How a physician finds laughter during this dark time [PODCAST]

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“With my passion for writing and connecting digitally with others in health care and the general public, this ‘downtime’ has allowed for an expansion of these interests. I’ve begun recording on my podcast, a multidisciplinary conversation between women who thrive in fields that traditionally they haven’t thought to be able to (or shouldn’t). I’ve spent more time than I ever could have imagined with my son – a wonderful by-product of the distancing measures. And I’ve found that I love to make my friends – and even strangers – find their laughter during this dark time.

My family and friends will often attest to this, how I get joy from getting a smile, a smirk, or even a head shake (I can see you trying not to laugh under there though). As I’ve grown as a clinician, I’ve become more comfortable with infusing humor – appropriately – with my patients, and I know that a shared laugh even as they are going through a time that isn’t the best in their lives is appreciated.”

Nancy Yen Shipley is an orthopedic surgeon and can be reached at her self-titled site, NancyMD, and on Twitter @_nancymd and Instagram @_nancymd.

She shares her story and discusses her KevinMD article, “How a physician finds laughter during this dark time.” We also discuss her #1 tip for women physicians interested in traditionally male-dominated fields, and her new podcast, The 6% with NancyMD.

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Hosted by Kevin Pho, MD, The Podcast by KevinMD shares the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from.

Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show, where we share the stories of the many who intersect with our health care system but are rarely heard from. My name is Kevin Pho, founder and editor of KevinMD. Today on the show, we have Nancy Yen Shipley. She’s an orthopedic surgeon. She’s a blogger, she’s a writer, she’s a speaker, and she’s a podcaster, and almost as important as all of that, she is a KevinMD contributor. Her most recent article is “How a physician finds laughter during this dark time.” Nancy, welcome to the show.

Nancy Yen Shipley: Hi, thank you, Kevin, so much for having me on.

Kevin Pho: So we’re going to get into your article in a bit, but I was wondering if you could share your story and your journey to where you are today.

Nancy Yen Shipley: So I’m a physician. I’m an orthopedic surgeon, as you mentioned, and I took a really nontraditional route. I came in as an older medical student. I went into college at UCLA thinking, “Hey, I’m going to be pre-med.” I was going to go into medical school for completely the wrong reasons. I’m Asian American, and so it’s kind of those Asian expectations; the parents are like, “You’re going to be a doctor, or you’re going to be an engineer.” And I would have been the first physician in my family. And so I said, “Well, I don’t know. I guess that’s what my major ought to be.”

And I got rapidly weeded out of the pre-med curriculum. I walked into my first biology class, and there were 500 people in there. Everyone wanted to be pre-med, and it just did not work. And so I ended up a psych major. It was really good. I had a great time in college, and I don’t have any regrets, but I came out with a 2.99999, which rounds up to a 3 in my mind, but not good enough for medical school.

I had actually given up that idea because it wasn’t my idea. And it wasn’t until years later. I had a couple of other careers. I worked in sales and marketing in the snowboarding industry. I worked for a family member, and I ran conferences for them and ran a small business, and I realized I needed to build something for myself. And I had some good interactions with some physicians, and I thought, “Hmm, you know, actually, I think I do want to go into medicine.” And so I came back around and took all these post-bacc classes as I was working full time. I was so much more serious about it the second time around, and then I got into medical school. I was almost 30, and I became an orthopedic surgeon.

And now, over the last two or three years or so, I started to do a lot more blogging and writing. I kind of discovered my voice and realized that it was important, as a woman and as a person of color, to have my voice out there, so that younger people who are thinking about going into medicine, or just trying to find the best version of themselves, have somebody out there to be inspired by. And so that’s how I got more into the online space, got more into speaking, and eventually launched my podcast.

Kevin Pho: Fantastic. And we are talking the second week of June, and by the time listeners hear this, your podcast would have already launched. So tell me about your podcast.

Nancy Yen Shipley: So my podcast is called The 6 Percent with NancyMD. The title is inspired by the percentage of women within orthopedics, and fortunately in training, that number is rising, but maybe not fast enough.

I realized, as I was walking through the airport a couple of years ago and saw a female commercial pilot, I was like, “Gosh, you know, you never see any women.” And I wondered if she had a lot of the same experiences that I did choosing this career: people detracting you from going into it, saying, “You know, girls don’t become orthopedic surgeons. You’re not going to be strong enough. How are you going to hold that leg? Are you going to hold that mallet?” And I realized that there are probably a lot of other careers out there where women are tried to be swayed away from the career because there just aren’t a lot of women in there.

So I came up with this idea to interview women who are in male-dominated fields, all fields, beyond just orthopedics, beyond just medicine. Of course, I have to include some of my medicine sisters in the podcast, but I have talked to women who are in business and who are in tech. I talked to a woman who is the first Major League Baseball coach. And I have a bunch of other people in the lineup for my planned season two, whom I’ve already talked to, who spanned a number of different careers that are fascinating. I’ve learned so much talking to them myself. It’s just been a joy.

Kevin Pho: So what’s your number one tip for female physicians who are interested in going into male-dominated fields?

Nancy Yen Shipley: I think my number one tip is to have a thick skin and know which battles to fight, and that’s going to be the key. It’s the hard work, and there is the putting your head down and working, but it’s not just that. You know, there’s so much more. There are so many more nuances to getting to where you want to be as a woman in a male-dominated field. If it was just hard work alone, then we would see so much more equity at the top of these fields, but there are obviously different challenges and different societal expectations that will attempt to hold you back.

And so I think it’s beyond just the hard work: just knowing what to let roll off, knowing what is unintentional and what is just some of that unconscious bias that we encounter, and knowing to have the right touch for educating those around you that what you’re saying and what you’re proposing is not OK, without beating everybody up about it. So there are some people who deserve to be beaten up, verbally, I mean, not physically. But, you know, I think that sometimes you have to just know when to be forceful about calling people out and when to have a little bit more subtlety with it, and when to let certain things go, because you’ve got to keep your eye on the prize and remember the big picture here.

Kevin Pho: Well, thank you for sharing that, and I’ll be sure to listen to your podcast.

Nancy Yen Shipley: Thank you.

Kevin Pho: So you wrote the KevinMD article “How a physician finds laughter during this dark time.” And we are currently undergoing twin public health crises with the pandemic and the protests against systemic racism and police brutality. So tell me, how does a physician find laughter during these dark times?

Nancy Yen Shipley: Well, you know, I have been thinking about humor and laughter a lot, even outside of the lens of these public health crises, but I really began to put my thoughts together more when COVID hit. As it is, I think that we’re in such a serious profession, and we’re talking about, for me, making incisions and all the surgical complications that could potentially happen, that it’s hard to think about where humor comes in, in our interaction with our patients, for one. And that’s something that I have learned to develop over the years as a physician, in that sometimes laughing together, as well as sometimes crying together, with your patient really builds that rapport. And I think, just naturally, I enjoy humor. That’s part of my personality. And so I just try to let that come out in my interactions with my patients.

And as COVID hit, I think, like everybody, I was just, everybody sort of was down in the dumps about the uncertainty and the fear of getting sick. And as physicians, we’re fearful for our patients and the system, and how overwhelmed our systems would be, and the economic implications, both within our own local spheres and more nationally and globally. So there was a lot of pressure, a lot of fear there. And I think with everybody sheltering at home, we were all starting to feel a little bit stir-crazy. And I found that one of my ways to cope with that was to turn to humor.

And so, you know, I think that it’s OK to find humor. It’s OK to laugh even when the world seems to be, you know, burning down around you in a figurative sense. And it’s needed. I think with our 24/7 news cycle and the constant barrage of information that one can take in, it really can be overwhelming, and it can really weigh you down. And while we don’t want to take away from the seriousness of that, we also need to feed our own souls, and sometimes that laughter is needed.

So, you know, I always worried a little bit during this time when I was not doing any cases. I was working on my podcast, but all my elective cases went away. I kind of discovered TikTok, and you and I are in the generation where, you know, maybe we’re not the first ones to embrace TikTok. But I got on there, and I just had to let some of my funny out, and I made a couple of funny videos. I wrestled with whether they should even be public, but I was like, “You know what? This is good, clean fun.” It encapsulates some of the feelings and the fears that all of us are going through. And it felt good to put it out there, and it felt good to make people laugh. And so that was, you know, part of my therapy in trying to get through this, and it still is.

Kevin Pho: Fantastic. And I’ve seen some of those videos on TikTok, and I’ve seen some of your whimsical pictures on Instagram and Facebook as well. And it really shows that human side of physicians. I think that’s tremendously important.

Nancy Yen Shipley: Yeah, it also shows just how ridiculous I am sometimes.

Kevin Pho: So is there something that you know now that you wish you knew before the pandemic started?

Nancy Yen Shipley: I think that, you know, even when things are happening around you in the world or in your career or in whatever sphere you’re in, it’s important not to let go of your values, and it’s important not to let go of the things that you’re passionate about. And even if you have to hit pause or you have to pivot, that doesn’t mean you just drop it.

And, you know, in my personal experience, it was this dream of talking to these amazing women for this podcast. And for about a week or two, I was like, “Oh, you know, I can’t do this. I’m not going to be able to do this.” But it was funny. I realized that I lost my elective surgeries temporarily, for a period of time, but I also learned, as I started to reach out to people, that their lives were kind of on pause too. I had people who I normally wouldn’t be able to talk to, because they were too busy, say, “Well, you know, my schedule’s kind of cleared. I have plenty of time. When do you want to talk? You want to talk tomorrow?” And so I think it’s just hanging on to your passions and not letting them go, even if you have to modify or pause them temporarily.

Kevin Pho: Wonderful. That’s a wonderful story and wonderful insight. On the show, we’re talking to Nancy Yen Shipley. She is an orthopedic surgeon, and she is starting a new podcast, The 6 Percent. So Nancy, my final question: What is your take-home message for the KevinMD audience?

Nancy Yen Shipley: I’m going to read a quote, which I really should probably just write on my bathroom mirror, and I love this because I suffer from fear of taking a big leap forward and into the unknown. So this is a quote from JFK: “There are risks and cost to action, but they are far less than the long-range risks of comfortable inaction.”

And I love that because a lot of times our fear holds us back, and we are, you know, maybe we’re complacent and we’re comfortable with where we are, but there’s that nagging sensation that we could do more. We could do something different. And so I love that quote for that reason. I have to remind myself of that all the time when I’m afraid to move forward from where I am. I think about, well, what are the costs if I do nothing? I’ll just still be here, standing in the same little circle. So that’s my little bit of take-home advice.

Kevin Pho: Well, thank you so much for your wisdom. Nancy Yen Shipley is an orthopedic surgeon. She wrote a KevinMD article, “How a physician finds laughter during this dark time.” Nancy, how can people find you?

Nancy Yen Shipley: So I am at www.nancymd.com, and my handle on both Instagram and on Twitter is @_nancymd. I kind of stole the NancyMD thing from KevinMD. I apologize for that, but it kind of has a good roll to it.

Kevin Pho: Fantastic, Nancy. Good luck with everything.

Nancy Yen Shipley: Thank you.

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