Finding My Rhythm: Healing, Leading, Becoming

It Wasn’t Brilliance. It Was Listening. It wasn’t the first time I had to fight to be heard. She was young. Quiet. Wasting away in our ICU.By the time I came onto the service, she had been admitted for weeks. Consult after consult. Test after test. Each new team trying…

I was no longer a trainee. I was an attending surgeon now, experienced and confident—at least on the surface. When I was referred a young man in his early twenties with recurrent testicular cancer, I approached the case with both skill and caution. He had already undergone orchiectomy and chemotherapy…

I remember that afternoon clearly — the fluorescent lights casting a sterile glow, the post-call haze hanging in the hallway, the squeak of clogs on tile. I was a Fellow, rounding with my third-year resident. We stepped into the room of a post-op patient who had just been transferred out…

I walked into the room, introduced myself clearly: “Hi, I’m Dr. [Last Name],” and proceeded to take a thorough history and perform a physical exam. I explained the differential diagnosis, reviewed the plan, and outlined next steps. The patient nodded along, asked a few questions, and then, after all that,…

In many complex cases, patients undergo multiple procedures on the same day — often requiring two surgical teams from different specialties. That was the case one morning as I walked into the OR. I was still a Fellow, assisting my Chair as well as a second surgeon. The latter was…

CARING “for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs as heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.” Milan Kundera I was a urologic oncology fellow, rounding early one morning with…

I was nine months pregnant and still in the operating room, trying to maneuver my body around the table, my swollen belly brushing against the drapes, the baby kicking as I held retractors and tried not to lose my breath. But the hardest part wasn’t the end. It was the…

There are unspoken hierarchies in medicine—silent codes etched into the walls of every hospital. Where I trained, the surgeons were gods. Internists were the quiet thinkers, sure, but we were the ones who saved lives with our hands. We cut, we fixed, we strutted through the halls with an air…

Why the culture of male-dominated specialties still keeps women on the outside I remember walking into the OR break room during my residency, exhausted from rounds and desperate for a moment to regroup. It was a shared space—nurses and physicians grabbing coffee, heating leftovers in the microwave, trying to catch…