Where I’ve Been: Work, Divorce, and Moving Forward

Hey y'all. Welcome back. I'm so happy that you're here. I have had the most chaotic and — hello something two years of my life. But I feel like I'm finally getting back hopefully inch by inch to a more stable place. And soon we will move this studio for what I hope to be the last time. Please let it I have moved this studio so many times and it's now in my bedroom and I'm tired of working out in my bedroom. So, update coming soon. Really excited about that. Anyway, finally hopefully getting to a better balance and I thought it was a good time for a Q&A cuz we haven't done this in a long time. So, we asked you in the community tab what questions that you have and I'm going to answer them today. Thank you so much to Southern New Hampshire University, the sponsor of today's video. We'll hear more about them in a minute. How are you doing? I feel like I shouldn't even answer. I should just leave it that I should just laugh and leave it at that. I'm alive. I'm alive, y'all. I'm alive. It's been a rough couple of years and lots of really massive changes in my life that were very blindsiding and unexpected, but I'm getting to more level ground. Uh I'm still healing. I have been in therapy. I have spent my life savings on therapy. That's where we need to be when things are hard, right? Working with people who help us. So, yeah, I'm good. And being able to say that is amazing. And I know people are going to be really annoyed that I'm not like going into details. And if you follow me closely, I'm sure you've figured out more details than that. And I talk about it on stream a little bit before, too. But it's just not something that everything is really hard for me to talk about. So I don't talk about the nitty-gritty details because it breaks my heart a little bit. But yeah, I'm in New Zealand now indefinitely. And that's okay. I love it here. We have a great support system and really good friends and the schools are great and it's safe and the kids are happy and that's good and I just we also just really miss family and we didn't plan to be here forever but we're okay and there are much worse places that you could be. I love it here and I love work here. I love my job and what I do and the people I work with and my friends. So yeah, I'm a single mom. Got my four kids. I bought a house. It's beautiful. We have a beautiful lawn and it's got space and I have not ever bought a house or car without a husband or a parent in my nearly 40 years until 2 years ago when I bought a new vehicle by myself. And this year, well, a few months ago, end of 2025, when I bought this house by myself. And that feels like progress and moving forward from a situation that I never expected to be in and didn't want still don't love that I'm in. But yeah. Okay. Wow. Uh, that got real deep real fast. Anna, I'm sorry if you're not here for the I don't know. I'm rambling because this is uncomfortable for me and my heart is still hurting. All right, moving forward. Do you work full-time and how do you balance private and work life? I've never worked full-time as a clinical medicine person since I got out of residency. So, immediately when residency, I was like, I want to be home with my kids because full-time as an OBGYn in the US is like well over 40 hours a week. And so, I started working part-time all the way back then when I got out of residency in 2017. Since I've moved to New Zealand, most of that time I've worked uh 6 as my clinical time, which is Wednesday to Friday, plus 24-hour call somewhere in there, and 48 hour weekend calls sometimes. But that is in addition to content creation, which is truly a full-time job. So, Mondays and Tuesdays, I do content creation, Wednesday to Friday, and sometimes weekends and sometimes at night, I do clinical medicine. And that worked really, really well for a while. It's been a lot harder now because of the things I talked about in the last question. And I've actually recently shifted my role temporarily. I'm not leaving clinical medicine. I've loved my job so much. I could never permanently leave clinical medicine, but I have a passion for culposcopy and prevention of cervical cancer. I lead the culposcopy department in our district. And I've recently joined the National Screening Unit as one of their clinical leads for a temporary set period of time, which will allow me to work school hours and be there for my family a little more. And that's where the wonderful sponsor of today's video, Southern New Hampshire University, comes in. I've recently moved into a new role actually, which allows me to kind of niche down my clinical focus a little bit more and more importantly to be more present for my family during this season of life. Now, I am definitely not leaving OBGYn clinical practice. I love my job way too much for that. But even this temporary change has me thinking a lot about how often in life we stay on paths because that's the path we've always been on or we just don't know where to go or what to do next or how to change things up. And that's why I'm so excited to be sharing with you today the

sponsor of today's video, Southern New Hampshire University. If you're feeling stretched between your responsibilities and who you really want to be in life, Southern New Hampshire University or SNHU is exactly what you may need. SNHU is an accredited US university that offers flexible, affordable online degree programs designed to help people keep learning and building forward while balancing work, family, and real life. Southern New Hampshire University is designed for people who want to keep moving forward without putting their life on hold with no set class time. so you can learn when and where it works for you around all your other responsibilities, whether it's work or family or other things that you're carrying in life. SNHU is one of the largest accredited universities in the US, and they offer some of the most affordable tuition rates with programs that are focused around real world experience to help you prepare for the job market. They also allow you the option of transferring in up to 90 credits to help you save time and money. If you're in a season of life like me where flexibility matters, but your growth and career aspirations are still of utmost importance to you, this might be a sign to find your new path. Go to snhu. edu/mdj or click on my link in the description box down below to explore over 200 degree programs and start building what comes next. Thank you to SNHU for being a wonderful sponsor. Now, let's get back to the video. What have you learned as an OBGYn in New Zealand that maybe you would have never learned in the US? Oh my gosh, this is such a good question, y'all. When I got here, I had to be like, "Oh my gosh, how wait, we're keeping that person pregnant with the blood pressure like that? We're not delivering now. We're not inducing. " You know, it's like there's still a lot of intervention here. But I had to keep repeating for myself, outcomes are better, outcomes are better because it's just a very different practice style. I've learned so much from working with the midwives and they have a really cool maternity system here where everybody has a midwife. no matter how you deliver, you have a midwife with you. And I just I've talked about this in other videos. I'm not going to go too in-d depth to it here, but I've just really learned a completely different medical system practice style and different approach to obstetrics. The gynecology aspect, hm, I think it's quite similar. I think obstetrics is very different and gyne is very similar except that in the states we did a whole lot more like primary care stuff that is done here like with GPS. So like papsmears or breast exams or birth control visits or whatever that generally doesn't come to us. We work really as specialists here which I really like. I like being able to work at the top of my training level and yeah I really like the way I get to practice medicine in New Zealand. Not a question, but a thank you. One of your videos probably saved my life. I haven't read these, but that Oh, that's really cool. It was the one where you reviewed and didn't know I was pregnant where she had her tubes tied. I watched that video and realized that I haven't had a period in a while. I had my tubes tied the year before and I immediately took a pregnancy test where I discovered I was pregnant. I went to the doctor and found out it was ectopic and started rupturing before they could get me into surgery. If I hadn't watched your video when I did, I may not have known and gotten to the hospital in time. I hate that happened to you, but I love that even see sometimes I get a lot of criticism for doing like reaction videos and y'all who followed me a while know I do those because that's what you have to do to get your like basic medical information out to a wider audience. I like making just basic medical videos, but I know that more eyes will get on them if I also make entertaining edutainment videos intermixed in there. But I also very much stand by the fact that it doesn't matter what video you watch on this channel, you could learn something really valuable. You will you will come to think you're entertained and you will leave being educated. And I thank you for saying that. I really appreciate knowing that even those videos I mean having written proof are really doing good work in the world because that's my passion and I love that. So thank you and I'm glad you're okay. Are your children getting a Kiwi accent? Um, my youngest who's now seven, huh, we've been here since he was three. He definitely does. But for all of them, actually, people in New Zealand think they sound American and people at home think they sound Kiwi. So, it really depends who you ask. I can hear the Kiwi like accent trickled in. I don't hear American accents. It's just still like my ear default is American accents. I don't really notice that, but I definitely notice when they have little bits of Kiwi ease or accent sound sprinkled in. They almost always call me mom, even my 13-year-olds, which is interesting. And yeah, I mean, we use we all use the like words that you have to use to kind of assim assimilate into the culture, but I think the starting with the youngest, it's the strongest and moving up to the twins, but even they have some little bits of Kiwi accent sprinkled in. Do you have advice for anyone who's experienced major birth trauma, but wants to have another baby? I'd love a video about this. That would be a great video, actually. So, I won't go into a whole lot of detail because I could talk about this for a really long time. So, we probably should make a

whole video about it, but birth trauma, first off, is very real. Any experience that you have where something is going on medically that could be threatening to you or your child can become traumatic. And that can be because of poor health care professionals who made it traumatic. It can be because it was actually just a really serious emergency and it was going to be traumatic no matter who was taking care of you. It can be related to your past history and a combination of all those things. I think the most important thing is recognizing it's there and then talking to someone. I think having a debrief with someone who was there who can go through the details of that day, what happened, why, answer all of your questions. Like a really good debrief appointment is so important. And I know a lot of doctors are not going to make the time to sit down and do that with you and that hurts me. But I think getting your medical records and finding someone willing to do that if you can't get somebody who was there that day to do it is really important. And then therapy. I was talking about this already earlier. I went through an extremely traumatic situation in my own life. A couple of things that I think most people would put very high on extremely traumatic scale in the past 2 years. And I don't know where I would be if not for the help of therapy and counseling professionals. Like I cannot reiterate enough. And I think for people who have birth trauma or pregnancy trauma, that's even more important because you want, especially if you're planning to repeat the event, which is going to be a trigger, right? You want to be established with somebody who knows what happened so that you can if you're having trouble, anxiety, depression, stress during the pregnancy related to that. You don't have to find someone and tell the whole story to them. They already know you. They already know your story. So do all of that before the next pregnancy if that's what you're thinking about doing. I'm a senior in high school and plan to be an OBGYn someday. Recently, someone asked me why, and I said, I don't know. I just do. What drew you into this career? I've talked a little bit about this in a video that's probably very old by now, but I kind of did not think I would want to do this because I really didn't think I would be good at be a surgeon, and I also wanted to have work life balance because even as a med student, I knew I wanted to have a family, and I wanted to be there with my kids a lot. And I knew I wanted to travel a lot, and I knew that was hard in that field. But as I went through my rotations, I just didn't really fall in love with anything until my OB/GYN rotation. And I just I enjoyed every single second down to the point that actually my ex-husband and I were coming to New Zealand for the first time on our first trip to visit here the day after I finished my OBGYn rotation in medical school. And I told him like, I'm just really sad that rotation's over. And he's like, you've been working all the time. Why are you sad? He's like, and we're going on a really cool trip. I'm like, I know. I don't know. It's just I'm sad. I liked it a lot. I just really liked it. And then on that long flight, while I also read all the Hunger Games series, I was thinking and I just thought like, man, you know what? If I think back to my anatomy lab, I did not like anatomy lab. It was a struggle for me, but I loved the reproductive part of it. And physiology was great. I liked learning most physiology, but man, I really liked reproductive fizz. So, if I had looked back over it after then really loving that field, I was like, that's what I've always been interested in. And I started going like, right, I need to choose a career. Not because I'm scared I'll never be good enough to be a surgeon or I'm afraid that I won't be able to find balance. I just have to decide to find it, but I'd rather work 80 hours a week in a job that I love than 20 have to like drag myself there. And I want to be in a field where I like have such a cool, nerdy interest in it that I could just learn about it and teach about it forever. And I think that really comes through in what I do here because that's why this channel exists because I love talking about it and I love my field. Yeah. So there you go. Pick something that you love and that you can learn about and read about and teach about for the rest of your life because if you're interested in the subject matter, the work will always be rewarding. All right, that's the end of our Q&A. I hope that you found that interesting to listen to at the least. If you haven't already, check out Southern New Hampshire University, the sponsor of today's video, by going to my link in the description box down below.