Career inspiration can come from anywhere. For Ryan Regan, the first spark for following a career in medicine grew from a traumatic family experience during his teen years.
“When I was about 14 years old, I watched my grandfather go through very aggressive Alzheimer’s,” he said. “He was a healthy, 86-year-old. My last memory I have of him that I can remember is him chasing me around in the back yard in Fort Smith with a football. Then, two months later, he was gone.
“It wasn’t so much what happened to him — we had known that Alzheimer’s was in the family — it was more of what happened to my father. My father adored his dad, and like most sons do, he saw his father as almost invincible. Watching [my dad] go through that experience, I was just about old enough to start to really understand feelings and understand grief, but I’d never seen weakness in my father before, and I’ve never seen weakness in him since. That’s the only moment in his entire life that I’ve ever seen weakness in him.”
The experience so impacted Reagan that he decided to turn his already considerable aptitude in the sciences toward helping other families grapple with their own health challenges.
“I was always good at science and math and that kind of thing. I liked looking for answers,” he said. “I’ve been told by every schoolteacher I grew up with that I was more of a gifted student than most, even though I never would’ve considered myself that.
“When I saw what my dad went through with my grandfather, it was the first time I really thought what happened to them wasn’t fair. I thought, well, if I really am good at this, and I have a gift to understand things and to question things and to find the right answers, maybe I should look into doing something that will allow me to put that gift to use. That was where the idea of medicine started.”
After graduating from Greenwood High School, Reagan earned an undergraduate degree in biology and two minors in chemistry and medical humanities from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He then enrolled at the Arkansas Colleges of Health Education in Fort Smith, where he is in his second year studying to be a doctor of osteopathic medicine.
He said it can be challenging to maintain energy through the intense classroom and hands-on training that is likely going to be a 12-year educational journey. He has been able to motivate himself, he said, by thinking about what awaits him at the end, hopefully in a practice in Fort Smith, which has been his de facto hometown since early childhood.
“I have always wanted to fight for others who couldn’t fight for themselves. I always felt a passion to try to hold the world together one piece at a time,” he said. “Going through all of this schooling, it is hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. In fact, most days, it feels like they just keep building onto the end of the tunnel as I’m walking through it. This is something my friends and I talk about all the time. You know, there’s a 30-year-old man or woman right now who, in 15 years, is going to have a stroke on the worst day of their life. I’m standing here right now, preparing to meet them.
“That is what medicine is. Every person you’ve ever met in the medical field started somewhere and never knew that they would ever meet you, and you never knew you were going to meet them. As a medical student, had you not stuck through it, you never would’ve been there for that person who needed you.”
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