awareness
An Interplay Between Invisibility and Hypervisibility while Pursuing a Surgical Subspecialty
By Natalia G. Penaloza My latinidad in the context of pursuing a surgical subspecialty has made me both invisible and hyper-visible. As a Latina in an operating room with a thousand moving pieces, from ancillary staff turning-over a room in under 30 minutes, scrub technicians meticulously following the surgery anticipating the next instrument, to nurses ensuring the patients are safe and comfortable, I was often identified as one of these healthcare workers. I take pride in knowing that I share some of the same qualities as them; efficiency, attention to detail, and empathy. Still, it is often a surprise to many when I introduce myself as the medical student on the team. The hyper-visibility is accompanied by my continuous effort to ensure I know all the equipment, anatomy, steps, complications, follow-up treatments, to know it all. If I don’t, I will not have represented Latinas and women in medicine well....
Just Keep Swimming
By Elysa Margiotta, MD I could have given up. I could have decided that it was all too much to handle, and just faded away. To say that my path to becoming a physician was eventful is an understatement. I started medical school in Grenada as a fresh-eyed, hopeful 21 year-old, looking forward to the “first day of the rest of my life,” as we so often hear in movies. I had just left my family and friends behind in Canada, and I was starting my new life. Here is the series of tumultuous events that occurred during my medical school journey: - On my second day on the island, I was sexually assaulted by a senior classmate, which led me to develop and experience PTSD over the next few years. - During my second semester, the day before our first exam, I received an email from an attorney’s office...
The Taming of the Amygdala
By Jaime D. Lewis The last few weeks have been trying at best. Unprecedented, as they say. Feeling the anxiety of significant uncertainty, I find myself frequently stopping to slow my breathing and note the calming effect it brings despite a worldwide pandemic. I am quite aware that much of the danger that my body is sensing is not due to immediate threat. It is secondary to the “freeze flight fight” response triggered by a sometimes overwhelming flood of concerns about our current situation. This emotional process triggers my amygdala to send out a distress signal leading to a cascade that stimulates my hypothalamus and then my adrenals which send out epinephrine activating my sympathetic nervous system. You can see this reflected in the dilated pupils in my pale blue eyes, the spike in my heart rate recorded by my running watch, and my disinterest in eating due to inhibited...
Not What I Planned, More than I Expected
It was approaching 3:30 pm in the afternoon as I sat finishing up progress notes for the day. As I looked at my watch, I felt the feeling of dread start to creep in. At any moment I would be getting a text message from my husband about how our son’s day at school had gone. Lately, the reports had been pretty grim with lots of refusing to do his schoolwork, hitting and swearing. I had little confidence that today would be any different. The stress of raising a child with special needs and being a surgeon was starting to wear on me, and I wasn’t sure how much longer I could carry on worrying as intensely about my son’s behavior as I did about the critically ill patients I cared for in the burn ICU. It would have been so easy to give up hope and believe that my...
Being Non-Traditional in a Historically Traditional Field
By Jackelyn Moya My first memory of being in a space where I was treated in a “traditional” manner was during my senior year in high school. My counselor was creating my schedule for my final year and deciding whether he should place me in statistics or physics. I remember his words, “I doubt you’ll ever need physics in your life, so I’m placing you in statistics for your fourth class.” Without having any input from my 17 year-old self of what I planned on pursuing after high school, I accepted his statement as truth and thought, “hmm, When will I need physics?” I suppose that for my high school counselor, my traditional path would not require taking physics, so he placed me in what he assumed would be a more traditional class for me. I always knew that I loved science and wanted to be a doctor, but the...
Making It Work
By Joy Alvarado It’s not on everyone’s mind as they contemplate going into a surgical residency, but it was on my mind: Could I handle the physical challenges of this new diagnosis under the ergonomic pressures of being a surgeon? How would my coworkers perceive me when they find out about my new diagnosis? Will they become angry when I take time off to heal? Would they think it irresponsible that during my general surgery residency … I chose to become pregnant? As an older-than-average female medical student who desires children one day, these questions are very important as I contemplate my future in medicine. On the one hand, there are my imagined challenges to being pregnant during general surgery training that are associated with the condition itself: the extra exhaustion I’ll feel while carrying an extra 20 pounds during long cases, the inability to run to the bathroom when...
Fixing the Leaky Pipeline
By Daisy Cruz As a Latina in medicine, I am acutely aware of how many of the spaces I am occupying on a day-to-day basis have not been created for women who look like myself. I find ways to make myself present in a room, by questioning the status quo of how certain patients are being delivered care, be it by their race or socioeconomic status. This role has mostly been motivated through my own personal experiences as a Latina from South Central, Los Angeles. Thus, as I continue my aspirations in the surgical field, I have begun to realize the disappointing number of underrepresented minorities. This became obvious to me during my 3rd year of medical school, as I began to look for mentors. By finding these mentors it would enable me to feel more comfortable, sharing certain experiences with this individual, that others may not understand as well....
Egg Freezing Facts for Female Physicians
By Anu Kathiresan As women in medicine, we are always focused on the next goal we need to achieve to advance our career. Though undergraduate education, medical school, residency, and fellowship, we are constantly striving to get the highest score, to maintain a high GPA, to publish papers, to get excellent letters of recommendation. The challenge that women physicians face is balancing these demands in the midst of our passing prime reproductive years. We plan a trajectory of our career from an early stage, sometimes as early as our undergraduate years. But do we have the same foresight about an equally important part of our life journey: planning for a family? Infertility affects 1 in 8 couples in the general population, however infertility affects 1 in 4 women physicians. There is never a good time to have a family in our training years or in our early post-training years for...
Crisis Pregnancy Centers: Legal but Ethical?
By Nickey Jafari Perhaps you have already heard of crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs). I see highway billboards for them on most of my long drives throughout the rural midwest. I recently received an email from a student interest group offering medical students to tour them. The first CPC opened in the 1960s, but they have since ballooned to far outnumber abortion clinics, and unlike abortion clinics, they can and often receive public funding. CPCs present themselves to women as healthcare facilities, but they are often unlicensed and unregulated. Certain U.S. cities, like Austin and Baltimore, and states, like California, have attempted to combat this with their own measures, such as requiring unlicensed CPCs to simply disclose the fact that they are unlicensed, but a recent Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that such laws infringe on First Amendment rights. Furthermore, we should be concerned that CPCs often share misleading or outright inaccurate...
Save your rear
By Anne Fabrizio Buttocks. Butt. Bum. Booty. Badonkadonk. That’s just a few ways we refer to our bottoms. We speak freely about our rear ends when it comes to dancing or working out. In pop culture, we celebrate it. There are hundreds of songs dedicated to the exultation of the backside. However, when it comes to the health of our backsides, we’ve got some work to do. Despite the comfort we have singing songs about our butts, there remains social embarrassment discussing when things aren’t right. Too many times, I’ve seen people ignore symptoms and brush them aside. “I’ve just been a little constipated, it’s probably stress and bad diet.” “That blood in my stool? It’s probably just a hemorrhoid.” Sure, it could be those things, but we need to stop ignoring symptoms and make sure that people are aware that these could be signs of colorectal cancer. We also...
