STRONG MEDICINE FOR UTAH quality of life for my family as well. While there are certainly days when I’m not loving being a resident, I am incredibly grateful to be here and absolutely feel like I made the right decision to come here. In your biography on the University of Utah site, you also mention that your interest areas include education advocacy for disadvantaged youth and their parents, being a high school student medical interest mentor, and working with immigrant and other underserved populations. What does putting those interests into practice look like for you? Yeah! I grew up in immigrant and low SES communities, so that’s always been “home” to me. I always participate in things geared toward disadvantaged families because I came from one, and I REALLY wish that I had crossed paths with more professionals growing up. My cousins and I are the first ones to finish high school and go to college. I’m the first one to receive an advanced degree, so there was no way to ask anyone in our family for any kind of guidance about school (other than “go to it!”). Being from a low SES background and fighting that, and now having studied all about it, I understand and feel the struggle from many different angles. I try to reach out to families; the young kiddos to get them excited, the teens to try to bring them back from the dumb decisions they’re making, and parents to help educate and break the cycle. I’ve been the kid with food stamps, with thrift stores and knock-off clothes. I received corporal punishment for most of my childhood (mom is from the old country, which is how she was raised). I’ve briefly been in the foster system and fought viciously to stay with my baby brother every single minute. I’ve been the truant, smoked cigarettes for 14 years, and participated in over-drinking and illicit substances. But I also finally graduated not only from high school but college. And incredibly, also medical school – and I am now a doctor. It took me years, but I successfully quit smoking. I found an absolute saint, we got married, and now we have an almost 2-year-old who is way too smart for our sanity. Somehow along the way, I cut out all the deviant habits and behaviors and forced myself to evaluate what kind of person I wanted to be, with a lot of mental and emotional support from my brother and my husband. These are the stories and struggles that I can share with my mentees, peers, and patients. I think it’s important to know that you can keep trying, even if you’ve messed up over and over, and trying won’t always work but when it does it’s worth it. If you talked to young adults considering medicine as a career, why would you tell them to consider family medicine? The hugs. Just kidding, we live in COVID times. I love family medicine because there are so many ways for you to mold it to exactly what you love and help the patients for whom you feel the most passion. You can choose inpatient, outpatient, or a combo. You see every human in residency, but you can choose which population you want to work with afterward, whether you want to focus on geriatrics, women’s health, sports medicine, or a billion other directions. There are procedures you can do if you like that. And, you get to learn a bit of everything! The relationships with patients take time, but it’s so gratifying to follow someone over the years, be their medical advocate, and watch them progress in managing whatever conditions they struggle with. You also get to take a step back and look at the whole patient, rather than just one aspect of them, and you have an opportunity to help any human being. The relationships with patients take time, but it’s so gratifying to follow someone over the years, be their medical advocate, and watch them progress in managing whatever conditions they struggle with. You also get to take a step back and look at the whole patient, rather than just one aspect of them, and you have an opportunity to help any human being. Resident Spotlight | Continued from page 17 visit utahafp.org UtahAFP.org | 18
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