Hey everybody!
I know it's been a while since you've heard from me. I hope all of you are doing well.
How am I? I'm good, actually. The BHE and I celebrated our 17th year of marriage and both of those little boys that y'all remember so well will be in high school next year. High school, y'all!
I'm still at Grady and loving it. Oh! I got promoted to full professor in 2019. That was a huge deal for me as an academic physician. It's weird--getting promoted to the next rung on the academic ladder is always the goal. When I got that letter, I didn't really know what to do with myself.
Ha.
But let me share another reason why I was so pumped about it: Did you know that, as of 2019, there were 38,975 individuals who've achieved the rank of full professor at US medical schools? Guess how many of those 38,975 are Black women?
*waits while you guess*
307. Yup. You read that right. 307, chile. That's less than 1%!
I am proud to say that number includes me. And I am even more determined than ever to help keep those underrepresented in medicine in the academic pipeline and increasing these numbers.
Heck yeah.
Let's see. What else?
Where have I been writing? Hmmm. These days mostly on Twitter. I'm at @gradydoctor there and have taken to telling stories through threaded tweets. It's been pretty fun to do. I still do some writing for journals and such.
Here's something I published in The Lancet. I was pretty proud of it. I was especially proud to talk about my alma mater, Tuskegee. It's super frustrating to hear people equate our beautiful legacy to the awful untreated syphilis study that occurred in the area. I'm glad it got accepted for publication.
Hmmm. What else?
Let's see. The pandemic hasn't been a cakewalk. I mean, fortunately, my family has been okay from a health perspective. But the juggle of school in the time of COVID with my professional responsibilities has been rough. I can't say that the school part has been my favorite. I'm hoping we can ease into some normalcy next year on that front.
Sigh.
I'm still teaching students. Can you believe I'm about to be on my 8th small group? Yup. Small Group Theta is coming this July. Here are a few of my current babies from SG Eta. Small Groups Alpha, Beta, and Gamma are all done with training and bona fide in their fields. SGs Delta and Epsilon are trucking through residency and nearing the end of their training. Zeta just graduated and are all starting internships this week.
Nuts.
I've been going pretty hard on community outreach and education around COVID. I guess when you see so much awful from it, it hits different, man.
Yeah.
Oh! And one last thing. . .
A few weeks ago, a colleague and I started a podcast. Only about 4 weeks into it being live but it's been a really fun experience. If you are a podcast listening type, you can find it on Apple, Spotify, and Google Play.
Yup.
