All Roads Lead to Pharmaceutical Sales

We were trudging through the thick grass under the hot summer sun in Eastern Croatia, with Goran continously pushing us on from behind like a cruel taskmaster.

“In 351 AD, in this field, Magnentius’s usurper army of eighty thousand was confronted by Constantius’s similarly sized army of eighty thousand.” Goran's voice was loud enough to echo across the empty grassy plain spread out as far as the eye could see. “So many Roman soldiers died that day that the Empire's military was permanently crippled. After the battle of Mursa, they could no longer defend their borders against invaders.”

Jane, an overly chatty older woman in our tour group, asked, “What’s an usurper?”

“An usurper is someone who usurps!” Goran laughed at his own joke. “Someone who declares themselves emperor. Of course, they will be sentenced to death for that.”

“If the penalty is death, why did he do it?”

“The Emperor of the Western Empire, Constans, ruled since he was 15 years old. He had become incredibly cruel and corrupt. He sold government offices to the highest bidder and appointed his friends to the highest positions. Magnentius yearned to rid the empire of a bad leader and restore the Empire’s greatness.” 

Goran looked into the distance, in a studied manner, as if he was thinking of being emperor himself. He had been going through historical facts all day that anyone could look up on Wikipedia. 

I felt a cynical thought bubble up. Did Goran yearn to be a tour guide when he was young? I don’t think so. Nobody grows up wanting to be a tour guide. One could say his life was a failure, but I possessed enough common sense to not say that out loud, especially being the only American around outside of my parents, who, at their age, weren’t exactly going to be able to defend me in rural Croatia.

“This is getting dull,” I groaned to my parents. “And I couldn’t sleep last night.” 

“Jet lag!” My dad declared as if his medical training made him especially insightful in making this diagnosis.

“I just want to go back to the hotel.”

They had dragged me along with them on their “bucket list” trip to Europe. They said they needed my company, but I suspected they thought the change of scenery would cheer me up. After all, I had just failed the pre-med entrance exam, again.

Failing the MCAT was a bitter pill to swallow. I had been the top student in my high school class, and now I was stuck in the middle of a Croatian graveyard.

Goran droned on, launching into another Roman history story. 

“This is where the battlefield hospital would have been. The Romans treated wounds with wine, plant oils, and vinegar…”

“Vinegar!” I scoffed.

Goran continued, “-which were surprisingly effective at preventing infection.”

Vinegar was effective? It was a shame the Romans hadn't engineered an antidote for boredom.

The night before, our tour group had a “get to know each other” dinner at a historic tavern. My trip, which was already a masterclass in familial suffocation, became a group inquisition. As the only young person, questions about my plans for the future rolled in, for which I didn’t have good answers. I retreated to a quiet corner of the table to escape the unadulterated tension and watch the conversations from a distance. My parents kept claiming they were trying desperately to "immerse themselves in the local culture". Which, in my dad's case, meant nodding sagely at things, and in my mom's case, meant smiling so hard her jaw looked like it might unhinge. 

Whenever my dad mentioned his career, which was often, people would say, they “were happy to have a doctor along, just in case”.

 I moved to a corner, slid my heavy leather backpack off my shoulder, and onto the hardwood floor. The tavern owner literally lunged across the space, shaking his head frantically. Goran explained that leaving a bag on the ground is a supreme Croatian taboo, a harbinger that your money will flow away and disappear. I couldn't ignore the burning irony. Despite all the bag protection, they didn't seem to have much money; maybe they needed to hold on to whatever was left.

When the waiter brought out a “Waldorfska salata”, a tragic attempt at an American salad, I grabbed a plate and did what I always do when I’m overwhelmed: tried to make myself even more invisible. Determined to put as much physical distance between myself and my father's heavy, disappointed looks as possible, I slid down to the absolute edge of the long wooden bench.

"Will, sweetheart, move closer," Mom whispered, leaning over the Waldorf salad like she was passing top-secret intelligence. "The guide told us earlier that if an unmarried person sits at the corner, they'll never wed."

Perfect, I thought. A lifetime of solitude felt like the right setup for a guy who had just tanked his MCATs the second time. If I was going to be a professional failure, I might as well go all in.

To cap off the Croatian symphony of doom, a breeze rattled the windows left ajar, as a server opened the back door. You would have thought someone pulled a weapon. The tavern owner rushed across the room, muttering under his breath as he slammed the window shut against the draft. To the locals, a split-second draft isn’t a refreshing breeze; it’s a another guaranteed harbinger of ruin.

I just rolled my eyes, safely insulated by cynicism. 

But out in the open field twenty-four hours later, I would realize that the draft might have caught up to me after all.

We were descending an embankment when Dad stumbled, his hand grabbing a jagged block of Roman limestone to steady himself. He grunted, pulling back his hand in pain.

“It’s fine, just a scratch,” he mumbled, inspecting his palm.

I watched bright red blood begin to well up. The afternoon sun suddenly felt like a weight pressing directly onto me. A feeling of intense sleepiness was overwhelming. The world dissolved into a heavy darkness.

A second later, I blinked. A harsh light pierced my eyes. I was flat on my back, blades of grass scratching the back of my neck.

“What happened?” I asked the people hovering above me.

“You fainted,” Mom said, her eyes darting nervously to Dad, who stood just behind her, holding a blood-spotted tavern napkin to his hand, looking down at me. “When you saw... well, when you saw your father’s bleeding hand. He scraped it on the Roman ruins.”

I groaned. I had now officially embarrassed myself in front of the entire tour group. 

Dad let out a heavy sigh. “Look, Will, we don’t want to point out the obvious here.”

“What obvious?”

“This isn’t the first time. Maybe being a doctor wasn't meant for you,” he said in the tired voice he used when delivering a bad diagnosis.

“I had a bad day, Dad. The heat, and I didn't sleep…”

Dad’s spotless medical career, the clinic, his prestige, the framed certificates on our living room wall all felt like a crushing weight on me. My university friends were currently packing their bags for medical school, and I was lying uselessly in the weeds.

Offering an emergency exit as she always did, Mom said, “There are other paths in healthcare, sweetie. What about administration? Or healthcare sales? Or pharmacy?”

Our tour guide, Goran, who had apparently been listening to our private family conversation, looked around. A knowing smile broke through his sun-weathered face.

“My brother is the top pharmaceutical salesman in Croatia,” Goran said, gesturing with a hand toward the empty horizon as if his brother owned it.

I looked up from the grass, squinting. “Pharmaceutical salesman? He’s a drug dealer?”

“If selling Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson means that, yes!” Goran chuckled, mocking my misery.

Dad stared at my hands that had never held a scalpel. “A million? And you don't even have to touch blood to get it?”

“Dad, come on,” I groaned, pulling myself up to a sitting position, my knees still shaking. “You’ve spent twenty years telling me that Big Pharma is ruining modern medicine.”

“You think I care about the sanctity of medicine? I became a doctor because when my parents came to America, we ate expired canned food for ten years. I became a doctor so no landlord would ever evict us again. I gave you a good life so you wouldn’t need to know what real suffering is.”

I sat there in the dirt, completely silenced. For my entire life, I had viewed my father’s job as a monument to his success. The big house and his country club membership. I’d never considered that the whole thing might have simply been a way to survive.

My privilege to sit in a Croatian graveyard and feel cynical about corporate sales was a luxury he had paid for.

Dad looked away, adjusting the napkin on his cut hand. The silence between us grew heavier than usual.

Goran, entirely oblivious, clapped his hands together. “So! We move on to the Western gate? Or we stay here and talk about Pfizer?”