Family Medicine Worth the Wait for GME Award Winner: Melanie Dance Melanie Dance, MD, MPH, remembers March 15, 2019, differently than most of the nearly 3,900 other medical students and graduates who matched into family medicine that day. There was no Match Day celebration at a medical school and no highly anticipated envelope to open with family. Dance dropped off her three children at school, parked her car and waited, alone, for a life-altering email. “Having had the experience the year before of not matching, I knew there was a good chance I might never match,” said Dance, a third-year resident who teared up recalling her match with St. Mark’s Family Medicine Residency in Salt Lake City. “I realized that might mean I could never be a doctor again, and I had missed it for a long time. The reality that I could and would be a doctor again was a really big deal.” Dance had actually matched once before. After graduating from the University of California-San Francisco School of Medicine in 2006, she headed home for surgical residency at the University of Utah. Dance’s husband remained in California to finish medical school while she started residency with their first child in tow. Dance said her breast milk dried up during her first week of residency because she didn’t have time to pump, and she rarely saw her infant daughter awake. Midway through her second year of training, she made the difficult decision to walk away. “I loved being a doctor,” she said. “I loved surgery, but I just could not make that work with our family situation.” Being a mother changed Dance’s perception of health care and what she wanted when, and if, she could return to it. “Once I had my own family and got involved in my own community, I recognized all the different ways that health affects people,” she said. “Motherhood makes you more patient, and I was in a better position to talk to people about their health and how their family affects their health. Those things have become so real for me that I wanted to include that as part of what I did in the future, and that made primary care a really obvious choice. It has been the best fit for me.” Dance tried to keep a foot in science and medicine, teaching physiology at a community college for nine years and volunteering as a health coach and diabetes educator at a free clinic. When the youngest of her three children started elementary school, UtahAFP.org | 28
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