Twenty-seven years, ago Marcus Mosley was born prematurely at just 26 weeks. Last month, he graduated from the CUNY School of Medicine at City College of New York with plans to return to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) as a doctor specializing in infant care.
“It was very frightening when he was born and they told me that he was in the NICU,” Mosley’s mother Pauline Mosley told Good Morning America. “The doctors told me, they just kept giving me all these different percentages of very slim chance of him being normal, like less than 10% chance. They kept saying 90%, he might not be able to see. Eighty to 90%, he would have developmental delays. They didn’t know.”
But Mosley defied the odds and thrived. When he was 13 years old, his parents brought him back to the NICU at Westchester Medical Center where he had spent the first 40 days of his life after birth. That visit would turn out to be a defining moment in his life. While there, Mosley met Dr. Edmund LaGamma, the chief of neonatology at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital at Westchester Medical Center. While in high school, Mosley called LaGamma to ask about participating in a shadowing program over the summer.
“The more we spoke, the more I realized that although he was a patient… that was a particularly important era when a lot of advances had been made. So I said, ‘Oh, great. Yes. Why don’t you come and join us on rounds and that’ll be kind of an interesting experience for you to see what you were like when you were 1000 grams. [approximately 2.2 pounds],” said LaGamma.
Mosley told Good Morning America that shadowing in the NICU “really piqued my interest and then solidified my interest in wanting to go into medicine.”
READ: Baby nicknamed ‘Mayor of NICU’ released from hospital
After high school, Mosley enrolled in an accelerated B.S./M.D. program at City College, LaGamma’s alma mater. Now, he will begin a pediatrics residency at New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital.
“I’m really excited and looking forward to starting residency and to be able to take care of patients now,” Mosley said. “I’ll be responsible for patients and involved in patient care and treating families.”
LaGamma believes that Mosley’s engaging personality will help him do well as a pediatrician and he jokes that within a couple of years, he will be interviewing for his fellowship position in Westchester — which Mosley thinks is a great idea.
Mosley’s accomplishments despite the doctors’ negative outlooks for his life prove that doctors can’t always predict how a child’s life will turn out, whether they are preborn or newborn. A prenatal diagnosis does not define a person’s life and every child deserves the opportunity to live out their own lives as exactly who they are.
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