When I was 5 years old I watched a man die. He had a heart attack whilst climbing a ladder to fix my mother's fuse box. He was an electrician. He collapsed. My step-father gave him CPR. And then he died. It was obvious. He hadn't been breathing. It had been more than 10 minutes. And then his body completely gave out. His bowls, breathe and soul instantly leaving him.

When I was 11 years old I found a man who had died. My family was running a resort. The kind that school groups come to, with a flying fox out back and a giant baloney-trampoline thing out the front. I spent everyday of that summer reading by the pool until I was too hot, and then jumping in to cool off. He was sitting in a chair sun baking. I could tell straight away that something was wrong. He was blue-tinged and his face had swollen to twice human size. he was half out of the chair with the table next to him turned over in his effort to reach his cell phone. He had been stung by a bee and went into anaphylactic shock. He was dead before he fully realised what was happening. There had been no history.

When I was 13 my best friend called me. She had been depressed for a few years and I had always been there for her. I'd always been able to make her see the good things in the darkness. And then I moved schools. She called me to say that it wasn't my fault. That she loved me. That it was no ones fault. And then she jumped off a cliff into the sea below. Some men pulled her out and they revived her. But they were too late. She doesn't speak now, she just stares out the window.

When I was 17 a friend of mine came to my room in my boarding house. She said that I was her 'medical friend' and wanted to know how many panadols it would take to kill herself. I asked her how many she'd taken. She responded 26. She had been throwing up all morning. I wanted to take her to hospital but she wouldn't go. So I said we could tell them that she was experiencing stomach problems and needed to be monitored, that way if anything went wrong she'd be there. She agreed. As soon as I got her there, I told them what had happened. They told me she would have seriously damaged her liver if I had waited much longer.

That time I made it, the other times I didn't. As I sit here filling out application after application for why I want to go to medical school, the reasons for me are clear. But if I were to tell the truth they'd never let me in. Damaged goods, emotional trauma, psychologically scarred and all that BS. So what can I say? The reasons to me are clear. If you have the opportunity to help people, what else would you want to do?