“I had a dream about you. You were a doctor and you were helping a whole bunch of kids. I know you’ll be okay,” the get-well card said.

Shawn Stanley was 20 years old and very ill with leukemia when he received that card from a coworker. He had just graduated from Allen County Community College in Iola and was planning on a career in law enforcement. “I didn’t know if I’d see 21 or 22,” he said. Now, seven years later, he is a medical student at the University of Kansas School of Medicine.

Stanley’s experience with cancer motivated him to change his career path. He was a young college baseball player majoring in criminal justice when he was diagnosed with leukemia. He spent nearly three years in treatment where he learned firsthand what makes a good doctor. He said as a patient, it’s important to feel that the doctors and nurses really care. “Until you’ve actually been on the other side and scared to death, you don’t realize how much that means,” Stanley said.

Stanley also learned to treat both kids and adults as whole people, not just as sick patients. “Don’t go in there and just ask them questions about how they feel. Go in and really talk to them,” he said. He remembers getting tired of only being asked how he was doing. Sometimes he just wanted to talk about anything other than his illness.

After missing out on several of his young adult years, Stanley felt the only career he could be happy with was medicine.

“My whole reason for pursuing medicine as a career is that someday, one kid or one adult who is scared and thinks they’re not going to be okay is going to look at my eyes and think, ‘I’ll be okay, he’s got me.’”

Stanley plans to go into emergency medicine and sees himself coaching his kids’ ball teams and taking them to the lake, but stresses he’s in no hurry. “It was all up in the air for a while there. So I’m taking my time now,” he said, smiling. +