awareness
Fertility Preservation and Family Planning in Surgical Training: Highlights from a Much-Needed Discussion
Authors: Nensi M. Ruzgar, Camila R. Guetter, Natalia Correa, Jessica Millar, Jessica Means, Kelsey Romatoski, Brooke Golisch, Pietro Bortoletto Affiliations: Nensi M. Ruzgar, MD, MHS - Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA; Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA Camila R. Guetter, MD, MPH - Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA Natalia Correa, MD - University of Miami Holy Cross Hospital, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA Jessica Millar, MD - University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI Jessica Means, MD - Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA Kelsey Romatoski, MD - Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA Brooke Golisch, MD, MS - Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL Pietro Bortoletto, MD, MSc - Boston IVF, Waltham, MA; Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA On Nov 12th, the Association of Women Surgeons Resident and Fellow 2024 Webinar Series offered...
Delving into The Fourth Trimester and Beyond Lectures
By Anna Hargrave, DO This past August, we had an incredible series of lectures and panel groups discussing “The Fourth Trimester and Beyond.” The Fourth Trimester is the twelve week period after giving birth, which is particularly critical to all of our women surgeons. The demands of a new baby compete with clinical responsibilities and career goals, and become challenging to balance. While this series was aimed to female surgeons starting or expanding families, the lessons I learned can be applied to all female surgeons including those without children. Some of my key reflections from the month of Surgeons' Career and Leadership Professional Education Lecture Series (SCALPELS) are shared with you in the following paragraphs. To learn more from these phenomenal female surgeons, you can tune into the recorded August lectures! Dr. Amy Vertrees, a general surgeon and veteran who served 17 years with deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, joined...
Protecting Your Surgical Career During Workplace Conflicts
by Andrea L. Merrill, MD Imagine yourself several years into your first job as a surgery attending. Things have been going well, but occasionally, you hear from your division chief that a nurse has complained about your “behavior.” Your chief hasn’t given you specific details, and no formal complaints have been made. To your dismay, your division chief has not asked you how communication and interprofessional interactions have been with the nursing staff as necessary context to receiving those complaints. You aren’t concerned because you have heard stories about male colleagues yelling, swearing, and demeaning learners, which you never do. Additionally, you rationalize that your RVU’s are high, your patient satisfaction scores are above average, the learner evaluations are favorable, and you are publishing research in peer review journals – you’re a rock star and untouchable. Then one day, you express concern about a patient safety issue with suggestions for...
The Intersection of Queerness and Womanhood in Surgical Residency
By Dr. Sarah Klapman I’m getting married this August. I didn’t grow up planning my wedding, so I find it’s less about fairy tales and more about spreadsheets. In fairness, that could also be because I’m a second-year general surgery resident. There’s something therapeutic about embracing the lace of it all – about expecting the medical world to take you seriously whether you’re talking ball gowns or bowels. It can be freeing to be overtly feminine in surgery. And that would be the whole story – except when people ask “who’s the lucky guy?”, there’s a pause where I decide whether this is another opportunity to come out or an awkward moment best avoided. The woman I’m marrying is a knock-out, and I’m so proud to be hers, but sometimes it’s 5:30 am and I’m trying to pre-round and just because The Ring is swinging on a chain around my...
SBAS – Sunday Series: Finding joy in the little things
by Dr. Crystal Johnson-Mann Most would agree that achieving the idyllic dream of self-care can be challenging at baseline, let alone when trying to incorporate it into a demanding surgeon schedule. The activities that fulfill one’s idea of self-care are highly variable, depending on who you ask. For some, it is a relaxing day at the spa; for others, it may be quiet and solitude in one’s “happy” place. In the current climate, self-care is of the utmost importance. But how exactly does one achieve it? This is much easier said than done, as one would presume. I’m an academic surgeon, wife, mother to 2 little boys, and a former D-I college athlete. I have repeatedly said at the start of each new year since becoming a mom almost 6 years ago that I would make a special attempt to really lean into devoting time periodically for me…to preserve my...
First-Generation Immigrants in Medicine: Overcoming the Challenges
By Juliana Ampadu Otiwaah My Journey As a first-generation immigrant, my path to becoming a doctor was far from straightforward. My family immigrated from Ghana to Canada nearly 30 years ago. My father arrived first, working tirelessly to create a foundation for us. Three years later, my mother, brother, and I joined him. My parents, both blue-collar workers, did their best to support me, but they weren’t familiar with the complexities of higher education. When making decisions about my future, I had to rely on teachers and school staff for guidance—many of whom underestimated my potential based on early academic performance. Growing up in a French-speaking region and learning English presented additional challenges, as did navigating schoolwork without my parents’ ability to assist. By high school, I had unlocked my potential and excelled academically, but understanding how to pursue a career in medicine remained a mystery. Nursing became a practical...
Breaking the glass ceiling: Importance of representation in medicine
By Camila Gonzalez,MD The glass ceiling is a metaphorical concept used to describe an intangible barrier that hinders the career advancement of certain individuals, particularly those seeking to attain managerial or executive positions within an organization or industry. Unfortunately, this term can be applied to the current environment in medicine, where underrepresented groups such as women and International Medical Doctors (IMGs) face significant obstacles in advancing their careers. This is a concept that I have been dealing with for a large portion of my young medical career. I come from a family of strong women who did the best they could with their circumstances, between migrating continents and countries, taking care of their families, and assuming jobs that could bring food to the table and give better opportunities for the generations to come by sacrificing their dreams. A good example of this is my grandmother, who had a great affinity...
Performance Punishment, Perfect Punishment?
By Jenna Kwon I heard about it for the first time during a recent meeting with my mentor from the AWS Mentoring Program. As I was telling her I wanted to dedicate more time to research, she advised me to ask my current research mentor if there were additional projects I could join, saying, “since good work gets rewarded with more work.” My immediate reaction during the meeting was, “I hope he thinks I did a good job so I can get more work.” After all, I both wanted and needed research opportunities. After the meeting, as I looked through my notes on a Post-it, I noticed that the phrase about good work being rewarded with more work was circled several times with a small, sloppy “??” scribbled next to it. How lucky would it be to get involved in a research project you are passionate about—and to keep getting...
Sci-Fi to Surgery: The life story of a Latin American surgeon
By: Alix Yurany Baez Ramirez, MD In an operating room, under a mask, you don't know the life story on the other side. What decision has made the person in front of him decide to enter the world of medicine? After all, we are all stories, the sum of our experiences, the sum of the dreams we had as children, the construction of longings or whims in adolescence, and the social and cultural realities that surround us to become and build those adults that we visualized as children. This is mine. To better understand the context of my story, it is important to consider higher education statistics in our region. According to UNESCO-IESALC (2020), higher education in Latin America and the Caribbean has experienced an acceleration in the enrollment process, going from 23% in 2000 to 52% in 2018. This expansion is attributed to three main factors: an increase in...
Let it go!
By: Dr. Shruti Venkitachalam, Head and Neck Surgeon, Chennai, India It was an early morning surgery. I was the second assistant, retracting for a neck dissection. After almost three hours of retracting, I asked if I could get a five-minute break. The prompt reply was, “Why? Are you pregnant?" I was appalled and embarrassed. The others in the OR giggled. It made me cringe. He didn’t pause to think before saying that, and I was embarrassed - not him! Since completing my fellowship training, I have worked with only male superiors in different hospitals. I saw them as ‘surgeons’ and not as ‘male surgeons’ – until certain situations forced me to look at them that way. Years passed and faces changed but the story remains about several ‘hims’ and me. One morning, ‘he’ gave me several tasks to do. I scrambled to finish them but was late for the clinic....
