Heart Behind the White Coat | Sickle Cell Expert Marwan Shaikh, MD
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In this program:
Dr. Marwan Shaikh shares his journey to becoming a hematologist and sickle cell specialist in this Heart Behind the White Coat (HBWC) program. Watch as Dr. Shaikh explains how his interests and passions led him to his medical speciality, how he uses interaction with patients to improve their care, and his advice to aspiring medical students.
Transcript
Dr. Marwan Shaikh:
So I've actually gone through a whirlwind of I guess career aspirations. Coming from the Indian subcontinent, my father actually...we always joke around that from our culture, a lot of us end up in engineering or medicine, and so I always tell them that you brainwashed me into becoming a physician. And so ultimately, I think in high school, I started making this transition into computers, and so I went into college and I did really well in programming, so I actually did computer engineering from the beginning, and then at some point and I realized, you know...and this was actually my personal take on this rather than my parents at this point, but I realized that I'd rather deal with people than rather deal with computers for rest of my life, and so ultimately in my mind, I said, You know what, I'm going to go into medicine and after med school for a little while, to be honest, I was a little undecided and we talk about people trying to find their passion and trying to find what they really enjoy, and so I went through every field, cardiology and nephrology pulmonary. I told my wife and everything, and it taste what my interest would be, so eventually, when I started rotating in the ICU, I realized that I love taking care of patients, especially more at the end of life and dealing with these complex scenarios, and so oncology seemed to completely fit with that and Hematology as well, and so it was a way for me to deal with and still take care of the rest of the entire body and all the organ systems, but also deal with these end-of-life issues and things where cancer treatments a whole different ball game than treating diabetes and hypertension, we're talking about life and death pretty much at every aspect, and so helping patients transition and helping patients take care of those and treat those diseases with just something that I slowly started to love, and then somewhere during fellowship, I realized that hematology, and even specifically benign hematology, where to start taking care of sickle cell disease and anemia and blood clots and bleeding disorders, that stuff just fell naturally with me because a lot of that has to do...
How it is explained and everything, and to do with engineering and science and logic, and those are the things that I really enjoy.
Now, I think it's been actually multiple people, but probably, to be honest, the biggest person is going to be my wife. Like I told you before, I had to tell her literally everything, and she put up with me for the entire picture and help guide me and say, Okay, what do you really truly are passionate about, what do you really enjoy in life? And so those things, now, the way we've had our conversation discussions, it helped me kind of just focus more on the hematology and oncology, but there's always...along the way, there's always one or two people that help kind of stick out and say, “Okay, you know what, make sure you do what you're doing, make sure you go follow your passion,” and so those kind of impacts my parents or the Dr. Nyame from West Virginia. All my mentors from West Virginia were all very influential in helping me.
The biggest thing is that when we think of a physician, we think of someone who's very too matter, did a matter of fact, very strict or very to the point and everything, and when I'm in clinic, I try to bring a different aspect to not only my patient care by interaction. So in clinic, I try to be super goofy, and sometimes I'll make the corniest jokes, but to me, it makes my day when I'm in clinic and I can make a cancer patient laugh two minutes after I told them they have cancer, and to make them be able to switch gears completely and give them a different perspective and help them...to me, that's a really rewarding thing, and so whether it's there or at home with the kids, just goofing off doing the silliest things, that's what makes life enjoyable to me.
Follow your passion, follow what you love, medicine is a long, long road, and you know shadow with other physicians know what you're getting into, and when you get to medical school...I mean, nurse practitioner, PA school, any time in nursing, whatever it is, it's breathing and drinking through a fire hydrant. I mean, there's so much coming at you at any point that you have to take a step back, take time to relax, take time to enjoy your time, learn what you need to do, but the more you put in the time and they have for the more you'll be rewarded, not only in your patient care, what your interactions with your colleagues and the treatment outcomes that you deliver ultimately to your patients. Ultimately, we are here to do no harm, and so eventually...and that's our Hippocratic oath that we slope to at the end of med school and at the beginning, so ultimately do what you really love, put in the effort, and if you like sickle cell disease or whatever it is, you learn what's out there. Be an advocate, take the time to spend extra resources and time just focusing on that area and do what you love, if it's not sickle cell, fine, if it's something else that's okay, but if sickle cell is what you really love, then go for it and put everything that you have into helping those patients...
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