I tried to avoid OB but kept coming back to it

I definitely didn't know from a young age that I’d be a doctor. As I got older and became a college student, for whatever reason, I felt drawn to taking care of women. There was an OB who mentored me, who was very supportive and also very honest about what being an OB entailed. In medical school, I tried to get away from it. I did all of the rotations and everything to avoid OB. Everyone said it was so difficult, and there were other areas that appealed to me too, like ER and pediatrics, but I kept coming back to OB.

Many people have this idea of the patient and the doctor—and of course these are separate roles—but for me, I am every patient I see. I feel like I could be in their situation at a different point in my life. So I’ve never felt like I’m taking care of a patient who is completely separate from me. And as I’ve gone through more training and have had different experiences, this has only rang more true.

I was drawn to women's health and I love it. Often someone is going to an OBGYN for a problem, or they’ve had a bad experience in the past. So I want to support them through the care I provide and how I hear what they have to say. It’s important to me to be easy to talk to, and I’ve felt very comfortable in my role as someone's physician. I also love the variety in the practice. We're in the clinic, we're in the OR, we're in labor and delivery, we're doing procedures in the clinic. It's not just sitting at the computer all the time charting or thinking about the potentials. We're doing things to physically improve patients. And then the other thing that I love is not everybody is sick.

People come to the doctor a lot of times on their worst days. And while that is definitely true for us in certain scenarios, it's not true all the time. People come very happy and excited. While that can also be paired with a traumatic or difficult experience, it's a really special joyous time a lot of the time.