Cara Natterson, AB 1992
My biggest challenge in healthcare was finding balance.
When I was practicing, my husband and I were always rounding on our patients at the crack of dawn, then we spent all day with our patients in the office, only to go back to the hospital at the end of the day. This was how we felt most integral to our patients’ journeys. So when it came time to have a family, neither of us really knew how to build in space or time for our kids. As a pediatrician, that became painfully ironic: I outsourced all of my own child rearing in order to take care of everyone else’s kids. The biggest challenge in my healthcare career ultimately became my happiest as I realized that being a general pediatrician didn’t mean, by definition, physical presence in an office. It meant being a doctor, which has taken different shapes and forms at various stages in my life: writer, consultant, and even founder of a healthcare-related company.
My best friend in medical school was an architecture major during undergrad and then completed a post bac program. I bonded with her in the anatomy lab because, as you can imagine, she was able to articulate the depths of the body so well through the drawn image - much better than I ever could. She chose to become a surgeon, matching in a joint general/plastic surgery program and during our intern year, she was very famously followed by a TV news program, documenting what it was like to be a surgical intern around the clock. In medical school, she had it together more than anyone I knew. But halfway through internship - not to mention on camera and in full public view - she quit her residency program. It was such a moment. Ultimately, she trained in emergency medicine and now runs the department at her hospital. But back then, she was the first person I knew who was able to recognize that what we are choosing in health care is a paradigm. It is a way to solve problems through a diagnostic lens. It’s not one job or one corner of the field forever and ever.
The biggest challenge and greatest joy of medicine is recognizing that when you go down this path, you do not have to stay in one place - you can pivot, using the same lens and problem-solving strategies, to do a 100 different things.
I write middle grade reader books for 8-, 9-, and 10-year olds, and I write for parents, too, all with a focus on puberty. The written word presents such a perfect megaphone for lessons that kids internalize to help them grow up healthier, safer, and happier. Kids can be extraordinarily motivated: if you tell them to brush their teeth, they might reject the idea, but if you explain why, they will often take that sentence and carry it with them every morning and every night, their dental health now transformed. Whether it’s talking about using soap in a shower or preventing sexually transmitted infections, I believe that I have chosen a medium that allows me to help change the world even just a little bit, and making it a safer, happier place for those who thumb through my pages.
Cara Natterson, MD
AB 1992 | Sociology and Biological Anthropology
Pediatrician / Author / Consultant / founder OOMLA
Compiled and interviewed by Felicia Ho