The Whole Life Fertility Plan by Kyra Phillips jamie grifo m.d
Author:Kyra Phillips, jamie grifo, m.d.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-01-19T00:00:00+00:00
Jamie’s Story
Since I was very young, I always thought I’d go into medicine or science. I was a tinkerer and I loved to discover and invent, and also had a passion for health. As it turned out, I never really had to make a choice between the two fields.
In college, I majored in biology and chemistry. Rather than go straight into either research or medicine afterwards, I got into an MD-PhD program that allowed me to do both and decide later. The most logical progression for me was to go into cancer research, but I wasn’t so sure I liked the idea of sitting in a lab without much human interaction.
Maybe I could be a pediatrician , I thought. I always liked kids, and I had a good sense of empathy. That would appeal to one part of my personality, but it still left out the part of me that wanted to discover and break new ground.
I graduated from medical school right around the time when things were just heating up in reproductive medicine. The first in vitro fertilization (IVF) baby had just been born and it seemed that this was a field with a lot of possibility for growth and change. At the last minute, I changed tracks and decided to specialize in obstetrics and gynecology (OB/GYN).
I’d done some study in the field and liked that we were now able to perform amniocentesis to do genetic testing on an unborn baby—but what I found more interesting was the possibility of doing genetic testing even before there was a pregnancy: testing embryos before implanting them into the mother. Doing so could help us avoid all kinds of diseases and serious health conditions, as well as lowering miscarriage rates. I had seen that some researchers were doing this on animals, so that’s what I focused on during my fellowship and what led me to become a fertility specialist.
Translational research has been my forte; I like translating research into real-life applications as opposed to just increasing the body of knowledge on a topic. It’s more interesting to me to help enact changes in the way we practice medicine, so that’s what I set out to do. I helped to make major advances in embryonic genetic testing and egg freezing and thawing techniques while also seeing patients regularly.
What surprised me the most about the field was that it didn’t just require me to be a fertility expert but also a de facto psychologist. There is so much emotion within the walls of a fertility clinic. There are spoken and unspoken fears, heartbreaks when the process doesn’t go right or ends badly, tensions in relationships, overwhelming amounts of stress and anxiety, and, of course, overwhelming amounts of joy on the other end of the spectrum. It would never be worth it without that payoff; I do have many sleepless nights and times when the pressure of carrying so many people’s dreams in my hands follows me home. I need to decompress from it all
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