I ‘made’ my bones in medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis, where multiyear records for national homicides, syphilis, and other diseases provides a pathologic landscape second to none for training in the medical field.
Perhaps more interesting is how I came to medicine in the first place.
I didn’t start med school until I was thirty-six. Before I arrived at that, I was a marketing director for the Girl Scouts of the United States of America. At that time my church was also going through a revisioning process to determine what direction future endeavors should take. I applied those same prayers to my own life and was answered, in prayer, with a question: “What would you do if you could do anything?” I answered, “I would be a doctor.”
“Then go be a doctor.”
Several days later I was at the county dump dropping off a load of trash. In the heat an elderly woman tripped and fell, cutting her head quite severely on one of the large metal dumpsters. I sat with her and got the bleeding stopped before the ambulance arrived.
I didn’t need confirmation of the path I should follow, but I received it that day.
Three years of the first science classes I’d ever taken at the collegiate level found me on the doorstep of UT’s medical college as a ‘nontraditional’ student (codeword for ‘old’).
After successfully completing my classes and boards, I pursued a residency in emergency medicine in Chattanooga, then settled into a career in that field in Knoxville.
Since then I have pivoted once again, focusing my practice on treating pain via regenerative medicine; addressing men’s health issues; and my Saturday passion project – helping persons with disabilities get their health benefits in order.
I’ve directed these medical practices, and look every day for new ways to follow the path set before me.