Happy Friday everyone! Lately I've been thinking a lot about what it will mean for me to be a mother in medicine one day and the experiences that will entail. I think the female med student/resident/attending perspective on balancing motherhood, career, and lifestyle is an extremely important one that may not be discussed as widely as it should be.  For today's blog I featured an inspirational classmate of mine, L. She was kind enough to answer some of my questions to share with you all.

1. How many children do you have and how old are they?

I have seven children, 4 girls and 3 boys.  From my first marriage, I have three kids, ages 18, 16 and 13 and with my current husband, we have four kids, ages 8, 7, 5, and 2.  My 18 year old, is autistic and will likely always live at home.  I don’t have religious reasons to have so many children.  If I did, I’m sure it would make me look more sane.  I grew up in a large family (the oldest of nine) so it feels “normal”.  My mother was the oldest of 12 children.  They are a huge family of cattle ranchers and everyone worked to help out from the time they were small.  We’ve always viewed large families as an asset.  When I was growing up, we were the “city folk” that would help for large cattle drives, branding the calves or slaughtering the chickens, but the ranch wasn’t part of my daily life like it was for my cousins.

2. Why did you choose to go into medicine?

As a young adult, I had no clue what I wanted to do.  I had a number of scholarships, but I just wanted to play once I went to college, so I took general classes and had a “B” average.  I didn’t get into drugs or alcohol, but did a lot of skiing, hiking, rollerblading (it was something people did back then) and hanging out with friends.  I was unmarried when I had my first child during the second semester of my sophomore year.  It was surreal.  This little human was completely dependent on me.  But once I was a parent, I found myself again.  I went back to being an “A” student.  I found a job at a bank as soon as I finished maternity leave and it paid almost twice as much as my previous job plus I had health insurance benefits for myself and my daughter.

I did my best as a single mom, but it wasn’t easy.  She literally didn’t sleep more than 2 hours at a time for the first 2 years of her life.  Even today, she doesn’t sleep much.  When she was 7 months old, she began having issues with a seizure disorder and was hospitalized on a number of occasions from complications.  She saw a pediatric neurologist, but none of the medications worked for her.  When I told him that her development just didn’t seem quite right, he listened to me and referred me.  I took her to learning specialists and speech therapists.  She was in early intervention programs for “speech and language delay”.  But why she was delayed in speech and language, we didn’t know.  I remember when she was 5 years old, I received a phone call after 8:00 on a Sunday evening from her pediatrician who had just returned from a conference on Autism.  She was so excited because she thought of my daughter and couldn’t wait to call me to let me know the news.  It was hard news to hear, but it was good to finally have an idea of what we were actually facing.

I married my daughter’s father when she was a year and a half old.  To finish college and chose the easiest degree I could think of (which was a B.S. in Photography.)  I continued with my job at the bank to support my first husband as he finished his degree and our eventual three children.  I took promotions and worked my way up.  After I divorced, I kept working at the bank.  I don’t think I actually stopped to figure out what I wanted to do, but did whatever made the most sense for my family.

When I was remarried and pregnant with my 5th child, I asked my husband if I could quit work and be a homemaker.  He knew me well and warned me that I liked to work and would hate being at home.  I insisted I would love it at home, so he reluctantly agreed I could quit.  It took me less than a year to realize that he was totally right:  I needed to do something.  I liked volunteering, but felt like something was missing.  I knew that I didn’t want to return to banking, I wanted to do something that had more meaning to me, was challenging and that I felt good about.  I think the experiences I had with my oldest daughter and her medical needs that helped me realize that a physician can affect lives in unique ways.  I can thank my daughter for helping me find my path to medicine.

3. How has being a mom affected your med school experience?

My first year of medical school, I was determined that I would have the same medical school experience as everyone else.  I joined every club.  I went to parties and tailgating with classmates.  I did “electives” and started “distinction tracks”.  I volunteered to work with underserved people and volunteered to help with alumni events and for the medical school graduation ceremony.  Anything that I thought sounded interesting, I wanted to try it.  But, I saw very little of my family.  Luckily, I did a rural professionals summer program that allowed me to take my family to a rural place to do a rotation.  The doctor I shadowed had kids while she was in medical school and advised me to have fun and enjoy my summer with my kids.  She invited me over for a July 4th barbecue with her family.  She encouraged me to take the kids fishing and to the local community pool.  After the 6 week rotation, I returned home, but I had a hard time getting back into the swing of medical school.  I didn’t want to be away from my family so much.  Prioritizing is difficult, something always has to give.  I decided to commit specific time to my family.  I dropped out of some of my extra clubs (like the a cappella group) and started volunteering a lot less.  Overall, I don’t know if being a mom changed my medical school experience.  Some of my classmate are dating and I know dating is time consuming.  I don’t really watch television but most people do.  We all fill our time with something and we all have to balance school, family, friends and self.  So while my time is consumed differently than others, I don’t think it’s very different from other medical students.  I think we all took on too much at times.  Reprioritizing is part of medical school.

4. Do you have any advice for current moms that are interested in pursuing medicine?

• Shadow physicians:  make sure you like the job you want to do.  If you don’t love it, don’t do it.


• Nothing is better than having great childcare.  If you feel good about where your kids are and who they are with, you can feel good about what you are doing when you are away from them.  It’s worth every penny to have better childcare (I personally recommend family or a nanny if at all possible.)  Make sure you have backup childcare as well.  And backup to your backup childcare.  In other words, you need to know that if you couldn’t be there, it would work out, somehow.


• Don’t let people tell you that “you can’t…”  No matter what it is.  There are many ways to do things, so maybe you just haven’t found the one that works for you.  There will undoubtedly be roadblocks.  Be strong enough to find the alternate path.  Don’t let rejection be an excuse.  I was rejected my first application year, waitlisted my second year, but got into multiple medical schools the third time.  I just had to try different approaches each time.


• There will never be a good time for things.  If you wait for the best time to come, it won’t.  A pre-med friend of mine had morning sickness during the MCAT and didn’t do well.  She decided not to apply with a poor MCAT score and instead to take time off to prepare for her little one and retake the MCAT again in a year.  But a year later, she was so busy with her baby and she didn’t retake it.  Now, I haven’t had the heart to ask her why she hasn’t applied yet.  Maybe she she decided against it or maybe she has applied but I just didn’t hear about it.  She’s young, she has many years to decide.  But I kind of think you “lose” the work you’ve already done as time goes by.  Recent experiences matter on the medical school application just as much as a history of experience.  So if you’ve already done a lot, don’t make it a waste.  If you really and truly know you want to be a doctor, don’t say you couldn’t because you were a mom.  It’s not fair to them or to you.  If you want them to reach their potential, you should reach yours.


• Make sure to take the family with you on your “journey” to medical school.  Help them be part of it, if you can.  It was the coolest thing ever to see my little ones jump up and down cheering when I got into medical school.  The teens, didn’t jump up and down, but I’m pretty sure they gave me a fist bump or something.  I’ve been working on this very hard for 5 years now.  The kids are still excited and tell me they hope they can become a doctor someday, too.  Well, three of them tell me that and one of them is a 16 year old teenager, so I think that’s impressive.  This journey didn’t ruin them.  Cloud their judgement, perhaps, but not ruined. And they don’t seem to think I’m the worst mom ever.  Or they are super great at hiding it.


• Reflect.  Take the time to think about yourself, your weaknesses, your choices, your plans, your children, your significant other, your strengths.  What could you have done differently?  What are you glad you did?  What do you like?  What do you not like?  What makes you happy? How do you learn? How did you get to where you are?  What stopped you from taking another path?  What are you doing?  Are there other options? Use reflections to re-evaluate and prioritize.  Plus these sorts of activities are needed for medical school essays.  Trust me, I filled out 40 secondary apps my 3rd time ‘round.

5. Do you have any advice for other moms currently in med school?

Stop doing things because you’re supposed to do them.  Think about your time as a valuable thing.  Now granted, you need to “waste” some time each day, so make sure you waste it in ways you choose instead of letting wasted time happen to you.  Overall, how you spend your time matters.  There are so many things that don’t matter and as moms we get wrapped up in the guilt of attempting to do it all perfectly.  I think the type of person that goes to medical school may be more likely to demand perfection of herself than other moms.

Does it matter if I wait 15 months for the dental check ups for my kids when it’s supposed to be 12 months?  Meh. They don’t have cavities, so it’s not the end of the world.  And yes, those dishes really will still be there waiting for you after you tuck the kids in to bed.  They can wait: they are ridiculously patient, those dirty dishes.  Are you in the PTA because it brings you joy and overwhelming happiness, or do you feel like it’s what you’re supposed to do?  I personally would prefer to spend time reading to my son’s kindergarten class than attend PTA meetings.  Have your kids help you decide. If my kids ask me to volunteer a half hour to pass out flyers for the booster club, I ask them if they would prefer I set aside that same half hour for them, doing something they like, like maybe going to the park.  It helps them to realize that life is full of things you can do, but you shouldn’t do it for the sake of doing it.

You already know this, but you could study every moment of every day and still not be done studying.  I’d rather spend 2 hours when I’m alert and ready to study than 6 hours inefficiently rereading notes.  Just do what you can as efficiently as possible, then let it go…..

Oh, and ditto on my childcare sentiments for pre-med moms in the previous question.  Worth it. I’m pretty sure if you got into med school, you got this.  But how on earth do you find the time to read a blog? Kudos to you: please share your wisdom with me.

6. Are you interested in any specific specialties right now? If so, how has being a mom influenced your decision?

I’m still undecided.  One comfort is that I will be happier in any specialty I choose than I would be in another career, so I can’t go wrong.  I considered specialties that are more conducive to family, but am leaning towards surgery which, well, isn’t.  I think overall, the fact that I have a family won’t change the specialty I choose.  There’s no reason to put in so many years of education if it isn’t the specialty I love best.  I figure that even if it’s a longer residency, it won’t really matter.  Residency is similar to what we will be doing the rest of our lives, so the length of residency isn’t a factor in my mind.  The hours should be an issue to me, but they aren’t because I know that I would rather work more hours at something I “love” than work less hours at something I only “like”.  The thing that I am finding the most difficult is possibly moving.  I moved my family over a thousand miles for medical school.  I would feel guilty moving them again for a residency program.  Moms always wonder if they should have done something different.  It’s something that plagues moms in any career.   Luckily, there’s no right answer.