A Young Alum Returns Home
Home
School
took a bachelor's degree in Biology from the University of
Chicago, and is a 2001 graduate of the Medical School, SUNY at
Stony Brook.)
my first thought was "but I haven't done anything! I'm way too
young and I haven't done anything remarkable, I'm just starting my
professional career!" Then, as if those feelings of inadequacy
weren't enough, I learned about some of your previous Cum Laude
speakers, their accomplishments, and felt like I belonged much
more with you guys sitting in the auditorium than on stage with
any of those speakers. But mulling it over, wondering what could I
really say, I remembered an important lesson that I first learned
in the upper-school sometime, and seem to need to keep learning
periodically; and that is, don't constantly compare yourself to
other people. It's bound to breed insecurity, and feelings of
inadequacy. Everybody has her own insecurities, her strengths, her
own fears, and her own weaknesses. We like to show our strengths,
and we see those of others readily, but we don't often know their
fears, and we do know our own. So, it seems like we're the only
ones walking around feeling inadequate. The sooner you ditch this
whole delusion&emdash;stop worrying about other people and focus
on just being yourself, and being the best self you can
be&emdash;the happier you will be. We all learn things in our own
ways, and at different times in our lives, we learn different
things. So today, I would like to share a few of my experiences
and thoughts with you, and I hope you enjoy them.
wearing-the-uniform-thing is over once you graduate, but that's
not necessarily true. I know I thought that, and now I find myself
wearing a new uniform. For the next five to ten years at least, I
will be in the uniform of these turquoise surgery scrubs almost
everyday, and I like it. But I will tell you, for those of you who
haven't tried it already, that it is possible to show some
personal expression while still being in uniform. I've brought my
old school skirt to show you. In my day, this was a well-known
skirt. In tenth grade, I started putting the buttons on in the
corner to weigh it down in the wind, and I liked it. Over the next
few years, I would add a few more here and there, bit by bit, to
work my way around. By senior year, I had lower school students I
didn't even know bringing me cute buttons for my skirt. And I
remember one day, in the very beginning of twelfth grade, I was
standing on the corner of Madison avenue waiting to cross the
street with our then headmistress, Mrs. McMenamin (remember big,
tall, scary Mrs. McMenamin). She looked down and shook her head,
and said "Lia, I'm going to get you into a regular skirt by the
end of this year." I smiled, and said, "OK, we'll see." I wore
this one all year, and a regular one for honors assembly, so we
both won. So you can be yourself in uniforms, just do it in
moderation or the faculty will kill me.
bathroom of my grandmother's house in Florida, starring at this
swan faucet she had in her sink. It was one or two days before my
eighth birthday, and I remember just standing there and crying. My
aunt was walking by and found me there, and asked me why I was
crying. "I don't want to turn eight!" I said, "I like seven. Seven
has been good. Why can't I just stay seven for a while longer, and
have my birthday some other time?" Now, you would think she might
get a good laugh out of this, and she probably did afterwards, but
at the time she actually said something very profound which has
stuck with me ever since. She told me, "You're not loosing seven.
You know how when you cut a tree, and you look inside and see all
the rings, and each ring is a year, and you can count them? That's
what happens with us, we keep adding years, like rings. You're not
loosing seven," she said, "seven will always be there inside you,
you're just adding eight." I love this analogy. I think a stroke
of genius came over my Aunt then, because you can just keep
thinking about it; it works on so many different levels. I love to
picture our lives as trees, with our past inside us; all of our
experiences and decisions, our mistakes and our joys become woven
into the rings to form our structure. And when I think about it
that way, I know there is something very important in my core, in
the inner rings of my structure, that gives me strength for being
a woman in a field of mostly men, and part of that definitely
comes from Nightingale. I took for granted, for many years, the
importance of knowing a strong community of women who are doing
what they want to do, and who show by example that you can and
should do what you love. I also took for granted the fact that the
way women forge friendships in a community of mostly women is
often very different than how they form their relationships in
more male-dominated environments, where unfortunately competition
often takes over. This realization hit me rather suddenly in
college, especially in my first science courses, where for a long
time I actually found it much easier to make friendships with men
than with most women. I have since learned to adjust to the
different environments, but I believe I must still try hard not to
change myself and how I relate to women as I go between the
different worlds. And I find that just remembering the worlds of
strong women in my core rings, in my background from family,
Nightingale and otherwise, comforts and strengthens me.
surgery rotations, which means that I helped take care of patients
in the hospital, and got to go into the surgeries and help a
little here and there. In this particular department of this
hospital, there was only one female surgeon faculty member, who
was in her mid- to late-forties, and very good. I operated with
her often, and enjoyed it. One day, she was trying to be very
supportive of me, and she said, "As you go through your training,
and it's going to be hard, just remember that we can do it, that
women can be surgeons." That was such a given for me, and I was so
shocked that she would feel the need to say it, that I think I
blurted out something along the lines of, "Well of course we can,
I have never questioned that, my question was just do I want to do
it, for myself." We started talking about it, and she said that
during her training, she woke up every morning wondering if women
really could do what she was trying to do. I don't think there's
any one of you students that actually doubts whether women could
do these things, at least I hope not. Our basic assumptions are so
different, so much further than hers were, just one generation
ago. I am sure that some of the difference can be explained by
progress in society, but certainly not all of it, because I don't
believe that society is often able to make such changes so
quickly. Rather, I think we women here at Nightingale have been
taught more than most women that we can and should do what we want
to do, and we are in a position where we have the opportunities to
do so. That is an incredible gift, and I hope you use it.
applying for residency positions to spend five years at one place,
training to be a surgeon. In one of my interviews, I was gently
reminded that society hasn't really changed as much as one might
hope. At one hospital, I had an interview with the Chairman of the
Department of Surgery, who led me into his office to talk. "Before
we start," he said, "I think there's something important I should
tell you&emdash;I have no problems training gals." I was
speechless. He continued, "We've had a lot of gals come through
here. In fact, we've even had some pretty smart gals come through
here. I just thought you should know that." "Yes," I said, "thank
you for telling me."
ways. Nowhere is that more obvious to me than when travelling to a
country or a place very unlike home. I love seeing all sorts of
people in other places and learning how they talk and think and
live, the wide range of different people's realities, of what is
normal to them but maybe foreign to me, and what, despite the
gaps, we can share. Of course, this often leads me to travel alone
to places that make my mother worry more than a little, but such
is life. A few years ago I was in Uganda, in Central-to-East
Africa, travelling around with a backpack. The transportation
modes in the rural areas were walking, minivans on the more
popular routes, or pickup trucks. In this case, it was a pickup
truck route, and since it was pouring rain and I was tired, I
opted to pay fifty cents extra to ride in front, in the cab of the
truck, with four other people, four people. Needless to say, I
don't think my tusch actually got more than an inch of seat, and
it was mostly friction that held me suspended in place, but it was
dry. As we drove into the mountains, the clouds broke up and the
sun came through with patches of deep blue sky. The earth there is
the greenest I've ever seen, with rainforest and banana trees and
fields of green, green tea leaves. Everywhere you look everything
is deep green and living, the very definition of verdant. One
Ugandan told me that they have a saying for that region; that it's
so fertile you could put a stick in the ground and it will grow
into a tree. The actual soil, though, is red, like the red clay in
the South here, and really bright.
pickup, watching it get more and more beautiful with every turn;
views of old, rounded green mountains, deep red roads, and puffy
white clouds in a bright blue sky. I couldn't help but cry,
"Ooooo! Wow!" and "Oh, how beautiful!" At first I think the
Ugandans in the cab thought I was completely nuts, then they
laughed at me when I got excited, and eventually if I exclaimed
too loudly by mistake, they would stop the car and make me take a
picture of the view before driving on. So, I told them, "when we
get there, and I open my bag, I'll show you a picture of where I
am from, and you will see why I say Oooooo." I figured that they
had lived here all their lives and didn't see why it was so
beautiful, but when I showed them my postcard of New York, they
would see the dirt and grime and understand. But I had assumed too
much. When I showed the driver my card of New York, an aerial view
of midtown to about 86th street, he just froze and stared at it. I
think a full, solid minute went by before he looked up bewildered
and said, "But where are all the trees?" I might as well have
shown him a picture of a computer chip; he had no conception of a
skyscraper or even an apartment building, and I was humbled. I had
crossed into his world, but he could have no sense of what mine
was like, and I didn't even think of it. I try to use that story
now to remind myself never to assume that I know about a person I
just met, or what a person's perspective is. We have to ask about
others, and we have to tell each other about ourselves to share
our experiences.
surgery, and I tell them 'because I just love it.' 'Well,' they
say, 'when did you know you wanted to be a surgeon?' Not for a
long time. At Nightingale, I loved biology with Mrs. Ratner but
figured I should wait and see, who knows. In college, I thought I
wanted to do research, go to graduate school in molecular biology
and run a lab. So I tried that for a while, and realized that I
wanted other things to make me happy, not the least of which was
that I wanted to help people in a concrete way everyday. But even
when I went to medical school, I never thought I would be a
surgeon until my third year. Some of my friends and my anatomy
professors thought I would, so of course there are many things
that lead into it, but probably one of the moments when I first
realized it was when I started my surgery rotation in the
hospital. One of the first surgeries I ever scrubbed in on, which
means I was allowed to wash and be in the sterile field with the
surgeons, was a bowel surgery. At some point during the operation,
one of the pieces of equipment wasn't working, and we had to wait
while they brought us a new one. At this point, the patient was
asleep and covered with sterile drapes, and the abdomen was cut
into and being held open. You guys have all had some basic biology
by now, right? You probably have all learned about peristalsis:
how the gut actually has muscle in it that contracts to push food
through it. Well, in medical school you learn about this in
excruciating detail, about in which direction the muscle fibers
run in which layers, what exchanges happen in what cells of the
mucosa along the gut, etc. But you learn it all in the abstract,
really, taking it on faith that it happens, that it's important,
and what can make it go wrong. So, while I'm standing there in the
operating room, just waiting and looking at the gut, the bowel
started to move. Just on it's own, right there with the belly
open, the small intestine was contracting in series and moving
around. That link, that moment of seeing concretely what had only
been theoretical to me before, was fabulous. I was so excited I
actually blurted out "It's doing it, it's peristalsis!" Seeing my
excitement, the surgeon said, "go ahead, feel it" Really? I can? I
stuck my hand in and the abdomen was warm and squishy, and I felt
the intestines moving around my hand, the body working and
processing right there. That was the body living around me, that
was life, and I was hooked.
because of pressure, or because of something to prove. I'm
becoming a surgeon because I feel that I am a surgeon, and I love
surgery. Of course, I may not look like the typical surgeon to a
lot of people. Just the other day, in my apartment building
elevator, a neighbor with a young child asked me if I ever
babysat. I told her I didn't really have the time. I suppose my
main point with all these stories, besides keeping you awake, is
that I really believe that whatever you do in your life, you have
to be true to yourself and do what you love. Push yourself, use
good judgement, and leave your options open because you never know
what may come your way or how you might change as you continue to
add your rings. But make your choices because they feel right for
you. You're all smart. Be safe, be true to yourself, and have fun.
