self-care
One step at a time
By Jaime D. Lewis I am more than a surgeon. I am an educator, a wife, and a mother. And among other things, I am also a runner. I recently completed my first (yes, first, as I am now fully aware that there will be more) ultramarathon. It was a technical 50k over mountain biking trails, gravel paths, and rutted grassy knolls, up and down 4701 feet of elevation gain including two grueling climbs up “Big Ass Hill.” I hadn’t been able to eat any of my standard fare stocked in my pack after the first 15 miles, nearly tossed my cookies when I tried to put an M&M in mouth at mile 19, and praised the gods of the soft drink industry for the sweet sustaining nectar labeled Coke and Ginger Ale for the last 12 miles. My husband, son, and daughter hiked the last quarter mile with me....
Waiting Your Turn
By Alyssa Brown I remember very clearly the first time I heard about Match Day. We were sitting in the lecture hall, and we stopped lecture to watch the live stream of Match Day. This was almost four years ago now, and from that day forward, I started an anxious countdown to when I would experience it myself. I would be surrounded by my friends that I had met the first weeks of medical school, and we would all find out where we would be heading for residency. The type of residency and location of the residency on the card changed over the course of medical school, but the day-dreaming feeling never really stopped. As the years passed, I knew more and more people who were matching. There were ups and downs through this. I watched close friends above me struggle through not matching, and I watched some come to...
Inspiring our future by encouraging our present
By Renee Hilton I am asked the same question nearly every day by young female medical students aspiring to become surgeons. “Can I be a surgeon and have a normal life as a woman?” You will make sacrifices in any career that you choose in medicine, and surgery is no exception. I respond by offering encouragement while explaining the challenges and then showing them my “travel wall” in my office. My bookshelves are lined with photographs of my family and our many adventures during my years spent as a surgical resident and later as a fellow. Even during the busiest time of my career I managed to find balance and not only have a life but really enjoy it. Part of the hesitation to pursuing surgery for many women is that traditionally surgery has been a male dominated field, but this is slowly changing. In 2018 according to the AAMC,...
AWS and ACS address Intimate Partner Violence in the Surgical Community
By Stephanie Bonne Nearly 2 years ago, the women’s surgical community was shocked by the loss of one of our own. Dr. Sherilyn Gordon-Burroughs, a gifted transplant surgeon, accomplished researcher, residency program director, and mother of a young daughter, was found dead in her home in an apparent murder-suicide committed by her husband. Her young daughter was left an orphan, cared for by her family. The immediate responses of shock and sorrow were apparent, but in the coming weeks as those waned, an unsettling thought came to the forefront: How did this happen? Dr. Gordon-Burroughs was an African American woman who became an academic transplant surgeon-scientist at a time when the odds were overwhelmingly against her. How does someone who was so academically and clinically successful become the victim of intimate partner violence? Can this happen to my colleagues? Can this happen to me? We learned once again a few...
Death & Dying: Finding Meaning in Loss
By Vaidehi Mujumdar April of 2017, Siddhartha Mukherjee wrote a piece in The New Yorker called “Love in the Time of Numbness; Or Doctor Chekhov, Writer.’ The last line was: "Beauty in all of its myriad forms, can only be created in opposition to numbness. That, at least for me, serves as a quiet manifesto of our times." That same April, I had just taken my first of what will end up being three board exams to obtain a medical license in the US. It had been a year where our political landscape shifted, where we saw the effects of a changing America on our communities. It came after the death of a classmate, the loss of personal relationships, and what sometimes felt like a loss of personhood. One week after reading Mukherjee’s article, I started my third year of medical school. Third year had been a re-start for me,...
Surgical Palliative Care and the Power of Stories
by Dr. Red Hoffman “There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” – David M. Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives When I was nineteen years old, my father was murdered by a terrorist in Cairo, Egypt. His death - sudden, violent and surrounded by what was then a “weird” set of circumstances - left me feeling not only heartbroken but extremely isolated. All I wanted to do was tell stories about my dad, but at nineteen I lacked both the insight to entirely process my emotions as well as the language to fully express them. Somehow, blurting out, “My dad was shot in the head by a terrorist” seemed to shut down any opportunity...
Black Clouds
by Alyssa Brown “You won’t see much with Dr. C on call this weekend because he’s a white cloud,” mumbled my attending. I immediately asked what he meant. He gave me a withering look, like he always did when I asked too many questions, and went on to explain that a white cloud was a doctor to whom nothing bad or crazy ever happens while they are on call. He stopped walking, turned around looked me in the eye and said, “We are black clouds.” I was only three months into my third year, and I had already seen six patients die. I had never been called a black cloud, but it immediately stuck. Wherever I went on rotation, trouble and patients seemed to follow. On one particularly crazy night on Labor and Delivery, they finally sent me home after the sixth C-section in a row. We didn’t talk much...
Women in Surgery – How to Deal
There has been a lot of conversation about what is the role of women in the workplace and especially surgery with the #MeToo and #ILookLikeASurgeon campaigns and what are ways we can prepare ourselves as an upcoming generation of surgeons to deal with some of these issues. I talked to Dr. Nancy Baxter about some of the problems residents and trainees might face in the workplace and what’s her advice. Dr. Nancy Baxter is a General Surgeon and Chief of the General Surgery Department at St. Michael’s Hospital,Toronto, Canada. She also has a Scientific appointment at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St. Michael’s Hospital and is a Professor of Surgery at the University of Toronto. Dr. Baxter went to medical school at the University of Toronto. Through the Surgeon-Scientist program, she completed her Ph.D. in Clinical Epidemiology and general surgery residency at the University of Toronto. She is...
Mental Health Awareness Month- Beyond Resilience
Across the United States, organizations and individuals are recognizing Mental Health Awareness month, shedding much needed light on an issue that affects nearly 1 in 5 US adults every year. Rates of mental health distress among healthcare professionals are even higher, with a 2015 meta-analysis demonstrating a prevalence rate of nearly 30% among residents and 300-400 physicians committing suicide every year in America. Yet despite the attention the crisis has received, both within the medical community and in the general population, it persists. Much of the current discussion and wellness programming responding to this issue has focused on increasing resilience among trainees. Suggested strategies for improving resilience include promoting recognition of stressors, stress reduction through mindfulness training, and improving self-regulation of stress responses. But at what point is asking trainees and physicians to become more resilient simply adding another task to what seems to be at times an endless to-do...
Balancing Act: Not Letting The #GymGrind Grind You Down
The Santa Hustle Half Marathon on a chilly, windy Galveston day in December 2016 “Everything in moderation” is one of those phrases we all toss around when it comes to nutrition and wellness. For me, it was one of my mother’s broken-record-phrases that she applied to everything from exercise to broccoli to peanut butter (gasp, I know). Long before mind-body wellness and balance were hip themes for marketing fitness products, they were core values that my parents prioritized in our family. As I considered our blog themes for this month-Mental Health Awareness and National Physical Fitness & Sports Month- I began to realize the intricate relationship the two have, especially in my life. I’ve always been an athlete, from tee ball to high school track & cross country, to college intramurals (with just a few championships along the way). Sports have always been an outlet for...
