I’ve written about my reasons for leaving UCSF. And while it was painful to feel unsupported, isolated, undervalued, and gaslighted—including by Black leadership within the institution—I was already a published author, recipient of multiple coveted grants and fellowships, and double board-certified in nephrology and internal medicine. I’ve since learned that my story pales in comparison to so many other young Black physicians who are being disproportionately pushed out of medicine at a time in their career when they have no license to practice independently but do have $240,000 of debt on average after completing medical school. Only 5% of physicians in training in the US are Black, but account for 20% of program dismissals. And this doesn’t even count those who are convinced to resign to avoid the damaging mark of dismissal on their record.
how to get on the kidney transplant wait list
Mr. Garcia was one of the lucky ones.
Not in the born-in-poverty or kidney-failure-by-30 sense. But lucky in the sense that by the time his kidneys failed completely, he was in California where Medicaid pays for undocumented folks get the same dialysis as the US-born and not in one of the 38 states that wait until undocumented people show up to their ERs damn near dead before they will give them a dialysis treatment or three before they send them back out to start the process again five or six days later—even though it is far more expensive than standard care. Because racism.
my final straw
“My pending exodus from academic medicine after 15 years…” This is how I started my piece recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine. I wrote my thoughts on what academia needs to do to right the wrongs that centuries of racism and anti-Blackness have created, but not on the experience that served as my final straw. A story in the news since then makes me want to share it now…
birthday wish
Today is my 50th birthday.
A couple of weeks ago, I was lamenting my birthday’s approach because of its promise of middle-aged woman invisibility as punishment for graying hair and slowing metabolism. I managed to climb out of self-pitying funk long enough to eke out a “happy 50th birthday old man” wish to a Latino friend. His response: “Lol…Thank you. Crazy. Never thought I’d live past my 20s yet here I am.” And the next day George Floyd was murdered, just days after we learned about Breonna Taylor’s and Ahmaud Arbery’s murders. George was 46. Breonna was 26. Ahmaud was 25.