"I remember so distinctly we were in Rwanda, I came back from a run, and my husband was like sitting on the chair looking shell shocked, and he said 'uhh you need to read this email'. And it was an email that said 159 children have been released from The Congo and yours is one of them. Please come get him"

This episode's conversation is with Dr. Beth Riviello, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

We talk about:
- The decision to adopt
- International and domestic adoption experiences
- How different her two adoptions were
- Having a career in globale health
- The moment she met her sons and felt like their mom
- The ongoing bonding process
- Advocating for fair leave for adoptive and non-birth parents
- Having a quarterly check-in with herself
- Making time to pray and run
And so much more!

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"Our lives are different than men in medicine in so many ways, and it has to do with being female and all of the reproductive burden that is put on us because of that."

We talk about:
- Having a baby as the only female physician in a private practice
- Feeling ostracized
- The challenges of treating pregnant women while pregnant
- Her husband choosing to stay home to raise the kids
- Having adult children go through illness

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"I just felt like, in that moment, I can't move forward in being a physician. Because you know to be honest I was fixated on her mortality, and I really thought I can't exist in my old life, you know, after this."

On this week's episode I talk with Dr. Kashi Goyal, a pulmonary and critical care fellow at Ohio State University, about her experience having her daughter Anika who was born with a congenital rhabdomyosarcoma. We talk about wanting to quit medicine, her decision to go back, what it was like being a trainee having a daughter at home who was going through chemotherapy, how the COVID19 pandemic made things even more challenging and complicated, and how today she and her family are thriving and profoundly happy. 

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"What do you want to do with your life, you know? I mean what are you really happy doing and is it worth doing something that you don't love every single morning."


On this week's episode I talk with Dr. Angie Frank about how she decided she didn't want to do research anymore and what it looked like to make that change, discovering that it is possible to be an academic clinician, how she feels about promotion, and having the freedom to do what you want to do,

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This week I'm joined by Dr. Ritika Parris who is a primary care physician and head of GME wellness at BIDMC in Boston. We cover so much in this coversation from having her two babies prematurely, navigating roles and jobs with her partner who is also a physician, the mentors she had looking out for her along the way, and what she had to do when she was working an overnight in a community hospital without a maternity ward and she forgot her pump supples.

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"It has been just the absolute joy and privilege of my life to see how institutions can change and how we can change the institutions that we love...that we are not just here to put the stethoscope on the chest of a patient. We are here to change the future of medicine"

In this conversation with Dr. Daniele Olveczky we talk:
- C-sections and complications
- Going back to work 6 weeks after her baby was born
- Why she chooses to be a nocturnist
- What it means to be in charge of your own mosaic
- What drives her to stay in academic medicine

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"The big bottom line, ok, this is the big bottom line - young moms and women in general we are so self critcal and we are so down on ourselves, and I could practically cry just thinking about this because it's so unneeeded. We're as smart as the guys, we're as committed as they are, we probably work harder in certain ways. Women do a lot of unpaid work. And so we have no reason to feel bad about ourselves, but I know when I was a young mom, you're so insecure. What happens though, I think when you get around 35 or 40, you're just like "who cares what people think". You can't even worry about that. As long as you're comfortable, your partner, your conscience, your family, that's what matters."

In this episode Dr. Deborah Gomez Kwolek shares her experience with:
- Having a baby during her intern year in 1987 and how she barely survived that year
- Having to take time away from residency training when she had her 2 first kids
- Sharing a residency spot with another woman who had a baby in residency (she needed to heavily advocate for herself to make this happen)
- Going on to have 7 children
- Taking several years away from medicine midway through her career, and then coming back
- Supporting young moms now that she is more senior

Join the SGIM Women and Medicine Commission's workgroup on parenting

"Pregnancy and Residency- Overdue for Equity" published in NEJM March 11, 2023

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"You end up finding yourself in this bubble of work, and childcare and survival mode, and I think a lot of us tend to feel alone when our focus is so narrow and our focus is on the work and on our child and it can feel very isolating, and it can feel like we're the only one going through the situation, not recognizing that it is so common and all new moms feel this way."

Today's conversation is with Dr. Lika Targan, a primary care physician and medical educator at BIDMC. 

We talk about:
- Balancing work and home life
- Going through a divorce
- Being a single mom
- Egg freezing - logistics and the emotional and physical toll
- Being forgiving of yourself when you can't give 110%

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"We have this whole other life outside of the hospital where we may or may not identify as being a physician, and either way I think that's ok. Some people feel like medicine is their calling and they're a doctor at home and a doctor at work. And there are other people who are like I love being a physician and I'm a physician at work but I'm a mom at home and I'm a friend and I'm another person. Maybe we just focus on the physician part, and we have been forced to confront mental healh=th but we really haven't had to confront this idea of having a family in residency in the same way."

In this episode we talk about:
-Having kids in medical school
-Taking leave from medical school after her first child and having to describe how she spent this time while on residency interviews
-The perception that taking time off means you aren't dedicated or it will set you back
-The isolation of being a parent
-Figuring out how to make pumping work when she was told that previously residents hadn't been successful at pumping
-Seeking out advice from various sources
-Being helped out by her colleagues and paying it forward

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"I spent too long thinking that because the system was a certain way, that that was the right way for it to be, and I think it took me a really long time to have the perspective to look and see how diseased our entire system really is, and to think of it in terms of how if we were to design a system by which to train physicians today…for training a group of competent, kind, compassionate, knowledgeable, diverse physicians, we would never design the system that’s been designed"

"Yes, everyone should get negotiation skills training, but wouldn’t it be really unique if we just created systems that treated everybody fairly to begin with and we didn’t make people fight for resources and equitable compensation?"

"Not only are parental leave policies abysmally short and inappropriate for the birth parent…but they are also woefully inadequate for the non-birth parent as well…it creates this dynamic right from the time of a child’s birth that you are basically saying, culture, society, is saying that there is one parent that is more important in the care of a child than another parent, and in some ways we never recover from that.”

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Links to some of Wendy's work:
- "Wondering If I’d Get There Quicker If I Was a Man: Factors Contributing to Delayed Academic Advancement of Women in Infectious Diseases"
- "One Person" - JAMA A Piece of My Mind
- "It's Not Your Fault" - JAMA A Piece of My Mind
- "An Essential Worker's List of Pandemic Chores for the Kids"

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