Latest / Clearly Hormonal / Ep 30: Becoming the Doctor My Mother Needed

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Ep 30: Becoming the Doctor My Mother Needed · Clearly Hormonal

• 0:02
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Welcome to Reset Recharge, the podcast where women's health takes center stage.
• 0:07
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I'm your host, Dr.
• 0:08
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Komal Patil-Sisodia, a triple board certified endocrinologist and women's health expert.
• 0:13
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: This show is all about empowering you with the knowledge to understand your metabolic health, navigate hormonal changes, and feel confident in the conversations you're having with your healthcare provider.
• 0:24
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Whether you're managing symptoms, exploring treatment options, or just want to feel more in tune with your body, you're in the right place.
• 0:31
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: As a physician, my goal is to educate on this podcast.
• 0:34
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The content shared here is for informational purposes only and should not replace personalized medical advice.
• 0:41
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: If something we discuss resonates with you, please talk to your healthcare provider at your next visit.
• 0:46
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Now let's dive in and help you reset, recharge, and take control of your health.
• 0:53
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Welcome back to Reset Recharge.
• 0:54
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Since its Menopause Awareness month, I wanted to take this episode to share my story of my journey to becoming a physician and why midlife care has become such a passion for me.
• 1:05
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Sometime in the middle of high school, my mother started to feel ill.
• 1:10
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: She started to feel short of breath when walking up our driveway, which was not so steep.
• 1:14
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Stress levels had been high the last year, few years prior to this, and her symptoms were initially written off as that stress.
• 1:21
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: No one could really figure out what was happening to her during that time.
• 1:26
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I had also made the decision to pursue medicine.
• 1:28
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I think I always knew that I wanted to be a doctor.
• 1:31
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: We have family photos of a three-year-old me with my stethoscope and all my dolls lined up to examine as patients.
• 1:40
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I was in the thick of my college applications.
• 1:42
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: When we finally got the news, my mom had an 80% blockage in one of her coronary arteries at the age of 42.
• 1:50
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It was in the left anterior descending artery, which is commonly known as the widow maker.
• 1:55
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: We were so lucky that it was found before she had a heart attack.
• 1:59
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Since stents were not what they are now, she was scheduled for a single vessel bypass surgery to address the problem.
• 2:06
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Her surgery was scheduled.
• 2:08
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I want to say just before I was supposed to fly to the East Coast for an interview, I was 17 and interviewing for one of those combined bachelor's degree in medical school programs, and the days leading up to the surgery in my interview were just a chaotic blur.
• 2:23
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: That moment in time changed our lives forever.
• 2:27
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: For my mom, it was the turning point in her life where her health problems started to deteriorate her quality of life.
• 2:34
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: For me, it was the start of my journey into medicine and healing, hoping to help patients avoid what my mom was going through.
• 2:41
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I often look back and wonder whether my mom's life and health could have been different if she had someone advocating for her and hearing her concerns.
• 2:49
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It's common knowledge that women weren't included in medical studies until 1993.
• 2:54
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: My mom's health issues started just a few years later.
• 2:58
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I watched her navigate the medical system and always assumed it was harder for her because she was an immigrant.
• 3:04
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I never once dreamed it was because she was a woman, and that sounds funny for me to say.
• 3:09
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Coming from an immigrant family and a culture where sons are generally valued more than their daughters, my upbringing was not typical though my dad and his two brothers all had daughters and there are no Patil men left to carry on our family name.
• 3:24
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: My parents were determined for us to have all the opportunities we could through education.
• 3:29
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Their ask was that my sisters and I study hard and make something of ourselves so we wouldn't be dependent on anyone.
• 3:35
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: We were never treated as being less than since we weren't boys, and I didn't grow up with a belief that being a woman would limit me in any way.
• 3:45
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Looking back, now, I know how naive this was.
• 3:48
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: But it helped me reach my goals regardless of entering a field that was dominated by men.
• 3:54
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And in the meantime, my mom continued to struggle to find answers.
• 3:58
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: A few years after her initial surgery, the graft in her heart failed.
• 4:03
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: So what they'll do usually in surgeries like this is take a piece of the vein in the leg and use that to graft the artery or go over that area of bypass.
• 4:13
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Usually these things will last 10 to 15 years.
• 4:15
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It was just a few years before my mom's occluded, and luckily this time she was able to get a stent, but they still didn't know why this was happening.
• 4:27
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: After several doctors' visits, she finally had specialized cholesterol testing that showed she had an elevated lipoprotein little A, which is a cholesterol particle known to increase the risk of heart disease and cause plaques within those arteries.
• 4:41
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: There are no treatments for this yet, but there are some very promising ones in development, so that is excellent news for people out there who have elevated lipoprotein little.
• 4:51
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: A few years after this event, when I was finally in medical school, I met my mom's cardiologist for the first time, and it was a rude awakening for me, but it came into very clear focus for me, why she was struggling with getting someone to listen.
• 5:07
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Her doctor was the antithesis of the type of doctor I try to be.
• 5:12
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: He was rude, he was dismissive, and it was clear that he had written her off as a stressed out housewife.
• 5:18
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Towards the end of my visit, my mom asked him, doctor, can you please explain my heart condition to my daughter so she can explain it to me in our language and I can understand it better?
• 5:28
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And his response made me see red.
• 5:30
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It still makes me see red today.
• 5:32
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: He paused and looked at my mom for the first time during the visit and said, Mrs.
• 5:37
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Patil.
• 5:37
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I've explained this to you so many times that it doesn't matter what language you hear it in.
• 5:42
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: If you haven't understood it by now, you're not going to understand it at all.
• 5:47
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And I watched my mom's face fall and it just broke my heart.
• 5:53
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I'm not a violent person.
• 5:54
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: But I have never wanted to throat punch somebody so badly.
• 5:58
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I managed to keep myself under control.
• 6:00
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And as we walked out to the car, I told my mom that she needed to find a new cardiologist.
• 6:05
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: ASAP and luckily she ended up finding an amazing doc who took great care of her and saved her life again.
• 6:12
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: When I was in my residency, he actually worked at the hospital that I currently work at.
• 6:18
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: But the rage that I felt during that initial encounter with the first cardiologist is still fresh in my mind today.
• 6:24
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It lives rent free in my head, but I decided in that moment I was going to channel it into making sure my patients felt heard during their visits.
• 6:33
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Even if I didn't have the answers to their health issues, I promised myself that I would do my best to make sure they were heard.
• 6:40
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: That was the moment that I started becoming the doctor that my mom needed.
• 6:46
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: My mom's story wasn't just about her heart, it was about how invisible she felt trying to get help.
• 6:52
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I watched her get disillusioned with her care until she found a team of doctors that actually listened for.
• 7:00
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: She was really fortunate because she ended up finding an excellent primary care doctor, an excellent endocrinologist, an excellent cardiologist, and but it took a very long time, and even then she continued to develop more health issues that no one had answers for debilitating arthritis, type two diabetes, high blood pressure, and despite her health issues and stressors, I watched her continue to show up for me and my sisters and do the best she could in spite of these issues.
• 7:29
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And having watched her do that, it continues to inspire me to make medicine more about listening and helping people verbalize their symptoms and fears rather than just trying to find a diagnosis in my mind when somebody comes into my office, it's all about connection.
• 7:46
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: So let's fast forward a few decades to 2020.
• 7:50
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The year I turned 40 and I started off that year, so optimistic with, you know, thinking, oh, hashtag 40 is the new 20, or whatever bullshit was going around.
• 8:01
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: But then came the pandemic and the start of my own perimenopause.
• 8:04
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And after dealing with secondary infertility in my thirties, I'd spent.
• 8:10
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The latter half of my thirties just working on my health.
• 8:13
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The five years leading up to the pandemic, I was exercising, I was optimizing my food intake, I was losing weight.
• 8:19
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I was following up with my primary care doctor and getting all my screening tests.
• 8:23
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And because of my mom's history, I made sure that all of my cardiac tests were checked, including the lipoprotein little a.
• 8:30
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: That was normal.
• 8:31
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: My coronary artery calcium score was normal.
• 8:33
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: But over the next few years, despite doing all these lifestyle things, I started to get diagnosed with things.
• 8:40
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Psoriatic arthritis came on six months into the pandemic.
• 8:45
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I attributed it to stress because it's autoimmune.
• 8:48
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: My blood sugar started to creep up into the pre-diabetes range.
• 8:51
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And again, I wrote that off as stress and positive family history.
• 8:54
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And then finally last year.
• 8:56
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I asked my PCP my primary care doctor, who is phenomenal to repeat my lipoprotein little A and I don't know why I asked for it to be checked again, because the current recommendation is that if it's normal, you don't need to check it again in your lifetime.
• 9:12
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: You can just call it a gut feeling.
• 9:14
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I don't know why I asked her to do it to this day, but sure enough, my lipoprotein little A level had risen 30 points and was now in the high risk category despite all of my lifestyle changes, and it was at that point.
• 9:28
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I started to piece together that perimenopause likely has a lot to do with it.
• 9:33
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: One of my mentors in my fellowship taught us that if you look at the natural history of aging in a midlife woman and overlay it with, when hormone levels start to decline, you'll see an association as hormone levels decline, chronic illness will start to rise exponentially.
• 9:49
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: All of the things my mother had dealt with were now becoming diagnoses of my own, despite my best efforts to make it not happen.
• 9:57
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And then it hit me-- if I am a doctor and I feel lost and confused and like what I'm doing is not working, what are all my patients feeling?
• 10:06
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: When I finally got a chance to talk to my mom about her menopause, she said she never had any symptoms and didn't know when she would've gone through it, and I asked her to clarify.
• 10:15
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: She said that she had a hysterectomy in her early thirties, and no one ever spoke to her about hormones.
• 10:21
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: She was so busy taking care of my sisters and me that she never even paused to really think about it.
• 10:27
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And likely this was not even a discussion point in the late 1980s.
• 10:31
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I started to create a timeline of her health, and I realized what an impact perimenopause and menopause had on her life.
• 10:37
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I am convinced that her premature heart disease is linked to her early menopause, and that was my mirror moment.
• 10:45
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I realized that I wasn't just treating women like my mom anymore.
• 10:48
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I was her.
• 10:49
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I was the woman who was trying to figure out what was happening to her body.
• 10:53
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: In a world where nobody was really talking about it, and that moment changed everything for me.
• 10:59
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Once I was able to see that I wasn't able to unsee it, I had seen through this matrix of the complexities of women's health.
• 11:10
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And I started to look for resources and I found that there were incredible physicians who were starting the conversation around the same time, I started binging their podcasts and their books as well as studies on women's health and women's metabolic health, and that's when I decided to build something new.
• 11:27
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I didn't know what I wanted it to look like, but I spent an afternoon when I was on vacation hanging out with one of my girlfriends, just brainstorming and typing away on my laptop.
• 11:38
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And what came out was that I wanted to start a podcast on all of these health issues.
• 11:44
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And then this year it felt like it was not quite enough, and I realized that I wanted to create a space that felt completely different from all of the places that I'd practiced in previously, I wanted to create a space that felt safe and calm, where women had time to talk openly about their symptoms, their fears, their hopes.
• 12:07
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: The longer I've practiced, the more I realize that healing doesn't happen when you're rushed.
• 12:12
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It happens when you're heard.
• 12:14
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I started focusing on metabolic health in midlife and menopause care because that's where I saw the biggest gap, the stage where women are told to just deal with it and there are no answers.
• 12:25
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I'm a big believer that knowledge is power, and the more women I can help understand their bodies, their unique personal and family histories, and how that plays into chronic disease, the more options these women have because midlife isn't an ending.
• 12:39
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It is an evolution.
• 12:41
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I believe that there's so much more left for us to do.
• 12:44
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: In March of this year, I launched East Side Menopause and Metabolism to create.
• 12:49
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: That space where women could ask questions they'd been afraid to ask, where they could feel normal again, and where they could understand what their bodies were telling them.
• 12:57
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And every time I get the privilege of sitting across from a woman who finally feels seen, I think of my mom every time I take the time to explain something, to make sure she really understands.
• 13:12
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I'm honoring my mom.
• 13:14
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: My hope is that we're not just fixing problems, that we're rewriting the story of how women experience their health.
• 13:21
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: When I think about women's health now, I see it as a spectrum, a beautiful, ever changing story.
• 13:27
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And it's funny because if you listen to my.
• 13:30
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: First podcast episode was actually a little angry.
• 13:33
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It was called, I think Mother Nature Is Not a Feminist, and I gave a talk titled that and one of my friends and colleagues, Dr.
• 13:42
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Sonia Wright, who is amazing.
• 13:43
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And if you don't follow her, you should.
• 13:45
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: She came out to me after the talk and said, you know, it was a great talk, but I have to say I disagree.
• 13:51
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I think Mother Nature is the biggest feminist of them all, and that really took me by surprise, but it stopped me in my tracks.
• 13:58
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I went on to think about what she was saying, and she's right.
• 14:02
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: From puberty to reproductive years, from mid midlife to menopause and beyond, our bodies are always changing and always teaching us something new.
• 14:11
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And that wisdom and knowledge that we cultivate with all of those changes that our bodies are going through that is.
• 14:19
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: One of the most beautiful experiences that we have as humans.
• 14:23
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Is it difficult?
• 14:24
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Absolutely.
• 14:25
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: But does it give us strength and resilience in ways we didn't think was possible?
• 14:31
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Likely, yes.
• 14:32
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I look at my mom and I see that strength in her.
• 14:35
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I look at my patients.
• 14:37
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: I see that strength in them.
• 14:40
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: So thank you to Dr.
• 14:41
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Wright who showed me that if we can learn to listen, really listen, we will see that every stage of a woman's life carries that kind of power.
• 14:54
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: And that's what becoming the doctor my mother needed means to me.
• 14:59
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It's not about having all the answers.
• 15:01
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: It's about creating space for women to feel safe asking the questions.
• 15:06
  Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia: Thank you for tuning in, and I'll see you all on the next episode.