I started HERstory in Medicine because I wanted to know what medicine actually costs a woman — not the tuition, but the real price. The women I have sat down with so far: a pathologist, an anesthesiologist, a physician assistant, an occupational therapist, an oncology nurse, a dentist. I keep asking because their answers surprise me every time — and because I wasn't the only one who needed to hear them. I needed their stories to know what I would face. Now I think every woman on this path needs them too — to keep going.
High school senior headed into clinical practice. I founded and host HERstory in Medicine — honest conversations with women who built careers in healthcare. New episodes dropping regularly.
Every guest, in her own words. Click any quote to hear it.
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Undergrad + Prereqs
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Step 2
Patient-Care Hours
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Destination
In Practice
HERstory in Medicine
What women in medicine are telling us.
Across every conversation I've recorded, honest findings keep emerging — things no one had told me before I asked. These are the ones that stayed with me longest.
Every woman I have interviewed described some version of not being sure she belonged.
Every single one of them. If you are feeling that right now, it is not a signal about you — it is the most common experience in this profession.
01
Imposter syndrome never fully goes away
Every single guest — physician, NP, PA, cardiologist — described questioning whether she belonged. The difference wasn't the absence of doubt. It was what they did with it.
"I'm not here to prove myself to my colleagues. I'm here to serve patients." — Dr. Shilpa Saxena
02
Listening is the skill nobody formally teaches
It appeared in every transcript, unprompted. When asked if listening is taught in medical school, Dr. Patel-Pannullo said: "I don't think so. It's a skill you develop over time."
"It's not about saying the right thing. It's about listening." — Christina Battish, NP
03
Passion follows competence — not the other way around
Dr. Deepika Thacker said something no other guest said directly — and it challenges the most common advice given to young people considering medicine.
"Make sure you're really good — the passion will follow." — Dr. Deepika Thacker
A private community for women in medicine — and the women who want to become them. Peer advice, real answers, and a space for the conversations medicine doesn't make room for.
I started this podcast because I wanted to know what medicine actually costs a woman — not the tuition, but the real price. Every conversation deepens the question. The answers keep surprising me.
Each episode is a real conversation — unscripted, unhurried, and honest about what it actually takes to build a life in medicine as a woman.
She walked into a field hospital where 40% of patients were dying. When she left, the death rate was 2%. She did it with data, sanitation, and sheer will — before germ theory was even accepted.
Elizabeth Blackwell
1821 – 1910
First Female Doctor in the United States
Medical schools admitted her as a joke. She graduated first in her class. Then she opened a hospital for the poor and a medical college for women — because the door that was opened as a prank became one she refused to close behind her.
Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler
1831 – 1895
First Black Woman to Earn a Medical Degree in the U.S.
She earned her medical degree in 1864, then walked into post-Civil War Richmond to care for freed slaves who had no one else. Pharmacists refused to fill her prescriptions. She kept going.
Anandibai Joshi
1865 – 1887
First Indian Woman to Earn a Western Medical Degree
Married at 9. Lost her baby at 14 because no doctor would treat a woman. Crossed the ocean alone at 19 to earn her medical degree. She died of tuberculosis at 21 — one year after graduating — before she could return home to practice.
Dr. Mary Edwards Walker
1832 – 1919
Only Woman to Receive the Congressional Medal of Honor
She served as a Civil War surgeon, was captured as a prisoner of war, and received the Medal of Honor. When the Army revoked it in 1917 and demanded it back, she refused — and wore it every day until she died.
Hover to learn their story
All Episodes
Every Conversation. Real Women.
Each conversation is unscripted and unhurried. I publish new episodes regularly — subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts so you never miss one.
15
Dentistry · Practice Owner · Newest Episode
Dr. Lajja Patel
“Confidence doesn’t necessarily come from knowing everything. It comes from knowing that you have the education, the experience to be able to figure it out.”
Dr. Lajja Patel owns South Avenue Dental in New Jersey — a practice she opened from scratch, with zero patients, and which now has a second dentist working alongside her. A lot of this conversation is about the part nobody trains you for: being a good clinician and being a good business owner ask completely different things of you. She talks about patients who arrive frightened because of something that happened to them before, about what the mouth tells you about the rest of the body, and about how hard it was to hand her own practice to her team — which turned out to be the thing that made them grow.
Payal Patel has been an occupational therapist for more than two decades, and she can name the moment it started. She was fifteen when her grandfather had a massive stroke, and she was beside him through a recovery nobody expected — watching the therapists give him his independence back. She is honest about how long it took to feel entitled to speak in a hospital, and about the thing that changed it, which was deciding that what she knew was what she could stand on. She also talks about moving into pediatrics only after her own daughter was born premature, and about the lymphedema patient who arrived in an electric scooter and walked out of the door.
“You start to get a little more comfortable with that discomfort.”
Dr. Komal Naik has spent two decades in neurology and went from being mentored inside her department to chairing it. I asked her the question I most wanted a real number for — how long until you actually feel like you know what you are doing — and she gave me one. Her definition of a mentor is far wider than mine was, her first job at fourteen was dissecting cow’s eyes at a science museum rather than working at the mall, and she is clear that humility in medicine is not a nice quality to have but a requirement: if you do not know what you do not know, that is a problem.
Oncology Nursing · ChristianaCare Graham Cancer Center
Nora Katurakes, MSN, RN, OCN
“I just can’t imagine that I would stay here more than five years.”
That is what Nora Katurakes thought on her first day — she had come from home care, she sat down in the new office, and she shook her head and thought: what did I do. She has now been there for the better part of three decades. She leads cancer prevention and community outreach at the Graham Cancer Center, and she is direct about why the work on colorectal cancer outcomes across Delaware moved the numbers: the state collaborated, and the message travelled through people the community already trusted rather than through the hospital. She also talks about pivoting the whole programme onto iPads and Zoom during the pandemic, about how many careers sit inside the word nursing, and about the test she uses for whether a change of direction is worth making.
"I didn’t need to wait for anybody’s validation. I can be confident and kind at the same time."
Nirja is a certified registered nurse anesthetist — the first CRNA I’ve had on the show. For a long time hers was the exact career I thought I was working toward, which is part of why this conversation mattered so much to me. She spent years in critical care before anesthesia, and she is direct about what nobody warns you: twenty years in, patients still ask whether she is old enough to be the one putting them to sleep. She also started in pharmacy school, was terrified when that turned out to be wrong, and wants younger women to know it worked out better than she expected.
"No working mom ever gets over the guilt of being a working mom, no matter how much support you have."
Dr. Fan has been delivering babies for almost thirty years and still calls it her favorite part of the job. She told me her biggest challenge was never the medicine — it was her own expectations of herself. We talked about why the guilt never fully lifts, why women often give each other less grace than they give anyone else, and why she does not think women’s health is taken as seriously as heart disease.
"The old adage that we're committed to this calling and have to give everything — that's a way to trap you."
Dr. Patel is a pathologist and hematopathologist, and the first pathologist I’ve had on the show — she calls her field the background glue that holds healthcare together. She wanted to be an oncologist until she noticed she was coming home too socially exhausted to talk to her own friends, and she built her entire career around what that told her. She is also the first guest to say outright that the idea you must give medicine everything is a trap somebody built.
"My first shift was getting the kids ready for school. My job at work was my second shift. And my third shift started when I picked them up."
Archna is an occupational therapist in acute care at Novant Huntersville Hospital — the first OT I’ve had on the show, and the first guest to tell me plainly about a door that closed. She applied for a leadership role and watched it go to a male colleague with more years than her, and she walked me through what she did next. She also gave me the most honest picture of working motherhood I’ve heard yet: three shifts a day, and the only one she would change is the one she never gave herself.
"I get just a few moments to gain a patient's trust. The more I practice, the more that part of it brings me joy."
Dr. Rattan is an anesthesiologist — the closest conversation I've had yet to the world I'm working toward. She told me what it means to build trust with a patient in just a few minutes, how getting comfortable with your skills eventually frees you to focus on the person in front of you, and what balance actually looks like after 15 years of figuring it out.
"The focus on finding your passion is a little bit artificial. Make sure you’re really good — the passion will follow."
Dr. Thacker gave me the most contrarian answer I've heard in this whole series. She's a pediatric cardiologist at Nemours right here in Delaware — and she challenged the advice I've been given my whole life about following your passion. What she offered instead was more honest and more useful.
"I had trouble getting through my board exams. But I didn’t give up, I kept going. And looking back — nobody cares, nobody asks, nobody remembers."
Dr. Chopra has four kids, built a practice with six physicians and more than 50 employees, and struggled for years to get through her board exams. Her story is one of the most practically useful conversations I've had — because she didn't just tell me what went right. She told me everything that went wrong and what she did anyway.
"If I just stopped to listen to the patient, I probably would have been in a different direction. Your brain takes these shortcuts — and they can lead you away from the true diagnosis."
This is the listening episode. Dr. Patel-Pannullo made the most direct case I've heard for why listening — not diagnosis — is the core clinical skill. When I asked if medical school teaches it, she said: I don't think so. It's something you develop over time. I've been thinking about that ever since.
"I don’t think of self-doubt as necessarily a bad thing. It’s you questioning yourself — it’s an opportunity to grow."
Minal chose the PA path on purpose — for balance, for flexibility, for a life that wasn't only medicine. And then she fell in love with a specialty she never planned on. The way she reframed self-doubt in this conversation is something I think about constantly.
"Nobody expected this from me. But I did it — completely on my own terms."
Christina went back to school for her NP a year into her nursing career — working full time, nights and weekends, entirely on her own. Nobody expected it from her. She did it anyway. This conversation is about doing the hard thing on your own timeline, not the one everyone else laid out for you.
Family Medicine · Integrative Medicine · Pilot Episode
Dr. Shilpa Saxena
"I just have to make friends with this imposter syndrome. When it shows up, I’m like — okay, I know what you’re trying to do."
The episode that started everything. Dr. Saxena built a practice with a gym, a teaching kitchen, and yoga teachers — because the medicine she learned didn't match the medicine she believed in. I started this podcast because of conversations like this one.
A private community for women in medicine — and the women who want to become them.
Ask real questions. Find real answers. Get support from people who understand what this career actually costs — not just professionally, but personally.
→Peer advice from women who've navigated the same challenges
→Direct access to HERstory podcast guests as founding advisors
→A space for the conversations medicine doesn't make room for
What Comes Next
This is the next chapter, not a finished one. Follow the podcast and you will hear when it opens.
Not Open Yet
An honest work in progress.
How This Works
I find guests one at a time — through family, through people my guests introduce me to, and through cold emails to women whose work I have read about. Nobody is paid and nobody sees the questions in advance.
Before each conversation I read everything I can find about the specialty, so the questions are specific to her and not a script I reuse. We record remotely for as long as it takes — some run seventeen minutes, some run closer to forty. I edit lightly and publish to Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Buzzsprout.
Afterwards I go back through the full transcript looking for what this guest said that nobody before her had. That is where the Lessons come from — not from my opinions, but from what the same obstacles look like across very different careers.
Are you a woman in medicine? I'm actively booking guests — physicians, PAs, nurses, NPs, CRNAs, therapists, researchers, and healthcare leaders at any stage. I record new conversations continuously — I’m building the library I wish had existed when I started looking. Each episode is an honest, unhurried recorded conversation.
I've known for a while that I want to spend my career in healthcare — not watching from the side, but in the room, in the decision, at the bedside.
For most of this project I thought that meant nursing: a direct-admit BSN, an RN license, then anesthesia. My plan now is to become a physician assistant. The reason is sitting in the episodes. Nora Katurakes took a master’s in nursing into prevention and outreach instead of advanced practice, and can name six careers inside that one credential. Payal Patel chose occupational therapy over medical school and can tell you exactly why. Dr. Sapna Patel handed me a method for noticing when something is not the right fit, and she is clear that catching it is a skill rather than a failure. I have asked every one of these women how she chose. It would have been strange to ignore what they told me.
I started HERstory in Medicine because I had questions I couldn't find answers to in a textbook. What does it actually cost a woman to build a career in medicine? What do they wish they'd known? What do they still struggle with, even twenty years in? Every conversation teaches me something I didn't expect. And I'm still asking.
I've been preparing for the clinical path seriously — through the Apollo Program, Georgetown University's Medical Academy, college-level Anatomy & Physiology as a junior, and certifications in Basic Life Support and Human Research Protection through the NIH. The podcast is where the human side lives. Both matter to me equally.
What Drives Me
The values behind the work.
👂
Listening
Every woman I have interviewed — without being asked — has named listening as the most important clinical skill they have. I'm practicing it every time I sit across from a guest and stay quiet long enough for them to say something real.
🔬
Rigor
AP Biology, AP Statistics, college-level Anatomy & Physiology, NIH research certification. Advanced practice nursing demands scientific precision — pharmacology, pathophysiology, clinical reasoning. I take the academic foundation seriously because patient safety depends on it.
🌿
Continuity
My Gujarati heritage taught me that identity is carried in small, consistent actions — not announced. The same is true in nursing. Bedside manner isn't performed. It's practiced until it becomes instinct. HERstory is how I practice showing up for other people's stories.
The Journey So Far
Building the foundation.
🏕️
Summer 2024
Health & Biomedical Sciences Camp
Lebanon Valley College — molecular biology, neuroscience, immunology, pharmacology
🏥
Summer 2025
Georgetown University Medical Academy
Sutures, intubation, ultrasound, CPR, organ lab — faculty-led clinical simulation
🎙️
2025 — Present
Founded HERstory in Medicine
A growing library of honest conversations with women in healthcare — on Spotify & Apple Podcasts
🔬
2025–2026
Apollo Clinical Shadowing Program
Active participant — fall, spring, and summer shadowing cycles with physician mentors
📚
2025–2026
DTCC Anatomy & Physiology — College Credit
Dual-enrollment college course completed as a junior — 90+ across all marking periods
🎓
Fall 2027
College Applications
Programs with a pre-PA or early-assurance physician assistant track
How I Work
The candor is the whole thing.
None of my guests had to answer the harder questions. They did anyway, on the record, knowing a high school student would publish it. Everything on this site comes from those recorded conversations — and every quote is checked word for word against what was actually said before it goes anywhere near a page.
I would rather leave a good line out than put words in someone’s mouth. These women trusted me with their stories. Getting them right is the least I owe them.
Drawn From Every Conversation
What We’ve Learned.
Every woman I have interviewed hit walls. None of them hit the same wall in the same way, and none of them got around it the same way either. This page is what they did.
It is grouped by where you are, not by theme, so you can find yourself quickly. Start where you are — then keep reading forward.
Before You Start Reading
You are not the only one who feels this way.
Every woman I have interviewed described some version of not being sure she belonged. Every single one — physicians, a physician assistant, a nurse practitioner, occupational therapists, a nurse anesthetist, an oncology nurse, a dentist. Women with decades behind them, at the top of their fields.
So if you are feeling it right now, it is not a signal about you. It is the most common experience in this profession, and not one of these women let it stop her. That is not encouragement. It is what they told me.
A Note About The Women Here
Vulnerability is bravery!
None of them had to say any of this. They were asked hard questions and they answered honestly, on the record, knowing I would publish it — the exam she struggled with, the role she did not get, the morning someone shouted at her on her first day in an operating room.
Those specifics are the entire reason this page is worth anything to you. A careful, general answer would have been safer for every one of them and useful to nobody. That candor is the gift, and I do not take it lightly.
Where are you right now?
Four stages, in the order they arrive. Open the one you are living in.
“My family already decided this for me.”
Many of my guests are Indian-American. None of them called it forced. None called it entirely her own idea either. What separates them is the distance between what was suggested and what was chosen — and every one of them still had to do the choosing.
Dr. Neeru Chopra
Was told she would be a doctor before she could remember. When she hit trouble with her board exams she was the one who refused to stop — she says she had realized by then that it was her own passion. The refusal is what made the path hers.
Archna Patel, OT
Her father researched stable careers for his four children, pre-internet, by asking around. She found occupational therapy in the 10th grade, through a distant relative. Real steering, no ultimatum — and the fit turned out to be real too.
Dr. Sapna Patel
Grew up with a physician father and no mandate at all. What she inherited was his love of understanding the human body, not an obligation to practice medicine. She points out this is not how it goes in many households.
Dr. Komal Naik, DO
First generation, and told young that the family wanted one doctor in it — in her own words, no pressure, but you’re it. She does not describe that as a restriction. Her first job at fourteen was at a science museum dissecting cow’s eyes rather than behind a counter at the mall, and she says the path was set in motion early enough that she never felt she needed the other options.
Payal Patel, OT
Her mother’s side is full of physicians, so the question she got was not why medicine but why not further — why didn’t you just go to medical school. What settled it was something she noticed as a teenager inside those same houses: the parents were never home. She picked the version of the work she could finish and then walk away from at the end of the day.
“Everyone out there is carrying something. They’re not carrying your story — they have their own.”
“I don’t know what I’m passionate about yet.”
This is the question I get asked most by people my age, and the answers I have been given cut against almost everything we are normally told about finding your passion.
Dr. Deepika Thacker
Says the focus on finding your passion is a little bit artificial — you end up passionate about whatever you are really good at. Her condition: you have to be willing to put in years of hard work first.
Dr. Sapna Patel
Says the mold is the problem, not you. The idea that type-A people become surgeons and fun personalities become pediatricians is wrong — she has met every personality type in medicine, and there is a place for each one. Don’t fit yourself into somebody else’s shape.
Dr. Nancy Fan
Knew at nine that she wanted to be a doctor and still spent a summer working in a law firm in college to check. She also did not major in a science — her degree was the history and sociology of science, with a minor in health economics. That minor is the reason she works on health policy today.
“There really is a spot for everybody’s personality in medicine. You don’t have to fit into this cookie-cutter mold.”
“What if I choose the wrong thing?”
More than one guest has described catching a wrong fit and correcting it — in medical school, in pharmacy school, on a single four-week rotation, and in one case out of direct clinical work altogether. None of them treated the correction as a failure. Dr. Sapna Patel gave me a method for noticing, and Nora Katurakes gave me the test for whether a change is worth making at all.
Dr. Sapna Patel
She wanted oncology, and spent much of medical school pursuing it. Then she noticed she was coming home too socially exhausted to talk to her own friends — and she is a social person. So she moved into pathology: the science of oncology, without the daily social cost.
Dr. Sapna Patel her method
She kept a diary of the days she did not feel right and why, then reread it later looking for patterns. One bad day is a bad day. The same feeling appearing over and over is information. As she put it, she let the paper carry the weight instead of her body.
Nirja Patel, CRNA
Started in pharmacy school. When she realized it was the wrong path she was terrified and had no idea where to go next — and she says it worked out better than she ever expected it to.
Dr. Nancy Fan
Went into medical school planning to be a pediatrician, then realized dealing with the parents was not her strength. A four-week rotation in obstetrics, taken outside her own state, settled it.
Dr. Lajja Patel
Points out that the question assumes one door. Dentistry alone contains general practice, orthodontics, pediatric dentistry, surgery, research and teaching — so her advice is to shadow several of them, because you will meet completely different personalities and find out which one you actually connect with.
Nora Katurakes, MSN, RN, OCN
Made the largest change of anyone here. She left direct clinical nursing for prevention and outreach, and her advice for anybody sitting in that decision is to start with your current leader rather than with a resignation — name what you are good at and ask which parts of it transfer.
Nora Katurakes, MSN, RN, OCN her test
Ask what you are taking with you, and then ask what you have no idea about yet. If you cannot answer the second one, you are not moving forward. You are changing jobs.
“Honor what your body and your mind are trying to tell you. That feeling is telling you something about what isn’t right for you in your future career.”
“I think this degree only leads to one job.”
Four guests hold four different qualifications, and not one of them is doing the job that qualification is assumed to lead to. This is the hurdle I have thought about the most myself.
Nora Katurakes, MSN, RN, OCN
Took a master’s in nursing and did not become a nurse practitioner with it — she went clinical nurse specialist, then system leadership, then running a prevention and outreach programme. She can also list the routes most students are never shown: home care, clinical trials and research, case management, patient navigation, teaching, school nursing.
Dr. Komal Naik, DO
A medical degree that led to a department as well as to a clinic. She chairs the neuroscience department and works with neurosurgeons and spine surgeons, and describes falling into the leadership half of the job rather than planning it.
Dr. Lajja Patel
Says the thing people least appreciate about dentistry is how much freedom it gives you — clinician, researcher, teacher, business owner. She built a practice, and is clear that she did not fully understand that versatility when she was deciding.
Payal Patel, OT
One qualification, used in a skilled nursing unit, a trauma hospital, an outpatient clinic, people’s homes, over telehealth, in pediatrics, and in an administrative role running an orthopedic programme. Her advice is not to specialise early, because you have not yet seen enough to know.
“Where you find your joy and your passion as a young nurse is where you need to be.”
That was the choosing. Arriving turned out to be a different problem entirely.
“I don’t belong here.”
Every single guest, without exception, described this. It shows up first in school, and I want to be honest about what comes later: it does not end here. You will see this same hurdle again in Stage Four, decades later, because that is what the women told me.
Dr. Shilpa Saxena
Calls the beginning of medical school an identity slap in the face. That is where hers started, and it started heavily.
Dr. Neeru Rattan
The most direct answer anyone gave me. Undergrad GPA, the MCAT, medical school, clinical rotations, residency — almost every step along the way, in her words, if she is being honest.
Dr. Sapna Patel
Carries a line from a mentor who talked her down before a board exam she was sure she would fail. She still says it to herself before signing out a difficult cancer diagnosis.
Nirja Patel, CRNA
Her first six months as a nurse she cried constantly, terrified she would kill somebody. Her rule now: temporary uncertainty is not permanent, and it does not mean you are incapable of doing the thing.
Dr. Lajja Patel
Names the exact shape it takes at the start: you are young, you are trying to prove yourself to patients and colleagues at the same time, and as a woman there is an added pressure to prove you belong at all. What released it was uncoupling confidence from knowing everything.
Payal Patel, OT
Says that the moment you show a lack of confidence you get pushed to the back of the line — and she is candid that she is not a tall, big presence in a room, so for a while she went unseen. What changed was deciding that what she knew was the thing she could stand on.
Nora Katurakes, MSN, RN, OCN
Hers arrived years in, on a first day. She had moved out of direct clinical nursing into outreach, and she describes shaking her head in the new office and thinking this was not going to work for her — because the skills that had made her good at the last job were suddenly not the ones this one needed.
“You have to start learning how to believe in your preparation and not believe in your fears.”
“They think I’m too young to know what I’m doing.”
This one is not in your head and it is not something you outgrow on schedule. Nirja Patel still gets it twenty years in — and her answer is not to wait for people to come around.
Nirja Patel, CRNA
Patients ask her, out loud, whether she is really the one who will be putting them to sleep. She reminds them she has been doing this for twenty years. What changed was not the question — it was that she stopped waiting for anyone’s validation before speaking up, and she is clear that confidence and kindness are not opposites.
Nirja Patel, CRNA the part she is honest about
She says a last name like Patel actually helps her in American medicine, because patients recognize it. Her point is that a woman of color without that recognition has to face the same doubt with less to lean on.
“It comes down to being able to advocate for myself and to be confident in my abilities. Early on, that was hard to do.”
“Someone senior just tore into me.”
Two guests handled a hostile encounter the same underlying way — by reading it as information about the situation rather than as a verdict on themselves.
Dr. Sapna Patel
A surgeon screamed at her on her first day in the operating room, for nothing she had done. She loved surgery — and decided that day that this energy would crush her. She is careful to add that she knows many wonderful surgeons. She read it as information about fit, not a verdict on her.
Archna Patel, OT
She does the same thing from the other side. When a patient will not engage, she changes her own approach rather than waiting for the patient to change. And when it still does not work, the team trades therapists — without anyone treating it as a failure.
“You have to be the person that changes. You can’t expect your patient to change how they’re behaving.”
“Nobody taught me how to actually talk to a patient.”
This came up unprompted in almost every episode I have recorded, and it is the one skill every guest called essential that not one of them was formally taught. When I asked Dr. Patel-Pannullo directly whether medical school teaches it, the answer was blunt.
Dr. Julie Patel-Pannullo
Says being right is not sufficient: if you reach the correct answer and the patient still feels unheard, that becomes its own problem. She describes catching herself heading in one direction until she stopped and actually listened.
Dr. Neeru Rattan
Says it is a character trait as much as a professional skill — she prefers to be the listener in her own life too. Her summary of what patients actually want is the shortest anyone gave me: to be heard, and to be seen.
Archna Patel, OT
The only guest who gave listening a limit. Clear the small unmet needs first and the session goes better — but sometimes you have to stop someone talking or nothing gets done at all. Knowing which moment you are in is, in her words, an art you learn with experience.
Dr. Nancy Fan
The most concrete method anyone has given me. Open-ended questions first — what is your day like today? Then eye contact, then naming the feeling out loud rather than arguing with it: you are anxious today, why are you anxious? She apologizes when she is running late, because she takes it as given that a patient’s time is worth as much as hers.
Dr. Komal Naik, DO
Draws the distinction the whole hurdle turns on: you are having a conversation with a patient and their family, not talking to them or at them. She reads the room too — apprehension, a shutdown, no eye contact — and slows to their pace, and says plainly that it does not all have to happen in one visit.
Dr. Lajja Patel
Starts from the fear rather than from the teeth. A large part of her practice is people who arrive frightened because of something that happened to them before, so the first job is understanding where the anxiety comes from and the second is explaining what is actually going to happen.
“Even if you get the right answer and the patient feels they were not heard, that also becomes a challenge.”
“I have no one to ask.”
Every woman answered this differently, and that is the finding. This is the hurdle where I have found the least agreement — which I think means there is no single right answer to it. The newest answers widen it further: a mentor does not have to be one person, and does not have to outrank you.
Dr. Neeru Rattan
The only guest who told me she had no mentors at all. Her peers were her support — they went through it together. She wishes she had had a role model, but does not think she was damaged by the absence.
Archna Patel, OT
Built the support into the working day. Her team talks it out the same afternoon, which turns a bad interaction from something you carry home into something everyone else confirms they got too.
Dr. Sapna Patel
Chose hers deliberately — and told me the negative role models taught her more than the positive ones. Watching people she did not want to become was how she worked out what to do instead.
Nirja Patel, CRNA
Names the person outright: Dr. Onofrio Patafio, a cardiac anesthesiologist who she says believed in her when she did not believe in herself and no one else did either. She calls him the reason she is a nurse anesthetist. She now teaches nurse residents, nurse anesthesia residents, college students and shadowing high schoolers — all the time.
Dr. Nancy Fan
Found hers on a four-week rotation in Colorado: an obstetrician whose patients loved her and who loved them back, and who showed Fan simply that a woman could do the whole job. Her residency director was the opposite kind — rigorous and hard to please, and willing to tell her exactly what she was good at and what she needed to work on. She says she appreciated both.
Nora Katurakes, MSN, RN, OCN
Her rule is about continuity rather than about finding the one right person: never go a long stretch without somebody, and expect that person to change several times across a career. She is also the only guest who says what to do when a mentor is wrong for you. One of hers kept telling her to publish, and she is honest that writing is not her strength. Listen anyway — then go and find somebody whose sense of your direction matches your own.
Dr. Komal Naik, DO
Widens the definition further than anyone else has. Anyone can be a mentor — not only the person above you. A peer, someone junior to you, someone outside your field entirely. If you are waiting to be assigned one, you are probably walking past several.
Payal Patel, OT
Answers from the other side of the relationship. What she needed was for somebody to give her a chance — and she now makes a point of telling newer therapists who are too timid to speak up in a meeting that the person they are nervous of is standing right there, and will learn from them.
“More important than my positive role models were actually the negative role models. I would look at certain people and say, this is not who I want to become.”
“I made a mistake and it wrecked me.”
The most useful answer anyone has given me on this came out of something Dr. Sapna Patel was taught as a child, and it resolves what looks like a contradiction: how to forgive yourself without letting yourself off.
Dr. Sapna Patel
She was raised on the idea that there is a time and a place for everything. A rookie is supposed to make rookie errors, so you are allowed grace for the stage you are at. But once you make one, you are no longer a rookie at that thing — and you never make it again.
Minal Patel, PA-C
Does not think self-doubt is necessarily a bad thing — she calls it questioning yourself, and part of self-reflection. What matters, she says, is how you deal with it.
Nirja Patel, CRNA
Tells students that everyone is ready and it is only a matter of time. If there was a moment you did not know something or could not do it, that was the learning moment and next time you will be ready. She still learns something new almost every day, twenty years in.
“The mistakes I made yesterday are not mistakes I make ever again. But I’m allowed grace for them, because I’m always going to be learning.”
“How long until I actually know what I’m doing?”
Nobody hands you a number for this, so I asked for one. Three guests gave me an answer, and all three are longer than you would like to hear and far less frightening than they sound.
Dr. Komal Naik, DO
Told me plainly that it was seven to ten years out of training before she felt comfortable enough. She does not offer that as a confession. It is simply how long the job took to settle, and knowing the real number is better than measuring yourself against an imaginary one.
Dr. Komal Naik, DO what changes first
The discomfort does not switch off on a date. What changes first is your relationship to it — you get more comfortable being uncomfortable, and that arrives a long way before mastery does.
Dr. Lajja Patel
Separates confidence from knowledge completely. Confidence is not having every answer ready. It is trusting that your education and your experience will let you work the answer out when you need it.
Payal Patel, OT
Puts her own turn at five or six years in, and it arrived from a direction she did not expect — teaching. She started sitting next to resident doctors in meetings and explaining what therapy could do for their patients, and says that giving them the background to be confident is what made her confident.
“You start to get a little more comfortable with that discomfort.”
“Nobody actually knows what my job is.”
Four guests in four different professions described the same thing: having to explain what you do before you are allowed to do it. Not one of them treated that as an insult. All four treated it as part of the work.
Payal Patel, OT
Went in worried that occupational therapy would be overlooked, and says that in a hospital you get swallowed pretty quickly — or humbled, depending which way you want to read it. Her answer was to become useful to the people who did not understand the role yet: she sat with junior doctors and showed them how to write therapy orders, and the collaboration did the explaining for her.
Dr. Komal Naik, DO
Gets the same thing from the opposite end of the ladder. The most common reaction to the word neurologist is to assume she is a surgeon. Neurology is a medical field — diagnosing and managing migraine, seizures, dementia, MS — and she has simply built correcting that into the first few minutes rather than resenting it.
Dr. Lajja Patel
Says the misunderstanding about dentistry is that it is reacting to problems one at a time: a tooth breaks, you fix it. Most of what she does sits in the part people have not been told about — why the problem happened at all, how it can be prevented, and what the mouth is saying about the rest of the body.
Nora Katurakes, MSN, RN, OCN
Gets it about her qualification rather than her profession. People hear master’s in nursing and assume nurse practitioner, because that is the route students are shown. She has spent a career demonstrating that the same degree can run a prevention programme across a state.
“My knowledge is my power. I’m the one that has to voice what I know and back it up.”
Training ends. The hurdles do not — they change shape, and they start competing with the rest of a life.
“I’m working three shifts a day.”
Five women, five completely different exits from the same trap. None of them found balance by accident, and none found it early. This is the clearest evidence I have that there is no single correct answer — only the one that fits your life.
Archna Patel, OT
Named the shape of it better than anyone: getting the children ready was the first shift, the paid job was the second, and pickup through closing the kitchen at night was the third. She moved to skilled nursing and as-needed work so her hours matched school hours.
Dr. Sapna Patel
A single mother of a four-year-old. She is out of the door at 3:30 and has never missed a soccer or karate practice — and then goes back to work from eight at night until midnight once her daughter is asleep. She did not find the time. She moved it.
Dr. Neeru Rattan
Tried daycare, live-in nannies and family support across three daughters, and cut down to two days a week. She says it took ten or fifteen years to work out.
Christina Battish, NP
Went from full time to part time so she could be at her children’s school functions and pick them up. She is clear this is common — she has watched friends leave jobs they liked because the hospital would not move their hours.
Nora Katurakes, MSN, RN, OCN
Her rule is about what you refuse to drop rather than about hours. The things that give you joy — the training runs, the walk you signed up for, the friends — are the ones to protect, because if you let them go you will end up holding it against the profession that took them.
“In adult life there’s no ‘I don’t have time.’ It’s ‘I didn’t make time for this.’ You just have to carve it out, because it’s going to catch up to you.”
“I was passed over.”
One guest lost the role. One got it. Putting them side by side says more than either does alone.
Archna Patel, OT
Applied for a leadership role in her twenties and watched it go to a male colleague with more years than her. She is fair about why — she lists his seniority first — but does not leave gender off the list. Then she used the closed door: with nothing keeping her there, she moved south. It relocated her whole life.
Dr. Sapna Patel
Made full partner in her practice as the only woman in it, most of whom are a generation older. She told me it was the first time in her life she said out loud that she deserved the spot.
“That was probably the first time in my life I said, I deserve this spot.”
“I feel guilty whichever room I’m in.”
The same pressure, answered five different ways. One absorbed it for years. One refuses it outright. One says plainly that it never fully goes, however much support you have. And the two newest answers are both about subtraction — deciding in advance what you are not going to do.
Archna Patel, OT
Described the guilt that comes from comparing yourself to mothers who stayed home, and how it made her try to make every hour with her children count double. Looking back, the thing she would change is not the job. It is how little of herself she kept.
Dr. Sapna Patel
She treats the guilt as something built, not something that just happens. Women are expected to be the endless caretakers — and she has decided to stop. She warns that plenty of people will make you feel bad for resting, and none of them will thank you for coming back twice as functional.
Dr. Nancy Fan
Blunt that it does not go away: no working mother gets over the guilt, no matter how much support she has. What she did was refuse to hide the job from her children — she brought them into the hospital, sat them at the nurses’ station, and let them see what her being there meant to other people.
Dr. Komal Naik, DO
Says the promise that you can wear every hat at once is the problem, not your failure to manage it. You will not make a custom cake for every birthday party, and you will not be class mom and be everything at work as well. She now says exactly that to everyone she hires, so nobody has to arrive at it alone.
Dr. Lajja Patel
Sets a hard stop and keeps it. She is direct that the practice would have grown faster without young children in the picture, and equally direct that she is not interested in that trade. What she gives up instead, she says, is her social life.
“I’m not falling into that mold that you created generations ago to trap us.”
“I’m burning out.”
Dr. Sapna Patel treats burnout as an engineering problem before it is an emotional one, which is a framing no other guest offered — and the women after her answer it from the opposite end, with what they do once the shift is over.
Dr. Sapna Patel
Built shortcuts early for everything she knew she would repeat for forty years — a report written ten thousand times becomes two keystrokes. The point is not speed. Doing something familiar while exhausted is still exhausting, and she would rather spend that energy on the hard cases.
Dr. Sapna Patel on getting through training
She carries a line from an athlete: love the game, but love the training more. She had days when she felt she had done everything wrong, and days when she thought she had harmed a patient — and got up the next morning anyway. That, she says, is where the grit comes from.
Nirja Patel, CRNA
Left the ICU partly because of it. She describes fourteen-hour shifts with no food and no water because her patient was too sick to leave the room, and guilt at the idea of leaving anyway. She is clear that nobody was taught to spot this twenty years ago — what was valued was working as much as you could. Her answer now is an hour of yoga with her teacher in India, meditation, travel, and more time off every year.
Dr. Nancy Fan
Says you cannot do this episodically — one good gesture after a bad week does not work. You need a healthy baseline before the bad day arrives, plus real introspection, plus talking to the other people who were in the room. She names it out loud: that was traumatic for all of us, not just for the patient and her family.
Dr. Komal Naik, DO
Her image for it is the one I will remember: you cannot run too many apps on low battery. If the tank is empty you cannot help anybody, so refilling it is not self-indulgence, it is what makes the rest possible. Hers is water — she swims.
Dr. Lajja Patel
Runs it as a routine rather than a rescue. Sleep first, food planned through the week, exercise most days. She frames it as sequencing: you can only pour into other people if you have poured into yourself first.
“It’s important to love the game. But it’s actually more important to love the training.”
“They don’t respect me — and it isn’t my colleagues.”
Dr. Sapna Patel drew a distinction nobody else has: the bias lands in a different place than you expect, and the two need completely different responses.
Dr. Sapna Patel
Colleagues you can eventually win over, she says — somebody at the table comes round if your evidence is sound. Patients are the hardest, and no argument resolves it. She is clear that her own practice, where she is the only woman, has never treated her differently.
Dr. Sapna Patel a story she told me
Her best friend, an ICU physician in Brooklyn, spent an entire night carefully getting a patient off a ventilator when nobody else would attempt it — and he woke up and told her he wanted a white American male doctor instead.
Archna Patel, OT
Adds the structural half: healthcare is majority women, but men still move up faster — partly bias, and partly because leadership is priced in evenings and weekends that the second and third shifts have already claimed.
“Women have to work twice as hard to get half as much respect. And that’s not just from your colleagues — it’s from patients.”
“How do I find women who will actually back me?”
This began as the most uncomfortable thing anyone had told me — that the backing you expect from other women does not always arrive on its own. But every guest who named it also told me what she does instead, and that half is the useful one. The answer is not to expect it. It is to be the person supplying it.
Dr. Nancy Fan
Says the whole idea of leaning in and helping other women does not automatically translate once you are inside women’s health care. Some women give each other less grace, not more, precisely because they went through it themselves — the unspoken message being that everyone feels like this, so you should just deal with it.
Nirja Patel, CRNA
Names the version she grew up inside nursing: nurses eat their young. Asked what one thing she would change about medicine for women, this is what she picked — women lifting each other up, mentoring each other and creating opportunities for each other, instead of making someone feel bad for not knowing something yet.
Dr. Nancy Fan what she does instead
Tells women they are doing great, whatever they have chosen — the ones with careers and the ones raising children full time, both of whom she says arrive in her office feeling they are not producing enough.
“I wish women would just be able to say to each other: you’re doing great.”
“I have to push back on someone who outranks me.”
One guest named this directly, and her answer turns the whole thing from a confrontation into a job description.
Payal Patel, OT
About twelve years into her career she took an administrative role running an orthopedic programme, walking patients through hip and knee replacement from the decision to the recovery — and then taking what she learned back to the surgeons, with data, after the operation. She is careful about how she framed it. She is in the room representing the person on the table, not opposing the surgeon. Same room, different job.
Payal Patel, OT where the nerve comes from
She grounds it in what she knows rather than in where she sits. As long as she is speaking for the patient with the knowledge she has, she says, she cannot be wrong — and she can go home and sleep afterwards whether or not somebody looked at her strangely for saying it.
“I’m the patient’s advocate. I’m not the surgeon’s enemy.”
Decades on, the women here are still answering the question they first asked in Stage Two.
“Decades in, I still don’t feel like I belong.”
This is the same self-doubt from Stage Two, still here decades later — and that is the finding. Not one woman told me it went away. What changed was what they did with it, and how much of it they aimed at themselves.
Dr. Shilpa Saxena
Decades into her career the imposter syndrome still shows up every now and then. She stopped trying to defeat it and made friends with it instead — when it appears she tells it, okay, I know what you’re trying to do.
Dr. Neeru Rattan
Came to suspect she had been her own hardest critic — overly critical, always asking whether she could be doing better, and probably doing a good job the whole time.
Dr. Sapna Patel
Reframes the doubt entirely: the physicians who double-check and triple-check are the best ones, and they are not doubtful. They simply look under every rock before deciding. She separates doubting yourself from knowing you did everything you could.
Dr. Julie Patel-Pannullo
Her advice is to stop comparing early. It is very easy to wonder whether someone else is moving faster or publishing more — so focus on becoming the best version of yourself rather than measuring against someone else’s.
Archna Patel, OT
Gave the most practical version of how that doubt fades — she learned to tell the difference between a mistake she made and a mood she walked into. A lot of the time, she says, it is not about you as much as it is about them.
Nirja Patel, CRNA
Twenty years in, she still catches herself asking whether she has imposter syndrome. She does not treat it as a verdict — she goes back to her mentors and to the books she has kept, and reminds herself that when nobody around you is being supportive you are allowed to be your own cheerleader.
Dr. Lajja Patel
Still feels it, and says so without hedging — constantly, even today. What she built instead of an escape is a habit: notice the thought, sit with why it turned up, then answer it with the evidence that she has got this far and can work the rest out.
Dr. Komal Naik, DO
Two decades in, she describes it as ongoing rather than solved, at every phase of life. The change is not that the discomfort goes. It is that you get more comfortable inside it.
“There’s a difference between doubting yourself and just knowing that when I rest my head on my pillow tonight, I did everything I could for this patient.”
“I’m the one in charge now.”
Three guests here run something — a department, a practice, a prevention programme. Not one of them described leading as having authority over people. All three described it as making room for them.
Dr. Komal Naik, DO
Was assigned her first mentees and remembers thinking: wait, I still feel like I need to be mentored. She now chairs the neuroscience department, which means working with neurosurgeons, spine surgeons and people considerably more senior than she is — and what she says makes that work is mutual respect rather than position.
Dr. Lajja Patel
Built South Avenue Dental from nothing, and found that handing any of it over was the hardest part — it was, in her words, her baby. What convinced her was watching what happened when she stopped: the less she managed them, the more her team grew into it, and the more they wanted her to be able to switch off.
Nora Katurakes, MSN, RN, OCN
Ran a home care company before she came to lead outreach, and separates the two halves of the job plainly: a leader has to have vision, not just daily management. Her method is collaboration rather than authority — the work that moved the numbers on colorectal cancer across Delaware travelled through voices the community already trusted, not through hers. In her own words, you are not the one making the difference.
“The more you let them be, the more they bloom.”
“If I could go back, there is one thing I would change.”
I have asked a version of this question in every episode. The answers have been remarkably consistent, and none of them were about the work.
Dr. Shilpa Saxena
Was fifty years old before she said, in her words, “my gosh, it’s my turn.” She had been trained, she says, to help everybody but herself.
Archna Patel, OT
Wishes she had been more mindful about taking time for herself during the years she was most worn out. Now that her children are older she swims and does yoga. She wishes she had taken that time sooner.
Dr. Neeru Rattan
Wishes she had moments to take her own time before switching into family mode, and says that often was not possible. It took ten or fifteen years to reach the balance she has now — which she calls lucky.
Dr. Nancy Fan
Would give herself grace far earlier. She spent years feeling she was not doing enough while the evidence sat in front of her the whole time — her children were fine. She says women do not give themselves enough grace, and she says it to patients every single day.
Nirja Patel, CRNA
Would tell the eighteen-year-old version of herself — the one under tremendous stress who had no idea where to go after pharmacy school — that it was going to work out, and better than she thought.
Payal Patel, OT
The one answer here that is not a regret. She says she would probably still be curious about neurology if she were starting over — and then says, in the same breath, we are here now, I am grateful for it, I am not looking back. Both halves are true at once, and neither is regret.
Nora Katurakes, MSN, RN, OCN
Answers it more squarely than anyone. She thinks she may have given up some of her family to reach where she is — and says in the same breath that her family understood and supported the career. She does not present that as solved, and she does not call it a regret either.
“It wasn’t until I was 50 years old that I said — my gosh, it’s my turn. I was so trained to help everybody but myself.”
This is the last stage, and the one worth reading first. Everything these women would change happened decades before they could see it.
Nobody handed any of them a single right answer.
Every woman here worked out the same problems her own way, and no two answers match. That is the most useful thing I have found in these conversations — not one path, but permission to build your own.
A private community for women in medicine — and the women who want to become them.
Every guest on HERstory in Medicine talked about navigating this career largely alone. Dr. Saxena didn’t learn to take care of herself until 50. Dr. Chopra cried figuring out how to be a physician and a mother. Christina Battish went part time to be there for her children. These women were extraordinary — and they were isolated.
Nirja Patel is the exception that makes the point. She had a cardiac anesthesiologist, Dr. Onofrio Patafio, who she says believed in her when she did not believe in herself and no one else did either — and she says he is the reason she is a nurse anesthetist today. One person.
The HERstory Circle is what I want to build to change that. A space to ask real questions and get real answers from people who understand what this career actually costs — not just professionally, but personally.
Why This Matters
22.7%
of newly hired registered nurses leave within their first year.
17.6%
is turnover across the profession as a whole. New nurses leave fastest.
That number is about nurses, and in a few years I will be a new clinician standing somewhere in the same system. Dr. Neeru Rattan told me she went through her entire training without a single mentor — her peers carried each other through, and she said she wished she had had someone. I don’t want to find out what that feels like, and I don’t want anyone reading this to find out either.
That is why I am building this page, and why I want to build the Circle. If having one person to ask is the difference between staying and leaving, it seems worth making sure everyone has one. When I asked Nirja Patel what single thing she would change about medicine for women, this is what she chose: women lifting each other up, mentoring each other and creating opportunities for each other.
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Peer Advice
Ask real questions. Get answers from women who’ve navigated the same crossroads — career, family, burnout, ambition.
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Guest Advisors
HERstory podcast guests as founding advisors — physicians, NPs, PAs, and CRNAs available to the community.
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Real Conversations
A space for the conversations medicine doesn’t make room for — love, loneliness, balance, and what it really costs.
Where This Is Headed
The Circle does not exist yet. It is the thing these conversations keep pointing at, and it is what I want to build next. Follow the podcast and you will know when it is real.
Not Open Yet
An honest work in progress.
Let's Connect.
Whether you're a potential podcast guest, an admissions officer, or someone who wants to say hello — I'd love to hear from you.
