MEDICAL SCHOOL EVALUATION & GRADUATION
Two Sisters in Medicine:
Two Roads Less Traveled, One Goal By Chinwe Anyanwu and Nneka Anyanwu
Student doctors Chinwe and Nneka Anyanwu aren’t just sisters in medicine. They also happen to be sisters in real life! These two sisters born to Nigerian parents, sometimes referred to by family as, “The Sisters,” because you never see one without the other, took two very different roads to medicine with one same goal in mind: diversifying medicine. Nneka, the older sister by 4 years, fought tirelessly to get into medical school and the road was anything but easy. After being diagnosed with scoliosis as a young girl and having spinal surgery to place rods at the age of 10, her ties to medicine were sealed tighter than a jar of pickles. Learning later in life the medical error that occurred during her surgery, in which adult rods were placed instead of the appropriate growing rods for children, she had spinal reconstructive surgery her senior year of high school. She wheeled across the stage at her high school graduation in a wheelchair to claim her diploma as if it was her birthright and wheeled herself straight into college at Prairie View A&M University in that same chair. She then went on to complete two master’s degrees. Her experiences meticulously fashioned her passion for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. She learned then, she had a strength that few had, and it was that same strength that would carry her through her journey in medicine, and apparently right alongside her little sister. Chinwe had a very different path. Never interested by just one thing, she never actually planned to go to college. After high school, she was set on moving to New York to be a creative and fashion designer. Just as many Nigerian parents would feel though, her parents actively dis26
SAN ANTONIO MEDICINE • June 2021
couraged the naïve idea of being a struggling artist in a place she’d never lived, and of course nudged her into going to college to at least have a “backup plan.” Little did she know that this nudge to college would bring a wind of events strong enough to skid a freight truck and propel her into the field of medicine. Returning home for the first time after her first semester of college to find out her brother passed away from a seizure helped scope much more of her future career than she realized. Sitting there as EMS attempted to save his life and not knowing what to do in that moment to help the one person she admittedly loved most, manifested itself as a deep love for the field of emergency medicine. She then went on to work as an ED medical scribe for the next four years and obtained her Master’s in Epidemiology. In 2018, both Chinwe and Nneka were accepted into medical school at University of the Incarnate Word School of Osteopathic Medicine (UIWSOM) and Meharry Medical College, respectively, and collectively have received over $140,000 in scholarships. Obviously, one sister chose DO, while the other set on pursing an MD. Two very different roads, though admittedly one even less traveled than the other, but have these roads really been so different? As they talk about their medical school experience, there are many similarities, such as both being part of relatively new programs. Nneka’s class had rolled out a new curriculum, so it felt like going to a new program full of lots of trial and error. As many know, UIWSOM is literally a brand-new medical school, with its first class graduating this year and is all too familiar with the trials and errors of a new pro-
