Dr. Catherine DeVries
speaker
80 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Dr. Catherine DeVries’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The team approach is a good idea, but actually when you are the one responsible for your outcomes from the beginning to the end, it puts a whole new light on patient care. And I think that's valuable. It also helps you to become a more independent surgeon because you're able to work and set up a case so that you can do that with a tech and pretty much any tech anywhere.
And you can travel around the world and surgery has its own language, but you can
work with people who don't speak your language because if you know how to set up a procedure and how to work with people who have some experience you can work with anybody pretty much anywhere and I do think that that is a value that many people who go into academics don't experience especially if they go directly from their training.
Well, I was the only one during my training. There had been one previous. That would be Linda Shortliffe. And Linda had trained also at Stanford, and she remained on the faculty. But amazingly, I never met her. During the time that I was training, because she was at the VA, and then she was off doing her fellowship in pediatric urology, and by the time she came back, I had finished.
So even though we had both trained in urology there, we never were in the same place at the same time. So it's kind of strange to realize that. But then there wasn't another one until Martha Terrace came. And that was after I had finished my chief residency. But Martha and I have stayed in touch. And she's now the chairman of urology at the Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University.
Although in the year that I finished medical school, half of the incoming interns were women. In surgery. So in the various specialties. So it really didn't seem at that time to be all that strange. At Stanford coming in, we had women in plastic surgery. I think there was one in neurosurgery and several in general surgery, possibly not in orthopedics.
But at any rate, it did not feel like it was particularly groundbreaking while I was in medical school. It was only once I got into urology and I looked around and there was nobody there that it seemed a little, it's not exactly lonely because there were plenty of guys and I was so busy I didn't have time to think about that. But in terms of mentorship, there really wasn't any.
Well, it was a very small program, so it was hard to be alone. There were only two residents per year. So it was a long trip in a small boat, in a canoe, really, because we all knew each other very, very well. But there were not many women, and the first time I really met other women was five years into my training when I went to the basic science course.
And there, there were women from Baylor, women in Washington. You know, I met several women, other women trainees, and I was amazed that some programs actually had two trainees. or three in the pipeline.
I finished in 1990. Okay.
Yes. And at that time, I was also raising two kids. So I was married and had two kids. And my husband was a resident in pediatrics and then anesthesia. So we were busy, very busy.
Well, you know, when I was looking at residency, it was before we had hours limits. So when we were on call, we were on call until the next day and somebody else was on call. And sometimes that was every other night. And very often that meant staying in the hospital all night. So looking at work-life balance or work-family balance, there really wasn't any such thing because my husband then, Dana,
was also on call in the hospital. So we had to have live-in help during that time. And we planned it this way because I started my residency a little older because I'd been in graduate school. And so I started when I was 30. And looking out at that time, there didn't seem to be other options. You either had your kids before residency or after residency.
And fertility medicine wasn't what it is now. I mean, I know residents and fellows who are women who are freezing their eggs because they want to have children sooner or later. They may not have a partner, they may want to get through their training, and they want to know that it's a possibility in the future. For us, it seemed like you either had them before or hoped it all worked out later.
So we decided, my chairman at the time, Dr. Stamey, made it quite clear. In fact, he asked me during the interview whether I intended to have children, and I had to make it clear that no, I did not.
Yes. But then, you know, the next woman to come along in the residency, Martha Terrace, did have kids during her residency. And by that time, Dr. Stamey had actually changed his tune on that. And he really celebrated having kids. So, you know, even... Some of the old guys and chairman changed their opinions about it. But when I was coming through, it definitely wasn't a thing.
And so when my male co-residents' kids got sick and if they took a day off, you know, they were heroes for doing this. This was really a wonderful thing that they'd go home and help their wives. But if my kids got sick, well, I should have thought about that before I got into surgery in the first place. and made provisions. So that was the double standard. It was not easy.
And my kids would have attested to that. But then when I was chief resident, then my husband, Dana, died. So everything changed.
Yeah, you know, I wasn't quite sure. what I wanted to do at that point. But I did have a job at Kaiser. And Kaiser was really a very good place to work at that time. I at least had control of the hours. So that was a very good thing. I would know when I was working and when I'd be off. That was a novelty. So now even more important as a single mother, right? Yes, that was a good thing.
You know, I could drive the kids to school sometimes. You know, that was a whole new experience for me. And the other thing about it that was good about Kaiser was that there was no cherry picking of cases. So I got everything my partners got in terms of oncology, women's pelvic floor, pediatric urology, we got the full spectrum.
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