Jennifer sipped her coffee. The anxiety about being late was now comfortably fading, and she began to wonder if she’d be accepted in the excellent UCLA surgery program if she decided on it as her specialty of choice. The exciting thing was that in the upcoming year, the whole hospital was moving into the new Ronald Reagan facility across the street, where the ORs were to be the latest and the best. As one of the hardest-working students, Jennifer was one of the top students in her class, and as such, she was confident she had a good chance to be asked to stay on if she applied. But in actuality, staying in L.A. wouldn’t be her first choice. Jennifer wasn’t from Los Angeles; she wasn’t even from the West Coast like the vast majority of her fellow students. Jennifer was from New York and had come west to take advantage of a four-year scholarship that had been established by a grateful and wealthy Mexican whose cancer had been cured at the UCLA Medical Center. The scholarship was for a needy Hispanic woman. Being all three, Jennifer had applied and won, and so began her unexpected foray to California. But now that her medical schooling was winding down, she wanted to go back east. She loved the Big Apple and considered herself a New Yorker. That’s where she’d been born, and as hard as it had been, that’s where she’d grown up.

Jennifer took another sip of her coffee, and switched her full attention to the TV. The two CNN talking heads had said something that caught her interest. They had said that medical tourism seemed to be threatening to become a growth industry in the developing world, particularly in South Asian countries like India and Thailand, and it wasn’t just for cosmetic or quack procedures, such as untested cancer cures, as it had been in days of yore. It was for full-blown twenty-first-century procedures, such as open-heart surgery and bone-marrow transplants.

Leaning forward, Jennifer listened with growing interest. She’d never even heard the term medical tourism. In her mind it seemed like an oxymoron of sorts. Jennifer had certainly never been to India, and with scant knowledge she envisioned it to be an appallingly poor country whose majority population was skinny and malnourished, dressed in rags, and lived in a hot, humid monsoon for half the year, and a hot, dry, dusty desert for the other half. Although she was smart enough to know such a stereotype was not necessarily true, she thought it most likely had an element of truth, or it wouldn’t be the stereotype. What she was certain of was that such a stereotype hardly suggested the appropriate destination for someone to go to for the latest surgical skills, modern and expensive technology, and twenty-first-century techniques.

To Jennifer it was apparent the newscasters shared her disbelief. “It’s shocking,” the man said. “In 2005, more than seventy-five thousand Americans traveled to India for major surgery, and since then, according to the Indian government, it’s been growing more than twenty percent per year. They expect by the end of the decade, it will be a two-point-two-billion-dollar source of foreign exchange.”