A Long Road to Physician Assistant
The Yakima Herald-Republic has the remarkable story of 45-year-old Miguel Blas-Matus, who is a PA student a the University of Washington MEDEX program.
Blas-Matus was a physician in Mexico, but lost his professional status when he moved to the United States.
Since leaving Mexico, he has worked as a farm worker, nurse's assistant and surgical technician.
He's scheduled to graduate from PA school in 2010.
Miguel Blas-Matus vividly recalls growing up with seven siblings in a one-room, dirt-floor house in his homeland of Juchitan, Oaxaca, Mexico.
Lacking electricity, they lived by candlelight while his mother cooked over an open fire at night, raised pigs and made cheese.
He'd get up before dawn to help his father -- who only spoke the indigenous Zapotec language -- farm their meager one acre of land amid the arid plains of southern Mexico. It provided just enough for his family to survive.
"You don't even think about poverty -- you're happy with what you have," he recalled recently while standing outside the University of Washington's physician's assistant program in Yakima. "If you have something to eat, that was the main thing."
Today at age 45, his life is much different. He rents a room from a friend in Yakima, owns a 2000 Chevrolet Impala, but mostly relies on his bicycle for transportation, and is a junior in medical school.
Link