Ever since I was a medical student I had wanted to be a surgeon. I often felt that it wasn't so much that I had chosen surgery as a career, but that surgery had chosen me. For one, my father was a big deal in the surgical instruments' industry in Pakistan, and I had always liked studying anatomy and was excellent at dissections when we cut apart frogs and individual organs during anatomy lab. Surgery was also my very first clinical rotation in medical school and by the end of it I was completely hooked on to the adrenal rush that you got when when you were frantically trying to stop a person from bleeding out, or trying to pull out a bullet from a critical organ where even a mistake of a couple of millimeters could mean the difference between life and death. It was no surprise then that surgeons held a certain prestige in the hospital.

As a medical student the surgeons I came across were some of the most impressive people, even if some of them were egocentric and occasionally came across as arrogant. However, on the operating table they literally held a person's life in their hands, so maybe that God complex was justified a bit.

To be clear, I did not have any anything against the other medical fields in which you had to use your brain more than your hands. Both Internal Medicine (which is medicine for big people) and Pediatrics (for little people - i.e. kids), were great fields. The physicians in those fields worked hard as well and were probably more intelligent than surgeons. I still remembered how Noor would cringe every time I bought up the fact that I thought she could have gone in to a more competitive field.

In retrospect, maybe if I hadn't let my bias towards surgery cloud my appreciation of her career, Noor would actually have chosen me.

But I had always seen myself as a surgeon, at a major academic center, commanding the kind of honor and fame that I had seen my faculty mentors have. I wanted to be a kick-ass surgeon, but also be an active researcher...i.e. a physician plus a scientist. Lofty goals, I know...but as one of my mentors once said, 'You can't achieve what you can't dream of'.

Little did I know that getting dumped 5 days before my wedding would set up a chain reaction that would completely alter the course of my career not to mention my life.

What had started off as a quick trip to Pakistan in August 2018 had turned into a 2 month ordeal. I knew Noor had gotten married just over 2 weeks after what should have been our wedding day. And while I had blocked her on all my social media accounts, she and I had so many mutual friends that inadvertently her wedding pictures had shown up on my feed, and that had just sent me over the edge.

So as soon as I was done with my sister's wedding I had booked myself a ticket to Pakistan. I had desperately needed to get away from everything in my life in the US...and what better way than to travel halfway across the world to visit home. I had intended to stay only a week, except that the night I was supposed to fly out, my travel bag with my passport and all my US visa documents was stolen from our locked car outside my grandmother's house.

I had immediately started the process of applying for my visa, except that my passport was about to expire. But when I went to get my Pakistani passport made, I realized that my national ID card had already expired. To top it all, I had left my student visa paperwork in the US...I already had a visa so I didn't think I would need it! When I tried to get my university to send them again, it took forever because August-September is when the new students come on to campus and the admissions office is extremely busy.

Then, because of the delay in my PhD I wasn't able to apply for my surgery residency when the applications first opened that November. By the time I did graduate, in February the following year all the surgery spots were filled in. So I didn't have a job till next year's surgery residency spots opened, which meant I would not have a visa to stay in the US since my student visa would expire after graduation.

My only option then was to apply for Internal Medicine residency and then switch over to a Surgery residency the year after that.

So, much to my chagrin, here I was on a cool Wisconsin evening in March 2019 sitting on my computer applying for whatever Internal Medicine residency positions were still open. There weren't many, so I applied for everything that was available across the country. I was hoping that my PhD degree in addition to my Medical degree would make me a fairly competitive candidate.

As soon as I submitted my last application, my phone rang and my mom's picture showed up on the screen. I knew why she was calling again...and like so many times before I debated just ignoring her. But I was a good son so I picked up the phone...mentally bracing myself for the conversation that was about to happen.

"Omar...did you look at the picture I sent to you?"

"Salaam Ami. Are you not even going to greet your only son properly?", I said, only half-jokingly.

"Wasalaam. Now answer my question!", she was not going to let it go today.

"I did look at the picture...but I don't know what you want me to do with it. She looks fine"

I mean, she did look fine, you could call her pretty even, but I wasn't going to marry someone just based on what they looked like. That certainly wasn't the reason why I wanted to marry Noor.

"Omar...I am getting so sick and tired of your delaying tactics. What kind of a girl do you even want? And don't say an independent career-minded girl, you've seen what such girls do", her voice was dripping with hostility.

That was part of my problem. I had always been sure of who I wanted to get married to, that I had never really thought about why I had wanted to get married to her. Which meant that now that she was no longer an option. I had no idea what kind of a future wife I was looking for.

The simplest answer that came to my mind was...someone like Noor!

But given how much my mom hated her, I simply said, "Ami someone who is nice and easy to talk to. I honestly don't have any requirements per se"

"Fine...I am going to go talk to your dad and we are going to go meet some of these girls and their families and let you know who we like"

"Ami wait...", but she had already hung up the phone. Oh great!

Well, maybe this is what I need. Nothing is working out in my life anyway, might as well let my parents handle my marriage. Besides, it's not like I will ever find anyone on my own

I went to bed that night wondering for the umpteenth time, what I could have done to prevent the mess my life was right now. And for the umpteenth time, I traced all my problems back to that moment in Noor's kitchen when she had told me that she couldn't marry me.

Ugh...what is wrong with me? Maybe I need to go see a therapist who specializes in mending broken hearts

I had eventually fallen asleep that night but was pleasantly surprised to wake up to emails from at least 5 different internal medicine programs that had expressed an interest in me. But my initial excitement dampened when I realized that all 5 programs were in small rural hospitals, pretty much in the middle of nowhere.

Being a brown-skinned immigrant physician in the middle of nowhere was not something I was looking forward to. But just as I finished Googling more information on these programs, a new email notification popped up on the side of my laptop screen.

"Dear Dr Omar Khan,

We are pleased to offer you a position in the Internal Medicine program at the University Hospital of Illinois in Chicago. As you know, this program has been consistently rated in the top 10 programs in the country for the past several years. Due to this prestige we have had many applications this year. In order to keep this process as streamlined as possible we ask that you reply with a confirmation or rejection by the end of the day today at 5pm.

Regards,

Allison Whitley (Graduate Medical Education office)"

I stared at the email in disbelief. Is this a joke?

For someone who did not know my past, it would have seemed that I was stunned because I had been accepted to one of the most prestigious Internal Medicine residency programs in the country. But if they did know me they would have realized that the reason I had frozen was because University Hospital of Illinois was the adult hospital connected to the same medical university as the Children's Hospital of Illinois...the hospital where Noor, my ex-fiancé, was currently doing her residency along with her husband.

Oh boy...

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