#21 - Letter to a Young Female Physician with Dr. Suzanne Koven

http://suzannekoven.com/

Health Story Collaborative

https://thenocturnists.com/

http://suzannekoven.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Literature-and-Medicine-List-2.pdf

 

Bio/Show Notes:Shownotes 

Letter to a Young Female Physician

 

 Suzanne Koven was born and raised in New York City. She received her B.A. in English literature from Yale and her M.D. from Johns Hopkins. She also holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. After her residency training at Johns Hopkins Hospital she joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School and has practiced primary care internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston for over 30 years. In 2019 she was named inaugural Writer in Residence at Mass General. Her essays, articles, blogs, and reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, The New Yorker.com, Psychology Today, The L.A. Review of Books, The Virginia Quarterly, STAT, and other publications. Her monthly column “In Practice” appeared in the Boston Globe and won the Will Solimene Award for Excellence in Medical Writing from the American Medical Writers Association in 2012. Her interview column, “The Big Idea,” appears at The Rumpus. Suzanne conducts workshops, moderates panel discussions, and speaks to a variety of audiences about literature and medicine, narrative and storytelling in medicine, women’s health, mental healthcare, and primary care. Suzanne’s essay collection, Letter to a Young Female Physician, was published by W.W. Norton & Co. in 2021.

Excerpts from podcast interview:

 

This conversation really starts with your 2017 essay describing the challenges faced by female physicians.

Resounding message: 

“Dear young colleague, you are not a fraud. Your training will serve you well. Your humanity will serve your patients even better.”

Did it surprise you that this book still needed to be written some 30 years after your training experiences involving sexism and imposter syndrome?

In the book you reference a NYT op-ed by a female anesthesiologist w/ 4 kids to asserted that “women physicians who work part-time are betraying their patients, their full-time colleagues, and the taxpayers who subsidized their medical education.” 

You trained at Johns Hopkins and Harvard, were you an outlier among female colleagues since you chose to practice medicine part-time very early on in your career and do you think that was part of why you were constantly feeling like you needed to prove yourself? 

 

Throughout the book you shared your incessant struggle with body image and dieting – revealing your family nickname “Big Tush” and joking “If I ever knew as much about medicine as I know about dieting, I would win the Noble Prize!”

 

One of my favorite passages towards the end of the book is your ultimate self-acceptance:

“I now see that everything I have ever felt good about- in my marriage, my parenting, my writing, and my doctoring- has been the work of the loud, curvy, curly headed girl, operating on instinct and without self-consciousness. And every wrong turn I’ve ever taken has been in pursuit of …the woman I thought I was supposed to be. CURVY CURLY always wins. Always.”  

Trend in med schools to accept more humanities students and to focus on BOTH competence and compassion in medicine. Reminds me of Dr. Kate Treadway’s course for 1st year med students:

“Introduction to the Profession” 

Students are sent out into the hospital to speak with patients. They can ask anything, but REQUIRED to ask:

“What advice would you give me as I begin my career?”

#1 answer patients give:

“I JUST WANT YOU TO LISTEN TO ME”?

Do you think it’s becoming easier to integrate humanities and storytelling into our practice and how does that change the way we see patients?

 As much as it is a letter to other physicians, your book  is very much a personal memoir. The portrayal of your relationship with your mom was so vivid, all the way to her final stages of life after suffering from a stroke. There was something you wrote which I think can be really helpful to young stressed out professional moms:

“ I was reminded of something my mother, not at all inclined to self-pity, said to me near the end of her life when I asked what I could do for her: “Bring me back my husband, my friends, my career, my health- that’s what you could do.”

 

SUCH a Reminder that whatever stress you think you have now, you’re going to miss it! 

 

Was that also a wake up call for you to appreciate the busyness of life? 

 

Describing another female physician who was a friend, but had a tendency to compare herself unfavorably to you…

“She marveled at how I’d simultaneously served her coffee and cookies, cuddled my daughter in my lap, offerd my son, who lay on the floor in a car seat a bottle, and swatted away our Chesapeake Bay retriever who was determined to lick milk dribbles off the baby’s face- all while we gossiped about work. “You should have seen her, She was a Goddess.” P. 120 

In the book you write about your son’s at one point intractable epilepsy and how terrifying it was despite BOTH your and your husbands training.   “People ask “Is it easier or harder to have a sick child when both parents are doctors?” But this is the wrong question. There is no hard, no easy. Only fear and love, panic and relief shaking and not shaking.” 

Can you share one of your unforgettable PAGING DOCTOR MOM MOMENTS with us, a time that’s etched in your mind when trying to balance medicine and motherhood collided?