"I Didn't Choose This Work it Chose Me." Pt 1

I Didn’t Choose This Work -It Chose Me

The First Moment I Experienced the Gap

As a healthcare leader, your days are often relentless. You are managing the systems, monitoring performance, tracking results, and protecting your organizations reputation often before noon. The decisions you make have ripple effects and touch more lives than you can count, and you rarely get a moment to pause and reflect.

I am curious: How often do you experience your system the way your patients do?

I mean from the waiting room not the boardroom or from behind a desk.

I didn't choose this work. It chose me long before I had the words to describe what I was living through. Long before I stood on stages, sat across from neurologist, and built a firm around the very experiences I once avoided.

It all started when I became a mother.

The Night Everything Changed

Two weeks after my son was born, we took him to his first well visit where he received vaccine number one. The pediatrician warned that he would have a mild fever and recommended Tylenol. We were new parents, hopeful and completely unprepared for what came next. His temperature wouldn’t regulate. He cried continuously. The kind of cry that that wasn't about food or lack of sleep. His tiny body was so exhausted that he passed out in his grandmothers arms. What started as a peaceful transition into motherhood became fear, uncertainty, and a rushed visit to the ER. I still remember the lights, the sounds, the pace, and the way my heart raced as I tried to hold it together.

The pediatrician on call moved quickly. He ran a series of tests and ordered a spinal tap. As I waited outside the door and listened to his screams my heart broke. I felt helpless and it took so much strength not to burst down the door and comfort him. I am not sure how much time passed before the doctor came out to speak with us.

When the doctor came out to speak with us, he was visibly upset. He explained that while our son had no evidence of meningitis or any other visible infections, he was reacting to the labor induction medications. Those medications, combined with his first required vaccine, had triggered a severe reaction. He shared that based on the duration of my labor and the amount of medication I was given my son “should not have been sent home.” He apologized gave us some medicine and sent us home.

Can you imagine? “He should not have been sent home.” How would we have known? We were first time parents trusting the doctors to have everything under control. No one from the labor and delivery team had shared any of that with me or his father. We were discharged with the directive to bring him back for his well visit in two weeks. We had no idea that he needed to stay a few more days.

The Question I Carried

As we left the ER with our very strong yet fragile son, I had so many emotions and a realization that we could have lost him? In the days that followed, I searched my mind for answers. I thought about how he would cry at the top of his lungs in the nursery and how he refused breast milk. The nurses at the time told me it was normal and that he was simply adjusting to his new world. Who knew that his cries were ones of distress? One thought kept recurring:

Were we treated differently because we were on Medicaid?

The answer never came but I carried the question in my heart for a long time. Back then, I had no words or even the insight on how to articulate my experience. But now, as a patient who has spent years navigating exam rooms and hospital systems I have the language. The treatment we experienced was due to :

• Stigma - assumptions about who we were because of how we were insured,

• Fragmented Communication- breakdown between labor and delivery and the discharge team.

• Missed Alignment : no one connected the length of my labor, the medications I received, and what my son's body still needed before leaving the hospital

• A system under pressure- moving too fast to catch mishaps

Those were my first real lessons inside a system I would spend the next two decades learning from as a mother navigating care for her son, as a patient managing chronic migraine, as a patient advocate speaking for others, and a leader building a building a firm around the very gaps I have lived through.

What Became Clear

Let me be honest, I did not walk out of the ER with a mission. There was no vision board or five-year plan. I was a new mom learning how to navigate the world of raising a child, working and going to school full time. What I did have was an awareness that what we experienced wasn't unique to us. I knew that other young parents were feeling just as invisible, afraid, and uncertain about whether the system they were trusting would see them.

Excellence in healthcare, I was beginning to understand, is not only about arriving at the right diagnosis, or only access, insurance, or resources.

It is also undeniably about how people are treated along the way.

This lesson has followed me for the last twenty years and is the reason I am here today.

Part 1 of 3

Wednesday I will share what happened when I stopped navigating healthcare as a mother and became a patient myself. A diagnosis of chronic intractable migraine and hemiplegic migraine changed everything I thought I knew about my health, my career, and my calling.

The gap I experienced as a mother was about to be experienced as a patient.

Have you ever left a healthcare experience feeling unseen as a patient, caregiver, or as a provider? I would love to hear your story in the comments.

#HealthcareLeadership #MigraineAwareness #IronsConsultingGroup.