In this BONUS bonus episode, the host, Amanda Quijano, revisits an additional portion of last week’s conversation with Breanna, a child and adolescent psychiatry fellow, focusing on what it felt like to take a year off medical training to move with her husband, be pregnant, and spend nine months as a full-time mom.

The two discuss the cultural pressure in medicine to justify time off for family, anxiety about not having an “academic purpose,” and the leap of faith of parenting full-time without prior experience. Breanna shares how she built support in a new city, how unexpectedly hard full-time parenting was, and how returning to work simultaneously evoked both guilt and relief.

The conversation focuses on identity shifts, marriage dynamics, and how post-training flexibility makes choices about part-time work both possible and paralyzing.

In this episode, the Host, Amanda Quijano, chats with Breanna, a child and adolescent psychiatry fellow and author of the Academic Psychiatry article “Fast Tracking Slowly.”

They discuss Breanna’s deciding to take a gap year between adult psychiatry residency and child fellowship to start a family amid the two-body problem with her MD-PhD husband who was also in the process of matching. She describes years of long-distance marriage, turning 30 and confronting fertility uncertainty, and trying to figure out alternative options for her own fellowship while her husband was applying to residency.

With support from mentors, program directors, and contacts at other institutions, she explored transfers, deferral, and alternative pathways beyond the traditional training track, ultimately deciding to defer fellowship for a year to spend time with her newborn.

The conversation touches on cultural pressure, stigma, logistical challenges, parental leave, and the financial realities of taking time off.

In this BONUS episode, the host, Amanda Quijano, and returning guest Kristen discuss her experience returning to emergency medicine after maternity leave.

Kristen describes fears about returning after nearly four months off, including physical recovery, sleep deprivation, clinical rust, “mom brain,” pumping logistics, and the emotional difficulty of leaving her son.

She explores how the transition back was smoother than expected, helped by supportive ED culture, communicating with attendings, doing study questions, and the support of her family.

She also reflects on identity integration, feeling like she now has “doctor brain” and “mom brain,” and how parenthood has deepened her empathy and advocacy work.

In this episode, the host, Amanda Quijano, sits down with Kristin, a fourth-year emergency medicine resident and new mom. The two discuss Kristin’s experience having her first baby during residency and how the physical stress of pregnancy forced her to change her original plans for leave and graduating on time.

They explore the inherent feelings of guilt associated with acknowledging the physical limitations of being pregnant and how this is antithetical to current ideal of what it takes to succeed in medicine. They also discuss how, despite the fear of being perceived as being behind and the potential optics of delaying graduation, her program’s supportive culture, proactive communication about leave, and a standard policy eliminating third-trimester overnights helpe to reduced that stigma and guilt, even as ACGME/ABEM rules constrained potential accommodations.

In this bonus episode, the host, Amanda Quijano, and Christine discussing her late miscarriage during her first pregnancy and the fear and guilt she felt about workplace exposures in the emergency department.

The host frames Christine’s story with data showing that the rate of pregnancy loss in medical trainees may be as high as 2-4x the national average, alongside limited systemic protections from toxins, radiation, infectious risks, and hazard hours such as long shifts and nights.

Christine describes the aftermath of her miscarriage, including unplanned time off due to hospitalization, lack of a clear policy or protected leave, and workplace “normalization” of working through pregnancy loss, prompting a call for systemic support and written protections.

Host Amanda Quijano interviews Christine, a third-year fellow and new mom. The conversation explores how she decided when to start a family during training and how her decision-making process was partially shaped by her experiences as a medical student, her identity as a Black woman physician and her awareness of higher maternal morbidity and mortality risks.

She talks about her journey freezing embryos during residency, navigating early-morning appointments, schedule swaps, and trying to time her procedures and recovery with her schedule.

She talks about how she ultimately began trying to conceive in fellowship, and experienced a late second-trimester miscarriage.

She highlight how her program provided flexibility near delivery (including a virtual rotation and no third-trimester overnights) and then how she had to navigate advocating for herself and her baby around her delivery and post-delivery complications - as well as the systems she had put in place ahead of time to make sure this could happen.

In this episode, the host, Amanda Quijano and guest Julie, a pediatric emergency medicine attending and first author on a recent Academic Emergency Medicine study, discuss a national survey of pediatric emergency medicine fellowship program directors on pregnancy accommodations and parental leave policies: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41948123/

Their discussion highlights major variability in these policies across programs, frequent lack of written and formal policies, and reliance on informal culture and program director discretion, which can leave trainees confused and hesitant to advocate for themselves.

Key issues discussed include limited leave, common requirements for “makeup shifts”, inconsistent knowledge and use of available training waivers, and inadequate pregnancy accommodations for infectious exposures, radiation, and overnight/hazard work hours.

The discussions of both this episode - and the study - argue for standardized, accessible options and better support for expectant and new parents in PEM fellowship and more broadly in all of medical training.

In this bonus episode, the host, Amanda Quijano and her guest Vicky discuss how difficult it is to build supportive systems within an existing system that was not designed to meet the needs of family planning, maternity leave, and pregnant trainees. They use their experiences as not just physician parents, but also chief residents, to highlight the lack of structural support and the absence of a unifying body to define what policies should exist or what systems can be created to provide consistent flexibility and support for physician parents in training.

In this episode, the host, Amanda Quijano, interviews her friend Vicky, a pediatric emergency medicine fellow finishing training, mom of [almost] two on her experiences with becoming a mom during her residency and fellowship.

The conversation focuses on Vicky’s journey building a family during medical training, the idea that maybe there really is no “right time”, and how surprising genetic testing results made IVF the best option for Vicky and her family.

She details the intense logistics of IVF during residency—timed shots, frequent early-morning monitoring, the need to disclose to chief residents, and fear of emergencies during injections—plus later pregnancy complications including preeclampsia and an induction during Match Week, and the stress of disclosing her pregnancy to a fellowship program after matching.

She talks about how her experience really brought to light the isolation, guilt, and secrecy that often enshrouds IVF during medical training and how much work still needs to be done to unmask the mystery and uncertainty of this process for trainees.

In this episode, host Amanda Quijano interviews Erica, now a first-year outpatient general pediatrician and mom of two under two, about having her first child during pediatrics residency and the physical and emotional toll of the training environment. They talk about the lack of guidance around pregnancy accommodations, leave and scheduling, including working 24-hour shifts late in pregnancy. They discuss the guilt involved in asking for any adjustments and the cultural pressure to work through pregnancy complications. She recounts her experience with preeclampsia, an emergency C-section, her son's resuscitation and NICU stay, and how this affected her recovery and leave - including having to extend her training. They also touch on how these experiences - even just that of being a resident and new parent - lead to feelings of isolation from her peers, separation from her family, strain on her marriage, and feeling misunderstood by co-residents... and how this first experience of pregnancy during training still had ramifications on her second pregnancy during her attendinghood.