IN PRACTICE

Other Specialties: Internal Medicine, Dermatology, Obstetrics/Gynecology

There are many medical and surgical specialties, and sub-specialties, for medical students to choose from. And there are many ways to practice them--in individual practice, in groups, in HMOs, in an academic setting. The women in this section have chosen a variety of specialties and practice situations. They range in age from 35 to 70, so they've experienced a great span in the course of nursing and medicine as well. They are very conscious of the current upheaval in the health care field and have decided ideas about whether this is healthy for patients and practitioners.

K.O. went into medicine planning to be an oncologist because her nursing had taught her that there was a need for physicians in the field who had a broader vision than the disease itself. The realities of being an oncologist, however, became clear to her during her residency and she realized that there was no way she could have a family and practice such a demanding sub-specialty.

Dr. FF knew long before she finished nursing school that she was going to be a doctor. Yet her trail from one prestigious school to another was anything but a straight line. She stumbled into her sub-specialty, dermatologic laser surgery, largely through a patient's insistence that she research a new technique. Practicing that new technique as it was being developed, she learned, makes you an instant expert.

Darcy Forbes was so depressed by her OB/GYN residency that she considered giving up medicine. As therapy she wrote a book in which an OB/GYN killed his patients by exploding them with laparoscopic gases. Feeling slightly better, she did a gyn urology fellowship in England and returned to move with her radiologist husband to Colorado. Here is the saga of her ultimately rewarding career, and her view of the faulty process that led to it.

Dr. HH is one of the many nurse/doctors who have realized that the price medicine demands of physicians is often that they give up their right to a private life. She is one of the few, however, who have insisted on controlling the demands that her career attempts to place on her. By working in a clinic and an emergency room, she maintains a hold on her sanity, and continues to find the inner resources to give to her patients what they deserve.

Catherine Pierce became a nurse to help with the WWII effort, only to have the war end before she could serve. Her decision to become a doctor was very much in the family tradition (for the men), but her practice in New Jersey came early enough that she was the first woman on the medical board and on the Board of Trustees at her hospital. Pierce did high-risk obstetrics and loved her responsibilities in teaching future doctors.