Making time for motherhood

By Zaina Al-Mohtaseb, MD

The elusive work-life balance is a very common topic of conversation here at Baylor College of Medicine, particularly among my women colleagues and especially the new parents. My first thought is, there’s really no balance because you never feel like you are doing a great job at everything. I think the key is to accept that, understanding that all you can do is your best. However, having family there to support you makes everything go much more smoothly, which I especially learned when becoming a mother.

Right after fellowship, I married my husband, Rami, and launched my practice around the same time. My husband and I chose to delay starting a family so that I could immerse myself in my medical career. I went all-in with my clinical routine — for example, I worked hard on increasing my referring base of physicians, a priority for me — and was active in research and resident education. My thinking was that, once I had kids, I would slow my work down and concentrate on what aspects of medicine I loved the most. In the first 5 years, I said yes to every opportunity to learn what sparked the most passion for me.

CARING FOR CHILD AND CAREER

Our first child, Aya, is 1 year old now. Being a mom is by far the most amazing thing I have ever done — looking into my daughter’s eyes and imagining the joys ahead and seeing her smile when I enter the room put motherhood head and shoulders over all of my prior life experiences. By the same token, parenting is tough: being responsible for a child’s wellbeing is a 24/7 job that entails sleepless nights, second guessing and frazzled nerves.

Essentially, it’s about figuring out how to take care of my child and continue to be involved in my career. I still have a heavy clinical load, and as the associate residency director I am involved in education, and I present at several ophthalmic conferences a year. Plus, research remains high on my list, and, along with cataract surgery, my areas of interest include corneal disease and transplantation, keratoconus and Fuchs’ dystrophy. I am able to do these things because of my husband’s and family’s constant support and help with parenting. The key to work-life balance is to adjust your responsibilities based on where you are in life and understand your current priorities.

I can’t attend every conference or follow up on every research opportunity, so I need to concentrate on what I prefer. My first priority is my child, and, at the same time, I think it is important to be a working mom and set that example for my daughter.

The logistical challenges are numerous, and there is no way I would be even close to successful without my selfless husband. The fact that we share parenting duties affords me the time I need to invest in my career. He, my parents and other family and friends often travel with us so we can bring our daughter to conferences. Having both my daughter and my husband on trips is important, because I don’t want to be away from them and because I want my child to experience this large part of my life. By pitching in, my family and friends allow me to do that.

FAMILY SUPPORT

By having my family close at hand for support, I can concentrate on the parts of my medical career I really love. I accept that I can’t always do everything, and I am quick to outsource what I cannot or do not want to do. Certainly there is expense involved, but my philosophy is that outsourcing this work allows us the freedom to enjoy the time we have with each other and with our daughter.

Of course, there is always guilt about what I might be missing. When my daughter first stood, grasping on to a table, I wasn’t there. But, being able to share that feeling and talk to friends and colleagues who understand because they have gone through it is hugely beneficial. I have learned to ask for help when I need it and be honest when I am struggling. It is human to have these feelings, and it is important we acknowledge them.

Luckily, I picked a field that I love, and I really enjoy going to work every day. I try to pick the things I want to do and cut back on as much of the unnecessary things that I can. Of course, you really cannot do it all, but then again that’s not the point, is it? The key is to do what you love the most.

A career that’s up in the air

By Larry E. Patterson, MD

When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a scuba diver and fly planes. Since flying planes was a whole lot more expensive, I learned to scuba dive. When I finally did learn how to fly, I felt like I had the keys to a time machine. That feeling has not changed, and it’s even helped me make more time for both my career and my personal life.

I have been in private practice now for 32 years. About 10 years ago, I went for an overall aging and health evaluation, at which I learned that my mental functioning was just so-so. Not that I wasn’t smart — but my ability to learn was only average. “You need to learn, read, study or do something different — to challenge and stimulate your brain,” they said. I immediately thought of flying. I always wanted to be a pilot, and now I could afford to learn to be one.

“AS THE CROW FLIES”

I have been able to fly virtually anywhere I want. I live in a town of only about 10,000 people. The largest commercial airport is a 90-minute drive, but my plane is 0.9 miles from the house. I can jump in the plane and be in Atlanta (a 3.5 hour trip by car) in only 55 minutes, go out to eat and fly back the same night. We pilots really do call it “a time machine.”

There is a significant amount of work involved in obtaining a private pilot certification; the effort is akin to going back to college. One has to accumulate at least 40 hours of flight time as well as pass a computerized aeronautical knowledge test, an oral examination and a flight test administered by a Federal Aviation Administration-authorized individual. Once one has certification, recurrent training to prove flying health fitness is required every 2 years.

Being a pilot has been great for my personal life and my business life. In terms of the latter, I have the flexibility to speak on behalf of companies in the industry. I can leave after surgery on a Tuesday afternoon, fly in to give a talk to a group of doctors and come back the same evening. I can fly to the AAO and ASCRS meetings — I’ll fly my own plane into Midway in Chicago or to Lake Front in New Orleans, for example. In fact, even when I fly commercial, I usually fly my airplane to the airport!

FLYING WITH THE FAMILY

To be fortunate enough to fly with my kids — my son Michael, who is in the practice with me, also has the flying bug — and now my grandkids is incredibly special. Recently, Michael’s family and I flew the entire family to Destin, Fla., for the Southern Eye Congress. A 10-hour drive became a 2-hour flight thanks to my time machine.

Being a pilot with a plane provides me with so many options, not to mention a ton of freedom and flexibility. I can live in a rural, out-of-the-way area yet be somewhere else in a matter of minutes for a weekend. Physicians with satellite offices often use small planes, even small jets, to go from one site to another. Some of these people are pilots, and others have their own pilot. I prefer to fly myself. It sure makes your world a lot smaller, and I’ve found it has helped strengthen my mind, as well. While I am flying, there is nothing else that matters — you just kind of let everything else go.

Helping the world see

By Stephanie K. Becker, MD, PC

Being a surgeon is intense — from patient volume to battling EMR systems — so we need to really concentrate on what makes us happy. I think it is crucial for each of us to ask ourselves, “Who am I, and what do I love to do?”

I don’t think that any busy physician really has great work-life balance, but we can all try our best to streamline the things that we don’t have to do, that take up our extra time and that we don’t enjoy.

One of the things that makes me “me” is being a doctor, so I believe strongly in volunteer work. Volunteering puts practicing medicine back into a pure state where it is simply about helping people, without the business aspect. Another thing that makes me tick as a person is travel, so volunteering is a great marriage of these pursuits. I believe in always trying to make the world a better place in some way. I always say to my patients, if everybody in America did one nice thing a day, that’s 320 million good deeds a day.

GETTING “THE TAR KICKED OUT OF ME”

Traveling teaches gratitude. I have had amazingly interesting and intellectually incredible cultural experiences. At the same time, I realize how lucky we are to be Americans. We have access to many luxuries that others don’t, from running water and plumbing to the internet or health care.

Surgeons, by nature, enjoy varied stimulation, and traveling is a great way to vary your stimulus. By doing international mission work, you can visit fascinating places as a guest of the local hosts. That is a very different perspective than going to Orlando for a meeting and staying at the Ritz-Carlton.

Traveling is also an adventure. When I came out of my training, I felt like I had participated in the pre-requisite number of cases, but I never did any of the really hard stuff. “How could I really be prepared?” I thought. I wanted to have that real trial by fire — to learn by doing my work somewhere that would be a challenge and get the tar kicked out of me and that way.

I ultimately decided that southern Nigeria was a good place to start testing myself. If I could do 50 cataracts in a couple of days with no running water and spotty electricity, everything else should be easy.

GIVING BACK TO THE WORLD

We may think we were born to be amazing surgeons, but, in reality, we learn by doing really complex cataract cases and managing complications. Ultimately, my desire to learn more and be better prepared led me to seek out volunteer work. In these situations, exciting, unexpected things happen, such as finding a way to work with “vintage” donated equipment from various surgical eras.

I personally love the intellectual challenge of overcoming obstacles. For me, it counteracts the aspects of running a practice that are more of a grind. What we do in ophthalmology on a daily basis is incredibly exciting. And while I enjoy and love my patients and the human interaction, not every case is an intellectual or therapeutic challenge — and nothing beats curing blindness.

Volunteering can even be a wonderful family experience, an added bonus effect of involving them in my passion for medicine and travel. My daughter has been traveling with me since she was old enough; recently she assisted me as part of her school’s community service requirement. It was an opportunity for a culturally rich mother-daughter bonding experience through mission work and volunteerism.

I try to schedule such trips around my daughter’s school vacations to make sure she can join me. While I can only schedule one a year due to my other work responsibilities, I feel it’s important for both myself and my daughter to make the time for this volunteering.

These trips are wonderful opportunities to learn gratitude. Do you think teenagers in our country, especially the children of American physicians, know that some people on our planet have no toilets? It is so important to understand how lucky we are, even many of the less fortunate among us. In some places, if you don’t have money in a suitcase, you might not get medical treatment. I am a big believer in the power of thank you. OM