 Hello, I'm Christine Lottie and I play a heart surgeon on Chicago Hope. When I was first preparing for the role of Dr. Kate Austin, I had the opportunity to speak with many women surgeons about their careers, their responsibilities, and their personal lives. And like the three surgeons whom you are about to meet, there is one common emotion that they all share. They love what they do because they save lives. You are about to get a close-up look into the lives of three women surgeons. You will see their operating rooms during real-life trauma, heart surgery, and orthopedic surgery. You will get to know these women both on the job and at home. And most importantly, you will see how they balance successful and satisfying careers with rewarding family lives. I encourage you to watch this program carefully. Give some thought as to whether a career as a surgeon might be in your future. Talk with your guidance counselor, your teachers, and your parents. Get as much information as possible about your career options. Make intelligent decisions about your courses starting now. And don't be afraid of academic challenges. If you work hard and make the proper choices now, many new and exciting opportunities will be open to you. I hope you enjoy the program and best of luck as you plan for your future. I'm really interested in being a trauma surgeon. So I like being with children. I haven't quite figured out exactly what I want to do. They're there when all this excitement is happening. And I just love pressure, and I just think it's so cool. A researcher of microbiology. I really want to be a sports player, but if I can't be a sports player, I'm probably going to like being a doctor. My name is Vicky Stevens, and I'm an orthopedic surgeon. I've considered being a pediatrician or a pediatric surgeon. Being like a doctor should be good. My name is Rosalyn Scott, and I'm a heart surgeon. I know that I can do it. If anybody could do it, I think I could do it. It wouldn't really matter if I was a, you know, a boy or a girl. If I really want something, I can work hard enough to get it. Second to do a burn. I see the feel of surgery that you have to love. Bringing someone back to life, I don't think there's anything more rewarding in life. The St. Mary's Hospital, which is a level two trauma center, is a community hospital. Patients who come to a trauma center are patients who have life-threatening injuries. Most of the patients that we do are blunt trauma, mostly motor vehicle accidents. In the last few years, we've seen more penetrating trauma, like stab wounds and gunshot wounds. I'm a member of the St. Carlos Apache tribe. The reservation is where I do most of my work, where my relatives and many of my friends live. I also have a limited practice in the mining community called GLOBE, which borders the reservation. We have a small hospital that's got 50 beds and a very wonderful operating room that we just remodeled. The people on the reservation lead a life that is fairly isolated from the mainstream of American culture. Economically, we struggle with a poverty level that's quite astounding. And many people live from welfare and social security pains. Your pins were, there you go. You got shot with the BB, huh? And you're the one that did it, huh? You wanted to see if the BB would go through your shoe, huh? And it did, huh? Yeah, it went right into your toe. Hi. I find that working amongst my own people, being in the kind of country that I grew up in, being around people that I know real well, gives me a sense of confidence and comfort that I know is good for me as a person. And therefore, I've chosen to be in the environment where I know my strength is the greatest. Does that hurt you now? Hi, Vicki. To me, the exciting thing about surgery as opposed to medicine in general is that when you operate on somebody, you know they have a problem. You know you can take care of it. And then you're going to see it immediately that you've done a good thing. So I think that to me, that's really the thrill. You do something and you see the effect of your work right away. I'm at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in Cleveland, Ohio, which is currently the institution that does more open-heart surgeries than any place in the country. They did over 4,000 last year. Yeah, the trick is to remember which room to set up for this story. Oh, oh. Door number one, door number two. Your interest in cardiac surgery and medicine has to almost be seamless with your being. It has to be so much a part of you. And for me, it's seamless with who I am. I will come to the hospital around eight o'clock. Normally, I will have sign-out rounds where the person who was on call the night before will tell me how many admissions he had and what were the problems. Probably after the weekend, I will say. I will give us about four days. Okay? Have a good day. I will do rounds in intensive care unit or the floor, depending on what assignment that I have the day. I'm so sweet. I heard that you've been so good. I've been good. I'm in the Meredith. Yes. I am in the Meredith. Yeah, we have made many times. I can't believe it's only been two weeks and I've come this far. I thought I would be dead by now. No. You got very sick. That's why the day that I had to intubate you. I understand that your family will help you at home as well. Sure. Absolutely. Do you have sisters? I have a husband. And I have a roommate. And I also have a husband. In between, I will get called for a trauma alert, which involved the three men on resuscitation of a trauma victim. Trauma surgeon has to take over. It's a captain of the ship. And basically, you have to make sure that everybody does their part in the resuscitation. Yeah. In trauma, it's easy in a sense because you follow protocols. We call the ABCs of trauma. Guys, do me a favor. Can I have some light in here? In order to be a good surgeon, you have to make decisions right away. You cannot hesitate. I think that you have to be confident. He's fixed and dilated, guys. Because he already got reflex when he got a reflex. I always heard that. Surgeons like to work on depression. That's a reality. But I think that you can train yourself to do that. He is going. The most difficult part of my job is when I cannot save a life. And there are situations that you know that are fatal, no matter what. And you know that you're not going to save that individual. That's very difficult. One of the most rewarding part of my job is seeing individuals that you treat and they are in extremists. And suddenly you can see them a week later, a month later, three months later, going back to the normal life. Orthopedics is a peculiarly physical specialty in medicine. It's closer to a craftsmanship. How well you can set a bone. How well you can put the little itty-bitty pieces together. How well you can sew a tendon without having straggling pieces coming out of it. For me, it's almost a sense of craftsmanship. So you do get to have the medical part of it. But you get to use your hands. You get to be artistic in a sense. And I think that's what really appeals to me about Ortho. Surgery is an exercise in perfection and compulsion. What I think about when I'm in surgery is making sure that I'm completely focused on what I'm doing and remembering all the steps. I will have thought about how I'm going to do the operation. And so mentally I've already done it and now I'm doing it in real life. One of the most exciting times that I have in the operating room is when you're working with a nurse that really knows the procedure and you never have to ask for an instrument. All you have to do is hold that your hand and you get what you asked for. It's really like a ballet because in a ballet you have a group of dancers that are coordinating and intermixing and working together. Even though they may not be doing exactly the same step, you see them somehow meshing together. And that's what a well-performed operation is like. It's just wonderful. I am an academic medicine. And what you do in academic medicine is still taking care of patients in the same way. But in addition, you can be involved in teaching the next generation of physicians, which I think is very important because I need a well-trained physician to take care of me when I get old and sick. So I say I better protect my own self and my family by making sure the next generation of physicians are also well-trained. I'm Mary. I have three children. Ages nine, seven and six. My youngest is a daughter. And my oldest is a boy. My two oldest are boys. How many of you have been in a hospital? All of you have been in a hospital. How many of you have been a victim of a... One of the things that I like to do is go to my kids' classes and tell a mom a surgeon and this is what I do for living. And they will be surprised because they see you as Manuel's mom or Adrienne's mom or Bianca's mom. They really don't realize that a surgeon can be the average person next to you. My husband is an orthopedic surgeon also. His name is Jodi Daggett. She's a good surgeon. She's very skilled. She's very knowledgeable. She's meticulous in the operating room. She has a touch with tissue that I envy. I wish I had. It's something that surgeons strive for and it seems to come very naturally to her. We have had two children, both boys. His name is Henry. He's the younger boy. He's nine years old. And we have Leland, who's 12. And their favorite thing in the world is skateboarding and riding bicycles. Well, I have two daughters. One is 20 and one is 24. The 20-year-old is in her third year of college and she wants to be a lawyer. Her sister is in Washington now in the Presidential Management Internship Program. I'm about the midpoint in my career, so I am not satisfied with where I am now. I still have places that I want to go. It always fascinates me how hard we work to make things better when somebody's gotten sick. Just to imagine what it took and the imagination and the wonder of what God did in creating it in the first place. When did they decide when they wanted to become a surgeon? Well, my father was a dentist and all of his friends were either physicians or dentists. So I really grew up around a lot of medical people. When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time in his office when I could. And one of the big thrills for me was when he let me sterilize his instruments and then put them back in the drawers and the little grooves that each instrument belonged. My father, who did have heart trouble, he had his first heart attack when I was in third grade, said that I should be a heart surgeon because there weren't any women that had been really great heart surgeons. This would be a real opportunity for me. My realization about going to medical school started when I was in freshman English, in high school. We had to write a composition about what we would like to be when we grew up. And I remember my English teacher saying to me after I turned in a paper saying that I was interested in being a psychologist, he said in front of the whole class, he said, well, why wouldn't you be a psychiatrist? And none of us really realized that there was a difference between the two. And so he said, well, a psychiatrist is a doctor who does that same kind of thing. That was the very first time that I had a clue about medicine. Was it a problem to have spent all that time in college because you're young and you want to get out and be on your own? The educational process for medicine today is a long one. First, you finish high school, of course, and then go on to college. After that, there's four years of medical school. After medical school, you go into a residency training program. The residency period is different for different specialties. For heart surgery, for example, you would have to first do five or six years of training in general surgery and then an additional two or three years of training in thoracic surgery. And then, of course, there are a number of individuals who are interested in going into academic medicine who would take another two or three years doing research, perhaps going to NIH. The way that my medical school training was paid for is what's called the health professions program through the United States government. If you are willing to pay the money back after you finish, you can get loans. And I did, in this case from the public health service, loans that pay very good money on a monthly basis and help cover your tuition and all of your living needs. The funding really ought to be the last thing that people worry about. The money will come if the talent and the dedication are there. The advice that I would give to a young person is that this is one of the most exciting things that you can do in life and that it is easy, as anything is easy, when you have a real passion for it. And so then the work becomes reward. You know, it's a very competitive field and if you want to get into a good medical school you have to have good grades. But again, if you do it in a way, if you structure your time and you have fun and at the same time you have good studying habits, you can do it. How do you get the courage enough to put their hands into another person's body? When you actually put your hands in someone's body, you're not thinking about the way it feels or whether it's squishy or whether it's warm or whether it smells funny. You're thinking about the person that you're touching because that person is the thing that you're helping to make better. To me it's not scary knowing that I'm holding somebody's life in my hands. I think it's a big responsibility. So from that perspective, I want to make sure that I try to know as much about the patient that I can and about the problem that we're going to be taking care of in the operating room. When I'm working on people, if their lives are hanging in the balance, that there is a force far bigger than I. My God that I believe in is there. And that's the strength that carries that person, that patient. When you're working on a patient, are you calm or are you like freaked out? You have to keep calm because in order to have people to work well, you have to transmit that confidence. And I think that that's why we make a good surgeon too. Can someone do me a favor and get me another guy or war? If everybody knows what they need to do and you guide them in a way that they don't feel threatened or they don't feel under pressure, they perform better. Do they usually get enough sleep or what do surgeons do to stay awake? I think that you get used to work 24 hours. It's not easy, but I guess with time and doing this for so many years, it becomes part of you. The other thing is to get exercise, which helps to stimulate you. I also practice yoga and that can also be energizing. You have to take care of yourself. You have to take care physically and mentally of yourself. Therefore, you have to try to maintain a good diet, sleep as much as you can when you're off, exercise and take time off for fun. I've heard that surgeries take a long time and so maybe like five hours or so. How do you stay like five hours under pressure doing all this work? Surgery does take a long time. However, it's like doing whatever your favorite thing is. The time passes so quickly that you don't really realize that an hour has gone by or two hours has gone by. My days go faster when I am in the operating room. How do you research about surgery? Medical research is an area that's critical in many ways. One of the areas that affects me particularly since I serve a disadvantaged population without a lot of access to money for care, we can do things now because of research that can get people better faster. Is it easy for you to get a job or is it harder because you're a woman? A woman has, I believe, a more sensitive nature towards people in pain. I think that we tend to be more emotionally involved with our patients and therefore able to support them better. We also are good with our hands. You notice women do the sewing at home. We do cooking and good cooking takes talent, takes being able to do certain maneuvers. Women traditionally have done things that require all of the skills that surgery requires. Basically, I think cutting and sewing should be a woman's profession. It was really, to me, a natural extension of what women do anyway and that men have to learn how to be sewers and cutters. So my big argument is that surgery is women's work anyway. What's the feeling when you lose a patient? I mean, isn't it hard for you, like, your first time losing someone? There are two aspects of losing a patient. When you lose a patient and you know in your heart that if you saw the same kind of patient with the same kind of problem tomorrow you would do exactly the same thing then you just have to accept that you know that you can't fix everything. What, when you really are disturbed is when you feel that there was something you could have done differently. When you're a surgeon, do you, like, have a life? Yes, I think as a surgeon you can have a life. Just as how you have to structure and organize your career, you also have to structure and organize your time off so that you maximize the things that you do and how you do them. The way you balance being a mom and being a surgeon is to make sure that you structure your life in a way that makes living your life fun. Is she doing something with them and then all of a sudden the beeper beeps and she has to, like, run off to the hospital? Some ways being a surgeon, it's kind of mechanical, you know? You hear that beeper, it goes off, you run. And that's kind of, you know, the energizer bunny. You're kind of just going and going and going. But there's the other side of you that you have to pay some attention to. You know, the spiritual, the mental. Your soul needs a lot more attention when you're kind of moving all the time. Like, when some people, like, ask her to go somewhere and she has to do surgery. So she has to keep working. If she doesn't do surgery, he will die. We balance everything by juggling. I think that's the best description. We juggle. And if I get called to the emergency room because somebody shot themselves with a nail gun and the kids are already out of school and we need to eat dinner, we juggle. The kids grab their skateboards. They skateboard in the hospital parking lot. I go in, I get the nail out of somebody's hand. And then instead of being at home doing dinner, grab a quick bite on the way home, come home, and get started on homework. Is your job fulfilling? I really like staying up all night inside a sick patient and doing different things than in the morning saying, wow, the patient's all better. The most rewarding part of my job is when people get better and they come to me and they go, you made me better. And they really do. They literally come to you and say, because of you, I'm better. And you walk on air for a little while after people tell you that. It brings enough energy to you to hear that from a person that you can do five more really hard things just on the positive energy that that person has brought you. The best part of my job is really realizing that you save lives. And that's the bottom line. You make a difference. After you've done everything you've many years of working everything, was it worth it to study hard and everything? The hard work for me has been worth it. After all the years of scrolling and training, I still can't think of anything that I would rather do. So yes, it was worth it. Most of my friends are always, what does your mom really do? She's like, I say she has a very important job and I like what she does. It makes me feel pretty warm inside that I have a mom that's a doctor. I think of what my mom does is good because it helps save people's lives and I hope to do it when I grow up. The hard work pays off. It's really fun and it's very rewarding. You can do it. You just have to set goals and work for those goals. I have a wonderful life. I couldn't ask to be any happier than I am now.