My Humble Beginnings

Little girls don't typically think, "I want to be a urologist when I grow up!"

I was certainly no exception. In fact, I don't think I knew what urology was until after college, when an ex-boyfriend was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Even then, it didn't cross my mind to think, "Wow, that's cool. Imagine an entire profession where you get to look at penises and testicles every day!" As serious as Nick's illness was, I still had to stifle a little bit of me that thought "eww" whenever we discussed his, ahem, condition. "Yeah, my ex-boyfriend has cancer," I would say vaguely.

In medical school, I was immediately dubbed a "peds" person, though I secretly had surgical leanings. I loved to use my hands - I was an incorrigible maker of fimo/sculpey figurines and had mastered the art of making 1/2 centimeter origami cranes in high school. But I feared that I wasn't hard core enough. More importantly, I loved sleep too much. Surgeons were strong (invariably macho), focused (often curt), and with it (if not militaristic). I was soft, flaky and often forgetful.

I could say that it all started in anatomy class. Our our first day, my anatomy group (Inna, Mike, Andrew and Dave) met our male cadaver, whom we named Tony (see link to an essay I wrote to thank Tony at our year end Anatomy Service of Gratitude). As you might expect, Tony had a penis, which we ultimately had to dissect. The day we had to go "down there", our assignment was divided into two sections: the male pelvis and the brain. The boys in our group got to anatomy early and made a bee-line to Tony's head. "Um, you guys can do that part," they mumbled. Oh, thanks.

I am both proud and ashamed that I took to my task, which included the insertion of a small probe into Tony's penis, with great gusto. Calmly, I took up the scalpel to fillet his urethra open much as I would devein a strimp.

Halfway through lab, Mike called over one of our anatomy instructors, a retired urologist with rumpled white hair and a kindly demeanor. "Hey, Dr. C. Ilene wants to be a urologist!"

I could have killed him - not only because I was NOT going to be a urologis, but because I had to suffer through a half hour of then-unwanted urologic teaching, in which Dr. C reached into our cadaver's open abdomen with his thick fingers, grabbed our patients spermatic cord (the bundle which houses the vas deferens, scrotal vessels and muscles controlling the family jewls), and tugged until a small round object freed itself from Tony's scrotum. "Aha, you see?" he said proudly as he waved the pickled testicle in front of us, still grasped in his hand like a microphone.

Urology. Hmph. As if.

By the time I got to my third year of medical school, however, urology made more and more sense. I loved surgery, and I loved kids. General pediatric surgery was a great field, but extremely rigorous. Many of the pediatric surgeons I knew seemed burned out. "You know you wouldn't have a life," my ophthalmologist aunt told me. Anyway, I knew I wanted to specialize. Pediatric urology is one of the most diverse fields in medicine. Unlike many fields in surgery, in which you often do the same procedure over and over again, the diversity of pediatric urology is astounding. You can do delicate plastics-like work, repairing congential penis malformations. You can do work with intersex kids - hermaphrodites - to help them recreate their sexual identity. You can reconstruct bladders. The complexity and room for creativity attracted me, as well as the fact that at the end of the day, you can do bread and butter extirpative surgery like taking out kidney tumors.

Urology is also arguably one of the most "medical" (ie: nonsurgical) of surgical specialties, dealing with UTIs, BPH, male infertility, and of course cancer. Most importantly, for though, urologists are almost uniformally nice people. You kind of have to be open minded to even consider the field, neh?

I still get a lot of questions like "What's a nice girl like you doing in urology?" A few raised eyebrows, a few smirks and wink winks. But, as I will confess in this blog, I love my job. I love that I have gotten progressively less and less inhibited the further I get in my training. The stories I get to tell are incredible, disgusting, inspiring and depressing. I am living a full life - thanks for joining me as I tell you about it.

(Note on style: It seems like the act of blogging legitimizes the use of the first person in writing. Since college, I've always tried to edit out the use of the word "I", not wanting to sound too self-centered - even in my personal essay writing classes. Three paragraphs ago, however, I decided, what the heck - this is MY blog. I'm supposed to write about myself. Goooooooooo solipcism!)