Medicine’s contribution to my family [PODCAST]

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“My children are embarking on their own lives now. While their paths are not taking them into medicine, I see how medicine has influenced their lives. They are committed to investing in themselves to reach their desired outcomes. They understand the value of dreaming big as they create a life and career they may not envision before. They help others. They enjoy the process through the long hours of study and hard work. From that perspective, it was worth it all.”

Stephanie Wellington is a physician and can be reached at Nurturing MDs.

She shares her story and discusses her KevinMD article, “Medicine’s contribution to my family.”

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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 Stephanie Wellington. She is a neonatologist and physician coach. She wrote the KevinMD article “Medicine’s contribution to my family.” Stephanie, welcome to the show.

Stephanie Wellington: Thanks so much, Kevin, for having me.

Kevin Pho: So we’ll get into your article in a little bit, but first off, can you share your story and journey to where you are today?

Stephanie Wellington: Sure. So like many physicians, I began my journey in medicine with that decision, and why that’s so important is because that decision was made long before I really knew what medicine was all about. I knew I wanted to help people, make a positive impact in the world, and that was the way that I saw that I would be able to accomplish that. So I went through the traditional route: undergrad, medical school, and then on through training. And I didn’t realize the impact that this journey was going to have on me. I think medicine is great at really training us in terms of becoming great clinicians and physicians, but there’s also another side to medicine that is shaping us and changing us that we really aren’t prepared for.

It became ever more glaring for me when I made the decision to go into neonatal medicine. While I loved the babies and the procedures, what I really wasn’t prepared for was doing that prenatal consult with a young family whose baby was on the cusp of viability, and having that conversation with them about what their goals and expectations were, and what we could do in medicine, what the limitations were for a 22-, 23-, 24-week, and how to have the two come together, merge, and coexist. I wasn’t fully prepared for those times in the middle of the night when I had to call a family and let them know that their baby had taken a turn for the worse, and invite them to come and sit at the bedside and just wait and wait to see what was going to happen. Would the baby respond to our medical interventions, or would the baby pass away? And I wasn’t prepared for sitting with the family should the baby not make it.

And while I knew from a medical standpoint all the things to do, there was a toll that it was taking on me, as I had to make sense of and figure out how this other part, this human side of medicine, integrates, so that I could continue to work from one patient to the next patient without really taking time to process it all. I often remember thinking the families had the opportunity to mourn, to grieve, and as clinicians, we just have to move on to the next patient.

And so through the journey, I realized that while the career was progressing, and the outward display of success was showing up, for me, internally, something was just missing. I remember driving on the highway one day and thinking to myself, “This couldn’t be all that there is, because I’m not feeling fulfilled at all in medicine.” And so on that journey, that’s what took me to life coaching, because I was looking for some answer, and I looked to my preceptors and I looked to my mentors. They seemed to be able to move through this process. They offered things like not being too attached, and detached involvement. And while that worked for some period of time, it really wasn’t the answer for me.

And so when I found life coaching and really began to live from those new principles and tenets, it became inspirational, it became motivational and spiritual, and it allowed me to show up in medicine in a very different way. It allowed me to partner with the families. It allowed me to partner with the colleagues, and not feel as if I was losing so much of myself as I was practicing medicine. So that’s how I came to merge coaching and medicine on my journey.

Kevin Pho: How long were you practicing before you discovered that life coaching can address some of the issues that you described?

Stephanie Wellington: I think it was probably about 10 years in. Yeah, probably about 10 years in.

Kevin Pho: And tell me a little about your practice now and how that intersects with life coaching.

Stephanie Wellington: So initially, when I started life coaching, I actually was working with family. So I did the work for myself, and then I realized and recognized that the same principles that I was using would actually benefit many of the families in the unit. We’d have families who were never expecting to have a premature baby, or expecting their baby to come to the NICU. They were expecting to have a normal delivery, go home after 48 hours with their baby, and continue on with their life. They had planned it that way, and the detour into the NICU actually became a dream interrupted.

And so my initial experiences with life coaching really were with coaching moms and dads in the neonatal ICU. I was able to facilitate the parent support group in the unit that I was working in at the time and really gave them tools and strategies to learn how to navigate medicine. One of the biggest things that I used to work with families about is how to incorporate the online information that they’re getting with their actual experiences, because there’s so much information online for anything in medicine, but particularly in terms of the neonatal ICU, and not everything would necessarily apply to you. And so do you go in and jump in and consume all this information and just elevate your level of stress and worry? Or, I would invite them to bring the information back to the bedside. What’s relevant, keep; what’s not relevant, discard, so that it empowers you to get more information and know what questions to ask the clinicians, without sending you over the top in terms of stress and just overwhelm. And so that’s really where it began.

And then, as I began to work with the families, I realized that the families were becoming more proactive and empowered, but then here we are as clinicians, kind of still sitting on the sidelines with more of a paternalistic view in terms of our interactions. And so it kind of segued into how do we work together in more of a partnership way, and so that’s where coaching physicians came in.

The other way coaching physicians came in was, we all have a story. We pick up evidence along the way, based on, even from as early as medical school and residency, our experiences. And I find that, myself included, a lot of physicians, those stories that we’ve picked up either contribute to our success or take away from our success. And it doesn’t mean that we’re not successful in moving forward, but it’s kind of what we internalize. So for me, my story was that I have to work very hard and I’m always tired. And so with every decision that I made, it was like, “Oh, I’m willing to do this, but it was a sacrifice.”

And so using coaching allowed me to begin to shift, and in the article that you mentioned, I mentioned that as well. It allowed me to shift the perspective, so that if I decided to do an extra shift, it would benefit me and my family, versus taking away from time with my family. And so where I am now, in terms of coaching physicians, is really working on how do we learn to partner with medicine in a way that’s life-affirming, in a way that allows us to enjoy the process rather than feeling like it’s an experience of struggle and stress.

Kevin Pho: So let’s talk about that KevinMD article that you wrote. It’s titled “Medicine’s contribution to my family.” Now, for those who didn’t read the article, can you just walk my audience through it and share the story of why you decided to write it?

Stephanie Wellington: So I actually started a series in my Facebook group about love notes to medicine. It was the month of February. We’re in the middle of a pandemic, where there’s so much upheaval in just life in general, in the world in general, and in medicine, that I thought about how there are things about medicine that have really been a blessing to my life, a blessing to my family. And so I started this series, and out of that came this article.

It really talked about the fact that, in the beginning of my career, I remember the first time my son rolled over, I was in the emergency room picking up a baby who was being transported to the hospital where I was working. And the immediate reaction was like, “Oh, I’m missing out on a huge event in his life.” And so it felt like I’m giving to medicine, but it’s taking away from me personally and in terms of my family life. As I moved through the beginning parts of my career, I actually had two children in fellowship, one at the beginning and one at the end of fellowship. There was always that dance I was playing between them or medicine, them or medicine. Luckily, I had family members, the grandparents, who took care of them, so I didn’t have to worry about child care, but it did make me feel like it was always a balancing act.

And so the article is more of a reflection, I guess, but I came to a place where I began to understand that it wasn’t a balancing act, and when I chose medicine, it was still choosing my family. It was still allowing me to provide for my family. It was allowing me to demonstrate the values that they now can pick up and use as they move on into their young adulthood and think about their careers, things like being of service, things like caring for others.

And as I actually even look back over their school careers, there were instances where I could see where they decided on activities and things that demonstrated those same principles. My son actually spent some time doing taekwondo, and now he’s doing another martial art. And when I think about it, he told me the value in that is that it allows him to de-stress. So he’s learning of the importance of well-being as he thinks about his long-term career. He’s going into finance, which can be very stressful, so he’s putting in place already things to really support his life. And I’m going to contribute some of that to medicine. He saw me work very hard. He saw there were times when we put in long hours, but there was also the importance of taking a break, the importance of recovering and restoring. And so I think that what initially, for me, looked like sacrifice, it really was a blending and merging of the two.

Kevin Pho: Wonderful. I love how you frame that. Rather than what medicine takes away from your family, you’re framing that as how medicine contributes to your family and is shaping your children’s lives.

Stephanie Wellington: Yes, and I think it’s real. I think that’s very important. Neither one is going into medicine, and that’s fine. But for me, making that shift, when I look back at it and I look at the journey overall, I say to myself, “I wish I could have made that shift so much earlier, so that I would have appreciated it so much earlier.” But the fact that it came when it came is just the way it is.

Kevin Pho: So actually, at least my next question. If you were to do this all over again and have a family during fellowship training, is there anything that you would have done differently?

Stephanie Wellington: I would probably have still done the fellowship. I think my perspective would have been a little different. I think that I would have sought to achieve a little bit more balance. I did fellowship almost 20-plus years ago, and so the way the fellowship training schedule was designed was a little different than how things are now. I think it’s a little bit easier today to be able to have family and do a lot of other things that you might want to do because of the schedule, whereas my schedule back then was very demanding. But in terms of my timing of having my family and children, I would still do it the same way. I have no regrets about that.

Kevin Pho: So that intersection between medicine and family always has been a little bit of a tension for most physicians. Now, from your own experience, or through the experience of your physician clients, what are some tips that you could offer for those physicians who struggle balancing medicine and family?

Stephanie Wellington: One of the first tips that I learned, as I began to incorporate coaching into medicine, was I needed to have an off switch. Because what I found was, if I had a very stressful day, I would then bring that home, and that would overflow into my personal life and my family life. And so one of the things that I did was I’d pick a point on my commute home. Usually the midway point, in New York, is traveling over a bridge. So I would travel over a certain bridge, and medicine now was shut and my family life was open. When I learned to do that, it gave me that time to decompress from the adrenaline and the stress and the high intensity of being in the unit. And then it began: OK, from this point on, it was about my family life. So whether I changed the music on the radio or just shifted my thoughts to planning the family dinner, I did my best to not have the two merge so much.

One of the other things that worked well for me was when I shifted from being an attending carrying a pager at home to being a hospitalist, because as a hospitalist, when my shift ended, my shift ended. When I worked as an attending, especially when my children were very young, I could be home fielding questions, and sometimes that meant I had to go in, and I had to disrupt whatever we were doing at home in order to go into the hospital. So really creating clearer guidelines, and it didn’t always work, but making the effort to create clear guidelines really benefited me in terms of finding some balance between the two.

I tend to work more nights and weekends, so I was able to be the at-home mom, so I could participate in the school activities, which was really great. And the energy and the joy that I got from that, when I transitioned over to work, those were the feelings and memories that I could keep with me, so that when I was doing a 24-hour shift and it was stressful, it didn’t just totally have me drained and bottomed out, because I found some balance between the two.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Stephanie Wellington. She’s a neonatologist and physician coach. She wrote the KevinMD article “Medicine’s contribution to my family.” Stephanie, I talk to a lot of physicians who are interested in becoming coaches as well, for similar reasons to what you described. If those physicians are interested in making such a transition, what are some tips that you could recommend to them?

Stephanie Wellington: Two things. One thing is that the most important transition that I made was incorporating the practices of life coaching into my life, so that it became not something that I’m just teaching others about, but something that I was living. And that really allowed me to see the benefit and to understand its true value, so that as I coach other physicians, I’m able to teach from example and not just from theory.

And then the other piece is that there’s also building out the coaching practice, and that takes a different skill set. And like you said, it is somewhat time-consuming. So understanding that there will be that period of time when you’re dancing between the two, and maybe even overcommitting some of your time at times to be able to do, if you’re still, like for me, I’m still in clinical practice and doing the coaching as well.

Kevin Pho: And my final question: What’s your take-home message that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience?

Stephanie Wellington: My take-home message is, you know, what I think about, my take-home message is going to be that I think medicine is still a great career. I champion that practicing physician, the clinician. That’s who I love to work with: the person who is still in practice at the bedside and wants support. And so my take-home message is that I think medicine is still a really great career, and I think that with the right tools and strategies and support, we can continue to live through and move through this career and do well in it.

I don’t think it’s something that, you know, we see a lot of people talking about exiting medicine, and I don’t think that being a clinician is something that we have to exit. I think it’s the opportunity for us to grow personally, spiritually, and emotionally, so that we continue to benefit from that initial decision of being a doctor.

Kevin Pho: Stephanie, thank you so much for sharing your time and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.

Stephanie Wellington: You’re welcome. Thanks so much for having me.

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