>> I have always loved kids.
I've always gravitated towards the youngest person in the room, and I also liked pediatrics
because I want to serve as a role model.
And so being a person that children can look up to was a very powerful role to me.
♪♪
I'm a third-year resident in general pediatrics at CHOP.
I would like to have a career in academic general pediatrics in primary care, and I'd
like to do some clinical care and some global health and other academic work.
I chose CHOP for several reasons.
First of all it's a very large hospital, and it's a freestanding children's hospital.
CHOP has a wide variety of subspecialties, so it allows you to really see the very specialized
and rare diseases, but it's also the community hospital for West Philadelphia.
So we do get to see bread and butter pediatrics as well.
I really liked Philadelphia, and I wanted to be in a kind of a midsized to large city
with a lot of cultural amenities and a very diverse patient population.
What I'm most passionate about in pediatrics is health equity.
I'm really interested in health disparities and why some children have higher morbidity
of certain diseases and some children don't.
And I'm really interested in how we as pediatricians can be advocates for policy change that make
health attainable for every child.
I got involved in some global health work in college, and I went to the Dominican Republic.
And CHOP's program in the DR was actually one of the big reason that I was interested
in CHOP specifically.
What I like about global health here at CHOP is that there is an emphasis on quality over
quantity.
So our two main sites are the Dominican Republic and Botswana, but both of those sites are
really fantastic partnerships that the global health team has worked very hard to cultivate.
When I see little girls of color who look at me like they've never seen a doctor who
looks like me before, it really gives me hope that I can be the person who demonstrates
to them, you can do this.
This is an option for you.
So for somebody like me who's interested in policy and advocacy, there's the CHOP PolicyLab
which is a collaborative of physicians from different specialties as well as non-physicians,
PhD scientists, and they all work on different issues around health policy and advocacy.
And that's a great way to get involved in that type of work.
I am also a poet.
I've continued writing throughout residency. And last January I had my first full-length
poetry collection published.
This is called a Ghazal for Twins, and it's about a birth that I was able to attend on
my N/IICU rotation.
It was a delivery of twins, and when the twins came out it was as if they were carrying on
a conversation that they had been having in the womb for the past nine months.
They were sort of calling back-and-forth to each other.
One brother unfolded from the other where his father's hand was missing.
One mother was opened and drained until her blood ran clear with fish.
Owls flew from the operating table, dropping white paper wishes.
The twins called out, two constellations, stars overflowing from their flesh.
A grass sky turned to fluorescent light and her open mouth,
Her hundred stitches could not stop the dawn in flight.
It came with fingers glistening, bright and born they rocked our eyes.
Who would have known to listen?
They sang their every mirrored bone.
Each was the other's christening.
The tiny gods they are have not yet learned to flinch.
To their perfect fists and the lambent world they wield
We add nothing but our witness.