For my chief year grand rounds presentation, a mentor suggested that I use it as an opportunity to share my experience going through surgery training and having children. He suggested I share both the good the bad.

I loved this idea. It felt like we would be doing an M&M conference on our lived experiences as humans going through professional and personal challenges. I liked the idea that what was seen as a “problem” (pregnant surgery resident)...

became an opportunity for us to change our culture to be more inclusive. I wanted to include the fact that we were able to increase awareness of surgery boards accommods for pregnancy during training among our residents, and as a result more women were considering fam planning.

I also wanted to share the layers that intersectionality added to this already difficult experience.

This is why I love surgery, I thought. We can focus on a problem with objectivity and learn from it. That is what we do with our own clinical complications after all, right?

Needless to say, I was very excited about this presentation ...

That is until I was told that it would have to be reviewed and approved by the leadership.

My lived experiences would have to be “approved” by leadership (who by the way disapproved of my choices)....

My experience with every -ism in the book would have to be verified and approved by leadership who turned a blind eye to them for years...

And that is when I realized that the objectivity of surgery, the commitment to continuous improvement and growth is only applied selectively.

The problem solving strategies we rely on to save lives are put to the wayside when the problems concern tearing down racist structures.

Academia would rather keep its head in the sand and remain comfortable with this racist structure and power dynamics.

This doesn’t work for the rest of us. And because of that, Black and people of color trainees and physicians will continue to be driven out.

You can’t talk about #implicitbias if you can’t even face the fact that #explicitbias aka #racism is alive and well in medicine.

Get your heads out of the sand and get uncomfortable. That is what we preach after all, isn’t it?