It finally happened to me. After three years and over 50 rejection letters, some of which came via certified mail, I got into medical school. No more “you must understand that we had a very competitive applicant pool this year” or “best of luck with your future endeavors.” I’m in, baby. And while I’m not going to Harvard or UCSF, this place in Ohio ain’t so bad.

I didn’t even want to go to medical school three years ago. When I graduated in 1999, my life’s goals included delivering pizzas and watching the morning light hit the peach fuzz on my girlfriend’s ears and maybe someday writing the great American novel. But then a few things happened. Like the big love went south. And I realized that the great American novel couldn’t be a full-time job. And I got this letter that said that I could go out to Toledo, Ohio, if I wanted to try their pre-med post-baccalaureate program and prove I could hack it with the big boys.

I looked up Toledo on the Internet. They had a picture of the skyline that made it look almost like a real town. I thought about leaving California. One of my two best friends had already gone into his family’s squid-fishing business. The other went to New York to get a real job. My San Diego connections were toast. I moved.

I moved to Ohio and took molecular and cellular biology. I went to class with medical students. I got a massive inferiority complex. I decided that medicine was not for me. By Thanksgiving, I dropped out.

That winter of 2000, UC Davis seemed like it had happened in another lifetime, back when there were bike paths and sun and love and biochemistry and good food. My column was in the Aggie every week for two years. I was a small-time celebrity. When I threw a party, 100 people came. In their pajamas.

In Toledo, I rang in my 22nd year on the planet with a martini on my balcony and a cordless phone.

I got a job at a deli that paid $7 an hour. I got a job at night teaching MCAT physics. I quit the deli and started selling used BMWs. No one buys BMWs in Ohio, but I didn’t know that at the time.

I spent my days pacing around a used-car lot and my nights teaching Ohm’s law to people who were just like I had been two years prior. My companions were mostly used paperbacks by Anton Chekhov, Ethan Canin, Samuel Shem, Perri Klass and William Carlos Williams. I was torn between science and writing and looked to these doctors who wrote, these writers who practiced another art.

I have always believed that my understanding of life rested upon a tripod consisting of humanity, religion and science. And it was during the spring of 2000 that I decided that I had been away from science for too long. I missed reading Norman Horowitz in Voet and Voet’s biochemistry standard: “Life possesses the properties of replication, catalysis and mutability,” which is not necessarily the whole truth, but there is a lot of truth to it.

When I dropped out and put away my science textbooks in November 1999, I had felt relieved. Forget about science. Here’s to a new life of possibility, I thought. Here’s to writing. Here’s to the end of formal education. Here’s to not doing what everyone wants me to do.

But that relief did not last. Yes, I was away from science. Yes, I was writing. I was writing about the misery of being a car salesman.

In the long year since I had lain naked fantasizing about my first novel and staring at my then-girlfriend’s translucent ears, it became clear that writing and medicine did not have to be mutually exclusive. I did not have to quit science to be a great writer. And vice versa. I also realized that I loved medicine, even though my dad loved it, too.

Standing in the sun selling a newlywed couple a Volkswagen, I decided that I could be the kind of doctor my favorite writers were. Moreover, I decided that it was what I wanted.

I gave myself a few days to make sure that this wasn’t just a fleeting epiphany. I thought about how medicine would complement writing. I thought about how the gifts I had that made me a good writer—the ability to distill the truth into words, the ability to read people, the ability to distinguish the important from the unimportant—would serve me in medicine. I walked into the dean’s office and said, “I want back in.” He said, “OK.” I asked him if that was it. He said, “Just don’t screw up this time.”

I passed molecular and cellular biology. I passed neuroscience. I’m getting a second degree, a master’s, in biochemistry. And come August, I’ll be a first-year medical student. I will be a doctor who writes.

Fred Houts graduated in 1999 with a major in biochemistry and a minor in comparative literature. His California Aggie column “Widening Gyre” was a campus favorite. Currently, he is a student at the Medical College of Ohio, Toledo.