Juan: He took the long road to a medical career.
Juan Guerrero took the long road to a medical career. At age 9, he immigrated with his parents from Bogota, Colombia to Miami. Instead of college, Guerrero moved to New York City at 18 to pursue an acting career.
Although he left Bogota at a young age, Guerrero can recall the stark class and socioeconomic divisions in Colombia that resulted in disparities in medical care. As an adult gay man, he also knows the negative experience of dealing with health care providers who struggled to navigate some of the stigmas associated with non-straight patients. These experiences motivated him to gain a better understanding of systemic impacts on the medical care of marginalized patients.
Guerrero’s first exposure to a hospital was at 17 when his grandmother was diagnosed with cancer. Guerrero was impressed by the combined effort of nurses and physicians working to heal people.
“I was really inspired by their sense of purpose, and that their purpose was such a noble one,” he said.
After seven years as a theater actor, Guerrero decided to use his passion for understanding the human psyche to help people in a clinical capacity and enrolled at Columbia University at age 26 with the goal of becoming a clinical psychologist. But his desire to help patients grew and he entered medical school at Boston University at 33.
Between his first and second years of medical school, Guerrero participated in The Other Side of the Bed, a six-week summer program at the West Roxbury VA Medical Center that has medical students undertaking many of the routine patient care tasks normally done by the nursing staff. The goal is to increase physician/nurse collaboration, but Guerrero found himself drawn to the patients. It was a humbling experience.
“We often don’t have the ability to fix, and that may be a blow to our egos, but we’re here to bear witness to suffering and to do the best we can with the tools at our disposal,” he said.