{"id":3041,"date":"2021-04-23T16:20:57","date_gmt":"2021-04-23T20:20:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/?p=3041"},"modified":"2021-04-23T16:20:57","modified_gmt":"2021-04-23T20:20:57","slug":"on-the-front-lines-team-of-five-female-surgeons-stands-strong-at-upstate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/?p=3041","title":{"rendered":"On the front lines: Team of five female surgeons stands strong at Upstate"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Emma Vallelunga<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

They say the sickest of the sick go to Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse, and in the teaching hospital\u2019s Level One trauma center, exactly half of the surgical team who save lives every day are women. These trauma surgeons take pride in what it means to be a woman in trauma surgery, a hero during a pandemic and a physician in the Central New York community.<\/p>\n

Most of the women surgeons on the Upstate trauma team didn\u2019t think surgery was for them until they simply fell in love with it. Dr. Joan Dolinak said she was biased before doing her surgical rotation in medical school and never looked back.<\/p>\n

\u201cI enjoyed coming to work. It wasn\u2019t a job. It was fun,\u201d Dolinak said. \u201cI liked the aspects of trauma surgery because every day was like Christmas. You never knew who was coming in or what you were going to get.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. Jessica Summers said she always knew she wanted to be a surgeon from the moment she got to watch a live heart surgery after volunteering at UC Davis School of Medicine in Sacramento.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love being able to fix things,\u201d Summers said. \u201cWe do take people who are broken or have something that we can fix. We get to make people better, and that was always what drew me in.\u201d<\/p>\n

On a national level, the number of women in surgery used to be few and far between. In 2001, 14 percent of U.S. surgical residents were women, a low percentage in comparison with the number of women medical students at the time, according to a study from the American College of Surgeons in 2018.<\/p>\n

However, an increasing number of women have entered medicine and the surgical workforce since 2017. That year, more women were enrolled in medical school than men, and about 40 percent of U.S. general surgery residents, and 20 percent of general surgeons were women.<\/p>\n

During her residency, Dr. Roseanna Guzman-Curtis said she felt lucky to have many female colleagues at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, where her class was the first in the history of the university to graduate with all women.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile I knew it was a fact that women surgeons are more rare than male surgeons, it didn\u2019t cross my mind as much because I was surrounded by powerful women surgeons all the time, so in some ways, it didn\u2019t form a part of my reality,\u201d Guzman-Curtis said. \u201cMy reality included female surgeons.\u201d<\/p>\n

In contrast, Dolinak said she came from a medical school program where there were no female surgeons at the time but had enough support from other male surgeons to feel comfortable working with them. She said she realizes more women are joining the field, so having an all-female team doesn\u2019t feel abnormal anymore.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember the first time we had an all-woman team in the OR and thought that was something special, and now it\u2019s not as special as it used to be because it\u2019s more commonplace,\u201d Dolinak said.<\/p>\n

What wasn\u2019t commonplace in medicine was the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic when it began just over a year ago. In addition to being on the trauma team, Dr. Amie Lucia was also the Surgical ICU director. At Upstate, she said many surgeons routinely took care of critically ill patients, but before the pandemic, patients with respiratory illnesses like COVID-19 would normally go to the Medical ICU, not the Surgical ICU. As the hospital system became overwhelmed, the SICU had trauma patients, burn patients, emergency general surgery patients and now COVID-19 patients to keep track of, so adjusting to those changes so quickly was difficult at first.<\/p>\n

\u201cNone of us were ever quiet,\u201d Lucia said. \u201cA lot of surgeons\u2019 business went down in a lot of ways because there were fewer elective cases, but the group of us stayed extremely busy. If I look back on the past year, exhausting is the word that comes out of everything in my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Guzman-Curtis also had other responsibilities at Upstate during the pandemic, like being in charge of the medical student rotations. Educating students at the hospital while they weren\u2019t always allowed to be on campus was hard to adapt to from an administrative standpoint.<\/p>\n

\u201cI never had more meetings than those initial months as the year progressed having to refashion and rework a lot of the systems that were already well-oiled and running,\u201d Guzman-Curtis said.<\/p>\n

And in general this past year, Guzman-Curtis said there was a palpable stress about keeping herself safe from the virus.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like a lot of times, especially at the beginning, the stress we were experiencing was how can we keep to our duties as physicians and as surgeons,\u201d Guzman-Curtis said. \u201cIt was [about] how we should keep ourselves safe so that we could take care of a whole group of people. For weeks, I just had a little to-go bag packed in my car because I thought \u2018What if I just shouldn\u2019t go home and I should just stay here for a while?\u2019 It never came to that, but I guess I just went into disaster mode.\u201d<\/p>\n

But despite the usual stress of the job, Lucia said she was proud to provide patient care over the past five years for a hospital like Upstate to a familiar CNY community where she and her family grew up.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom an institution standpoint, it was kind of a no-brainer when I went into trauma surgery that Upstate was the place to be,\u201d Lucia said. \u201cOur job tends to be very kind of grueling and long hours and busy and stressful, but if you really love what you do, the hours go by a lot faster, and I think working with a group of people that support you makes it a lot more tolerable too.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Upstate, Summers said being a female surgeon gives her a better opportunity to teach other female medical students that surgery is an option for them too.<\/p>\n

\u201cMedical schools are 50-50 now,\u201d Summers said. \u201cIf I can empower or inspire some female medical students to want to do surgery, I think that\u2019s really something I enjoy and want to strive for.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Emma Vallelunga   They say the sickest of the sick go to Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse, and in the teaching hospital\u2019s Level One trauma center, exactly half of the surgical team who save lives every day are women. These trauma surgeons take pride in what it means to be a woman in trauma…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3042,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[1161,1159,1158,1160,1157,1156],"class_list":["post-3041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-dr-amie-lucia","tag-dr-jessica-summers","tag-dr-joan-dolinak","tag-dr-roseanna-guzman-curtis","tag-trauma-surgeons","tag-upstate-university-hospital"],"gutentor_comment":0,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/04\/Trauma_women_02-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1707&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3244,"url":"https:\/\/www.syracusewomanmag.com\/?p=3244","url_meta":{"origin":3041,"position":0},"title":"Upstate Cord Blood Bank celebrates 5th anniversary: Mothers delivering cord blood at birth help save lives","author":"Alyssa Dearborn","date":"August 24, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"The Upstate Cord Blood Bank, the region\u2019s only not-for-profit public cord blood donation center, is dedicated to saving and improving lives through the life-saving gift of cord blood.\u00a0 The term \u201ccord blood\u201d may sound daunting, but it\u2019s actually quite simple. 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