"What A Waste To Train A Woman As A Doctor," He Said

Why We Need To Tell Our Stories To Help Each Other Heal

I’d been quaking in my boots as I anticipated telling the medical director of my hospital that I was resigning from practicing as an OB/GYN in the hospital- for good, at the ripe old age of 37. I didn’t know about Internal Family Systems yet, so I didn’t know how to reckon with the scared, mean inner critic voices in my head that were screaming, “What the actual f*ck are you doing? You spent twelve years and $200,000 in school debt learning to be an OB/GYN! You sacrificed your entire twenties while all your friends were off having a life, earning money, getting married, having babies, and backpacking Europe so you could help others heal, have a stable career, enjoy a meaningful job. You have a newborn baby whose father has never been employed the whole time you’ve been together- and you have no other legitimate means of earning an income. You are the most irresponsible mother, partner, doctor, human being on this earth if you walk out of this hospital!”

I had enough self-doubt already, so I didn’t particularly need to hear what the medical director thought about my scary decision, but I had to tell him. It didn’t particularly help when I approached him in the dark mahogany doctor’s lounge where pretty Latinx girls in short-skirted waitress costumes were serving the male doctors (but never us lady doctors) and he responded flatly to my news with, without missing a beat, with “What a waste to train a woman as a doctor.”

He went off on a rant that left me frozen and silenced about how you have to train two men to equal one woman in medicine, since we’re all so lazy and inclined to quit the profession when we can’t hack the pressure or become mothers who want to breast feed our babies or feel entitled to do stupid weak things, like sleep at night. He kept going, talking about how women were such inferior doctors and universities shouldn’t bother to give us the privilege of an education if we were going to shirk our duties to society and neglect the people who needed us once we had the skills needed to save lives because we cared about things like family life and our own mental or physical health.

I had graduated second in my class in medical school, just behind a woman who was a nurse first and a better doctor than me and deserved to be valedictorian. I wondered if she was struggling too. Or maybe she was just stronger and more capable of being like men expect women to be in medicine, which is how men expect men to be in medicine, which is to devalue everything but medicine, including your own family and your own health.

As his angry, corrosive voice ripped into me, I felt myself falling into a pit I knew well- the sink hole of shame. His voice took on a rushing sound, like I was in a tunnel and he was very far away. My visual field started narrowing and I wondered if I was about to black out, praying to a God I was no longer sure I believed in, just in case there was any way divine intervention might prevent me from the humiliation of passing out in front of the medical director who was berating me.

I guess I dissociated, because I have total amnesia about what happened next, other than hearing rumors from others who had been there that his rant had been misogynistic and insulting enough to upset others and that someone had apparently told him off, on my behalf.

He hadn’t asked me why I was leaving, even though, as medical director, he really should have known that I was jumping ship because my new boss was insisting I perform unethical, medical malpractice-worthy C-sections on illegal Mexican immigrants who were migrant workers in the farm fields, without even bringing in a translator or getting their consent. Someone should have told him my boss and his partner were racking in the dough, taking advantage of innocent patients who didn’t have enough power to say no, fight for their rights, or challenge authority.

He probably wouldn’t have cared anyway, but if I hadn’t frozen, maybe I could have told him that I’d refused to do a C-section on a woman with twins whose babies were too premature- when there was zero medical indication to deliver those babies early- and when I’d said no to my boss because it would have been wrong for me to endanger those babies by saying yes, I’d been told “It’s our way or the highway.”

When my physician colleague did the C-section because I refused, those preemies wound up sick in the NICU- and it was all his fault. The doctor who did the C-section came to me crying after he’d heard I’d chosen the highway instead of agreeing to do what he too knew was wrong in order to keep his paycheck. He said he wished he’d been brave enough to say no like I did, but that he was scared of losing his job. I told him I was scared of losing mine too, but I could not live with more preventable wreckage on my hands. I’d rather be broke.

He said his wife would kill him if he lost his job. I said my husband probably wouldn’t be too happy with me either.

But I still chose the highway.

I’d already left one hospital where I suffered moral injury so severe that I became sick and suicidal. I’d escaped to this one, hoping things would be better, but they were worse.

I heard through the grapevine years later that my boss’s medical license had been revoked- thank Goddess. But I always wondered if there was any accountability for that medical director whose name I no longer remember (funny how dissociation can wipe the memory slate that clean.) I never found out how those babies or those Mexican mothers fared after I left. Parts of me regret not calling an investigative reporter and blowing the whistle or reporting my bosses to the medical board when I left. But I was too traumatized. I spent the next two years writing my stories privately. And then one day, I started telling my stories publicly and realized I could be a different kind of doctor, not an utter waste like that medical director wrote me off as, but as a doctor of doctors and a voice for the voiceless.

Writing Your Story Can Help You Heal

I just wrote this story for the first time because I just flashed back to it. But I’ve written about other experiences of misogyny in medicine, especially in The Anatomy Of A Calling. And I just won an award for a story I wrote for Pulse, the literary magazine for doctors, about being a woman in medical training back in the nineties. It will be published later this month.

Sometimes I write for my own healing, and I used to think that my personal trauma would have no interest to anyone else. But I’ve since changed my mind. Now I realize that so many of our most painful stories are truly universal. Maybe you’re not a morally injured woman in medicine suffering from the misogyny and xenophobia in the system. But maybe you’ve been bullied by doctors into doing something you didn’t want to do. Or maybe you’re a woman in some other male-dominated field who was shamed for doing the right thing. Or maybe you’re marginalized in some other way and got traumatized for taking a firm stand for the disempowered. Or maybe this story touches you in some other way.

Either way, I’ve now realized that telling our stories publicly can help others heal. And there are SO many stories that have been silenced, that need to be told.

So…I’m teaching a one day Zoom workshop called Heal Others With Your Story. It’s for those of you who have maybe been writing for therapeutic purposes but are feeling like you might be ready to take the big scary leap into making your story public in some way. I’ll be featuring the story of one of my star mentoring clients Emma Jarrett, who turned her breast cancer trauma into a gorgeous one-woman play Breastless, which she’s now releasing on her Substack “Scars of Gold.” (Follow her here.) We’ll be talking about Substack as one of the ways you can tell your story. But we’ll also be talking about book publishing, keynote speaking, play-writing, art-making, song-writing, and all the other ways you might heal others with the stories of what’s been hard for you.

Learn more and register to join us live December 9 (or watch the recording later if you prefer).

I’m also teaching a live, in person IFS & Memoir Writing workshop in Malta November 4-8, 2024. There are only 30 spots, so if you think you might want to go, fill out the application soon.

Whether you join us online or in person- or just here- I hope you’re sharing your story- here on Substack, in a blog somewhere else, in a book, in a play, or however your creative muse inspires you to heal others with your story. Imagine what the world would be like if we didn’t have Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Liz Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, Tarana Burke’s Unbound, and every book Anne Lamott and Mary Carr have ever written? All of these books are stories of traumas turned into art that heals not only those who tell the stories but also those who read, listen, and feel. May we all benefit from the story YOU will share.

*That crumbled up photo of me from my time in the hospital is literally the only photo I can find from those days. That was me, 30 years old and straight out of residency, bright-eyed and ready to save the world. What a waste to train a woman as a doctor, he says. I look at my young wrinkle-free face and think about much I didn’t want to developmentally traumatize my daughter by being on call for 72 hour shifts, and I think about all the women doctors I know who care so deeply about their patients, and I think about how, in order to become doctords, we’re expected to defy so many qualities of femininity- empathy, compassion, intuition, creativity, maternal instincts- and I think “F*ck that.”