Finding My Voice: Musings of a Black Female Doctor with ADHD
The plan was to be either a rock star or a princess. I was intent on being both, but somewhere around high school, I realized I’d have to work for a living.
I could sit around a table with other ad execs and come up with slogans and jingles to get the public to buy our products. Turns out movies make that career look about 100x sexier than it really is. I loved math and excelled in all my math classes, so then I thought accounting might be the way until I realized it was simply a momentary indulgence. I chewed on it for a while but kept coming back to rock star and princess until a recurring illness dropped the answer in my throat.
When I was 13 years old, strep settled in for the long haul, which meant constant trips to the pediatrician’s office. Dr. Bernard, who’d been my pediatrician since I was a baby, was young, smart, funny, and Black. Visiting him was like visiting an uncle. In addition to being great at his job, he’d inquire about my grades, activities, and interests. At one of these appointments, he suggested I become a doctor because of my academic achievements and volunteer work. The idea didn’t immediately stick, but once I decided to get out of my comfort zone and go for it, I enrolled in the pre-med track at The Ohio State University. The rest is herstory that I’m still writing. A series of fulfilling, wide-ranging, maddening events has led me to share my experience of being a Black doctor, educator, wife of a Black doctor, and mother, all while managing ADHD. As all these things, I’m not a rock star, but I am a princess-like unicorn, so hop on so I can take you along for the ride.
I am board certified in both Geriatric Medicine and Internal Medicine, and I’m currently completing a fellowship in academic medicine. In addition to being a busy mom, I also have four jobs, which means I dream about sleep a lot more than I sleep. My husband and I are both overextended in many ways. In addition to constantly improving ourselves and helping the people around us, we are still raising two out of our three children. Fortunately, they’re the best kids in the world.
Three to four days a week, I wake up at 4:45 a.m. to work out with my husband from 5-6. I barely manage to dress myself professionally for work and convince my children to eat their breakfast, brush their chicklets, and dress for school. Not entirely trusting the public school system for my two sweet Black sons, I drive them almost a half an hour to a private independent school (but that’s a story for a different day). Three days a week, I’m the Asst. Dean of Diversity at Northeast Ohio Medical University. Two days a week, I observe and teach the resident physicians in Internal Medicine while they see various patients at the hospital system I’ve been with since 2008. Two days a week, I’m the diversity officer at the hospital where I precept residents. No, I don’t work seven days a week; some of these responsibilities overlap days, which means during my time on the clock, I have to switch hats quicker than Ohioans turned on Lebron when he went to Miami.
After work, my husband and I tag-team picking up the kids, feeding them in the car, and driving them to one of their many enrichment activities. I used to feel like I had to cook every meal, but in our ninth year of marriage and understanding the 24 hours in a day only go so far, I laid that feeling to rest. My husband used to act like such a task was out of his realm of possibilities, but I figured out that if I stopped cooking, he would do what he needed to do to keep eating. Now, we share this task almost equally. At the end of my day, we read books to our children, snuggle, and get back to work completing patient documentation, emailing, or perfecting a presentation. As you can probably imagine, our personal diets need work. I drink about 64 ounces of water a day, all of which I chase with caffeine. When I’m working, I eat when I can, but I typically live off a diet of green smoothies and protein powder. My favorite part of each day is the end, when I treat myself to my top-secret facial skin care routine. While ours is a wild existence, it’s a working existence. I’m in the swing of things now, but that didn’t happen overnight.
Learning what a life in the medical field would mean for me was an immediate wake-up call. Growing up in a very Black environment for much of my childhood, I never even really saw a White person until 3rd grade, and even then, I didn’t think about racism; I just gave everybody the benefit of the doubt, as I was taught to do by my loving mother who Is a pastor and missionary. Giving the benefit of the doubt is all fine and good until you realize that approach can have emotional and mental consequences if you don’t know what to look for or how to express yourself. Many times, when faced with the blight of racism, I felt a since of dismay and rejection, which left me feeling confused and powerless to speak out. To cope, I restricted my reactions to smiles and laugher, but never anger. Placing my emotional well-being in my back pocket, I went through medical school and residency training as a single mom with tremendous support from most of my instructors.
By the time I became a clinician, I’d become quite skilled at being reserved; sometimes, I’d even say I was timid. However, among my patients, I became popular in a community that’s 35% Black for a couple of reasons. One, there is a sparsity of Black physicians, so my patients finally felt like they had somebody to relate to, and two, I gave my patients the “Black touch,” treating them all like family. People around me wondered why my approach was so effective with my patients, many of whom had been condemned by the system as non-compliant and complex and sent to me to be “managed.” I knew the difference was the nuance of my upbringing, my culture, and that we need more providers of color in the medical field. As a physician, I witnessed firsthand that everybody doesn’t get the same treatment. I felt compelled to do something about that and got involved in health justice out of sheer void. Since 2012, I’ve developed various programs that previously hadn’t even been considerations to improve the recruitment and retention of both medical students and residents. Despite my successes, my voice has been devalued throughout my career. I have seen, therefore, I’ve tried to speak, but many people around me didn’t care to hear the truth from my perspective. That stops now.
As I untangle my identity, I want to give you a peek inside my life and the things I see each day through my vantage point. We’ll discuss topics like health disparities in the U.S., inadequate services, time and resources physicians provide to ailing people day in and day out while maintaining our composure, the difference between the respect offered to me versus my White male counterparts, my days as a med student and single mom, navigating a callous health system—pretty much anything I can think to tell you, except for my skin care routine. That’s my business and mine alone.
After everything I’ve done to stay in the good graces of the powers that be in this profession (and in this country)—relaxing my hair to make it straight, staying thinnish, earning my place in the medical field, speaking “properly,” staying happy and agreeable—I’ve given up. I spent over 30 years being dismissed, denied, and demagnified. I’ve fought my way through depression and ended up with more questions than answers. So now, I’m done. I no longer give a damn about pleasing them or how they view me. I care about nurturing myself and bringing myself fully back to life by using my voice. Audre Lorde said silence is death. This is my resurrection.
RIP: Compromise. As for all of you, welcome to the party.