all the boards. She said that while she was studying, she would have the textbook open and one picture of me and one of my dad in front of it. Every time she felt like she wanted to cry because she missed us, she would look at the pictures and remind herself of what she was doing this for, of who she was doing this for. Whenever I think about this, I remember that perseverance is a choice. You just have to center yourself on what is important to you and where you want to go.

Last year was hard. Three of my grandparents passed away, and it felt like every month, someone was in the hospital or one of my parents was flying back to China. The last one was my maternal grandma, the one who raised me. You know how you have that one person that you just have a soft spot for? She was my person. I lived with her and my grandpa, who passed away when I was in high school, from when I was six months old until I was four.

All my memories of when I was a kid are in Shenzhen, which is a city right next to Hong Kong. I think my happiest moments were just being with my grandparents and my cousin in their little apartment. Every day, they’d take me to this park nearby, Lychee Park, where we’d feed the koi fish and ride the foot-pedal boats. They were both doctors, too, for the army. My grandpa was a chief trauma surgeon, and my grandma was an OB/GYN. My mom told me this story once about how a woman from another village came knocking on their door one night because she was giving birth, and my grandma, who was maybe 5’4,” single handedly picked this woman up off the floor and put her on the table. The baby’s head was already crowning. That’s who my grandma was. She was very independent, but she and my grandpa were always a team. After they retired, they would hop on the bus and travel everywhere in China. Whenever my parents called, they’d be in a new city. They just had this zest for life. They were never complacent. And that’s something that’s really important to me, to always learn and explore. They never let age get in the way of doing the things they wanted to do.

That changed when my grandpa was diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer. It was around the time of college apps and SATs. He had to have his stomach removed and be put on a feeding tube, and my dad told me that he lost over 20 kg. But I never got the chance to see that, partly because my parents wanted to protect me and partly because I was in the middle of preparing for college. I think almost in a way, that made it worse – because I didn’t see him, I could only imagine his suffering. When it was getting closer to the end, I wrote him a letter to tell him I was sorry for not visiting him and for not speaking to him much whenever I went back to visit because I was self-conscious about how I sounded in my broken Chinese. When he passed, I promised that I wouldn’t make that mistake again, that I wouldn’t put myself before spending the last moments with the people I loved.

Slowly over the course of M1, my grandma lost the ability to communicate. She had been dealing with diabetes for over twenty years, but it got a lot worse after my grandpa died. She couldn’t physically speak or move on her own anymore. She’d laugh and smile, but in a way that resembled a child not knowing what was going on around her. I asked my dad if he thought she felt frustrated or unhappy that she couldn’t talk to other people. He said that she was smiling all the time because what she was experiencing was almost like euphoria, not real happiness. Because in order for there to be happiness there needs to also be sadness. In the winter, she was hospitalized for pneumonia. She had lost all the muscle tone in her throat due to the diabetes and would only continue to be hospitalized for aspiration pneumonia.

During the first week of Block 3, I met my parents for dinner and told them I had to go to China to see my grandma. Even if it was just for a day. I had two options: the week before Activities Auction, which I was planning, or the week before Med Talks. It felt wrong to leave the auction for the other Senators to pick up, so I decided on the latter. A week later, the day before Formal, I got a message from my dad. It was a home video of pictures of my grandma from different times in her life – but with no preface text. There was some Chinese writing at the end that I couldn’t really understand, but I had this uneasy feeling inside. She had passed that morning.

I think it hurt me a lot because I was deciding between these two times to go, and if I had chosen differently, I would’ve been able to see her. But I had commitments, and I didn’t want to let people down. It was my choice. It was very conscious and deliberate. It was hard because it felt like I had broken the promise I made to myself after my grandpa’s passing. It was a difficult thing to get over. I guess I’m still not really over it. I blame myself for not going back and seeing her even though I know she would understand. In fact, she would have told me not to come, but it’s hard to get over blaming yourself. Because in choosing me, I chose against her.

Looking back on it, I would still make the same choice. I think that everything that happens to us is the result of a decision that we’ve made in the past, and that’s why even though I feel guilty, I choose not to have regret. Because I’ve learned from the choices I’ve made, even the bad ones. They changed me and made me better. Sometimes when life is stressful, I remind myself of the challenges my mom has faced to get here, the life my parents have given me, and the opportunities that my family has told me to prioritize above them. I work hard because I’m grateful, and there’s no more powerful motivation than that.

Who are your 5 favorite artists?
Travis Scott, Post Malone, SZA, Kendrick Lamar, blackbear
If you could have any superpower, which one would you choose?
Perfect vision! I know it’s not really a superpower but I have terrible eyesight and a lowkey irrational fear of going blind lol anyone with 20/20 vision is so lucky.
Pick someone or something from NYMC to give a shout-out too!
Pokémon masters ;) and anyone in MEC who’s taken a break from studying to chat! You’ve gotten me through some rough times, whether you knew it or not.
If someone wanted to talk to you, they should lead with…
Your favorite food!