Growing up, it was easy to be naive of the poverty that surrounded me. It was all I had ever known or seen. I grew up in a trailer in a small town in West Virginia that was highly impoverished — an area that is still reeling from the opioid epidemic that plagues the state. Medical care is difficult to access, with only one major hospital over an hour away and a small clinic in town. Just a few years ago, the only grocery store in the county closed — now the closest one is a forty minute drive from my childhood home. My entire school system was granted free lunches from the government because the county was so poor, with over eighty percent of the youth currently being raised by their grandparents. I could go on about the insecurities of the area and how under-served it truly is, but that would take much more than 600 words. When I eventually graduated nursing school from West Virginia University, I took a job at Charleston Area Medical Center in the operating room at their level one trauma center. Here, I discovered just how truly depressing the situation in my state is. I had begun to realize the implications the opioid epidemic had left on the area by this point in my life, but it wasn’t until I saw it in the clinical setting that it finally hit home. My patients were addicted, scared, suffering, and most importantly, human and deserving of care. I decided after two years of working in the operating room that I wanted to continue my education and become a nurse practitioner, so that I could provide medical care for under-served areas like the one I grew up in. I chose to pursue this route because it is important to me to not only make a difference in people’s lives, but to give back to communities like the one that raised me. I find it unacceptable that in today’s world of excess, we have such little access to healthcare in our nation. Specifically, I am going back to school to work with the pediatric population and ensure that the children growing up in communities like mine are getting yearly well child visits, meeting important milestones, and have access to other tools and programs that will support their growth. I am no longer naive to the problems that surrounded me as a child, which is why I find it so important to help combat them for other children who may not have as many opportunities that I was granted.