When the wealthy couple saw their newborn’s face, the mother gasped, “Take him away, he’s a monster.” They abandoned him at the hospital. A kind nurse raised him. Twenty years later, the couple desperately needed a rare surgery. The world-famous surgeon walked in, revealed his birthmark, and…

with my crimson cheek fully exposed to the blinding flashes of parental cameras. I swept through a top-tier Ivy League pre-med program in three years, sleeping four hours a night, fueling my body on black coffee and the cold, hard image of Celeste Sterling’s signature on my abandonment papers.

Medical school was a battlefield I dominated. Under Dr. continue reading …