Dr. Catherine DeVries
Appearances
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Now I think all that's changed. But at the time, it was really great to see that not only had I not been doing it badly before, but I learned some new tricks, as one always does. And I felt a lot more confident having spent that time. The other thing is that as pediatric urology was defining itself as a specialty, in order to more or less join the club, you had to have done a fellowship.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Everybody had to do a fellowship. And if you didn't, you were one of those general urologists who liked doing pediatric urology, but you weren't, you couldn't really call yourself a pediatric urologist in that way. It was kind of an exclusive club.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And I really do feel that it's a good thing to have a broad experience, to have experience working on one's own, to get out of academics, even if we're coming back, to be the one responsible. You know, the team approach is a good idea, but actually when you are the one responsible for your outcomes from the beginning to the end, it puts a whole new light on patient care.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And I think that's valuable. And it also helps you to become a more independent surgeon because you're able to work and set up a case so that you can do that with a tech and pretty much any tech anywhere.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
and you can travel around the world and surgery has its own language but you can work with people who don't speak your language because if you know how to set up a procedure and how to work with people who have some experience, you can work with anybody pretty much anywhere.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And I do think that that is a value that many people who go into academics don't experience, especially if they go directly from their training.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Yeah, so I went to Augusta. Actually, this is a bit of my personality situation. There were some opportunities where I could have gone to be somebody's junior partner. I did want to set up my own program, and Augusta, they needed a pediatric urologist there. So at that time, then I was also the only female urologist on the faculty.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And also, I was on call 24-7 for five years because I was the only pediatric urologist there. And so that was a very good experience in surgical terms. I also had, for the first couple of years, a 5-8 appointment to the VA hospital. So I still took care of adults. And, you know, I like taking care of adults.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
I was, during that time, also working with colleagues from the CDC doing reconstructive urology on adults with lymphatic filariasis. which is a terrible condition, also known as elephantiasis. But many people will have seen pictures in textbooks about how men can get terrible scrotal, big hydroseals, and in addition, also leg edema.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And in certain parts of the world, it is a terrible, terrible condition. And so I worked a lot with the CDC to develop standards for that, also with WHO. And so with reconstructive urologists, before reconstructive urology became its own thing. There were just a few people who were really doing it a lot, kind of well-known for it.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Jerry Jordan and Jack McAninch were some of the big guys at that time. And I learned a lot from them when I was doing more than just the pediatrics, but the reconstruction for the adults.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Yeah, I looked around at a lot of different places and oddly, one of the reasons why Utah looked so good was the airport. So if you are working in a big city and it takes you an hour to get from where you live and work into the airport,
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And at that time, we had to take all the equipment we were going to be using because in many places you couldn't be sure that the suction would work, the cautery would work, even the anesthesia medications would be available. So we had to take everything in great big plastic boxes and we'd take them all over the planet. And so it matters how you can get all of these things through customs.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And so having a nice small airport where you can get to know the customs people coming in and going out. The trip into the airport was pretty easy. You can go east to Asia or west to Africa or south, which is a little more hard because you had to go through Houston or someplace to get down to South America. But Salt Lake had a wonderful airport.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And beyond that, it also had a wonderful children's hospital. And, you know, Primary Children's Hospital is a fantastic, really wonderful place to work. And Salt Lake itself has a very international community. The population there has a lot of experience doing LDS missions. And so many, many people have been to a lot of different countries.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And this was not... The work I was doing wasn't seen as a hobby so much as a part of life that's accepted, respected, and also we could do fundraising.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Yeah, it was something that I had not really experienced in any city or community. I grew up in California, but in other places it's seen as a nice thing to do, but certainly not a thing that would be part of your life and career. And nobody ever questioned that in Utah. In fact, that was part of the terms of my employment. I told them that I could come, but that I would be traveling quite a bit.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Pat Cartwright, who is a pediatric urologist in Utah, had been working with me already in Honduras and Vietnam and Cuba. So I knew that Pat understood what we were doing and Ultimately, pretty nearly all members of the faculty of the University of Utah have been on IVU trips, and some of them have served on the board.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And so this has been very much a piece of the Utah academic experience, in addition to the nonprofit experience. outside experience. So it's sometimes hard to marry academics with nonprofits. They have different calendars, time schedules, and requirements for work.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
You know, it's hard to know exactly about contributing to the success part. I think persistence contributes to success, whether you're a man or a woman. And I was persistent. I guess I still am kind of persistent. But I think also it is a little different voice. I think we bring to conversations a little different voice and a little different set of values and experience.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Not to say that one or the other is bad, but I'm glad that we have a better mix and balance of voices. Now at the university, we have a... I think five or six women faculty members. We just all took a photo recently at my retirement, and so it was great fun to see how many of them. But I think as an advantage goes, when I could get heard and sometimes I couldn't get my voice heard.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Then it stood out. The problem sometimes is just getting heard. And I experienced this interestingly more at the American Urological Association than I did with my own university in terms of male colleagues and getting heard. That took a little longer.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
I discovered early on when I was traveling around, and as I mentioned before, we used to take everything when we would go. We would bring our own instruments, we'd bring our own equipment, cautery machines, anesthesia machines, really everything to make sure that we had what we needed in order to do the surgery that we were intending to teach and to do.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
ivu has always been an educational organization we started that out to be an educational organization the motto was teach one reach many but it wasn't specifically just to do surgery and go home because that can always lead it leave a trail of disaster or maybe not disaster but if you even have one or two complications and you haven't worked with somebody else
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
locally to manage that and to know what to do, you haven't really helped. In fact, you can hurt and undermine the whole effort. So we have sought and intended to work with people who have wanted us to be there to teach them. So there's no point in my mind going into somebody else's
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
hospital home community and to work with the patients that they care for every day without respecting their position in that community and to work with them to help them provide better care for their patients. And as we do that inside hospitals, you start to learn about hospital systems.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And I think this is a thing that we rarely learn in medical school here in the States or probably anywhere else is how the system works. How do hospitals work? How are the nurses hired? It matters because the nurses are very often hired on a different system than the doctors are. So if all the nurses go on strike as a surgeon, you're toast. You can't do your work. You need to understand
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
how the place functions, the nurses, the doctors, the people who order the equipment and supplies, the whole system, including where the electricity comes from. Because if you're in the middle of operating and the whole room goes dark and you have no idea when the electricity is going to come back on, this was before everybody had cell phones and could just turn them on. You're toast. So
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
It's important to know how the whole system works and that gets into the public health part of it because public health is critical for surgery to occur. We have to have clean water. We have to have sterile process. We have to know that infectious disease is addressed and that we have not just a sterile processing of the instruments, but we learned during Ebola
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
that we have to have a public health approach to how the hospital runs. You know, you cannot share the bathrooms. The staff can't share bathrooms with sick patients. Otherwise, all of your staff will get Ebola too. You know, you have to have ways to sequester disease from not disease, how that's done in hospitals and how surgical surgery fits into that, especially
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
In low-resource countries where hospitals are very much built on old colonial styles, sometimes these are very old hospitals that were built by the former colonies, whether that was England, France, Portugal, pick your colony. They all had certain ways that they built hospitals at that time. And then the newer hospitals are sometimes built on Russian models or on American models.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
where there are maybe no windows in the OR, which might be okay if you had really reliable electricity. But if you don't, then when it goes out, you're in the dark. That's where the public health part comes in, is looking at the systems, both the community systems, and that includes infrastructure, but also the baseline health status of a community.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
I mean, if the kids are all undernourished, you're not going to get good outcomes. Similarly, as we all know with the fistula community, if we don't have good maternal care and we don't have good training, then you have all of these secondary problems for obstetric fistulas and that sort of thing.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
So it's true for all aspects of surgery, whether it's trauma care, whether it's urological care or anything else you plan to do. you do need to be aware of public health. And public health people almost never go into an OR.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
So the book, getting back to your question, was an attempt to introduce surgery to the public health community as well as to introduce public health concepts to the surgical community.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Yeah.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Interestingly, you know, I wouldn't have guessed it, but the when we were first working in Honduras, there were opposing camps in San Pedro Sula in the journalism community. And not everybody was all that enthusiastic about Americans coming in, even though we were working very much with our Honduran colleagues. And there were newspapers that were
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
printing that the Americans were coming and experimenting on the little boys in Honduras. And then, so that was not every newspaper. There was the opposing newspaper, which printed a more favorable and accurate view of what we were doing. But there are, depending on where we're working, always going to be some factions that are either anti-American.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
IVU, for example, is an international organization. Not everybody who volunteers and works is American. There are people from... All of the countries where we have started working now are volunteers themselves and work. So it's not always welcomed by all members of a community. But by and large, we've had very good reception.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And I would say that all these things change when it's your family member or your child and you want the best care. And you realize that there is something to be learned from a visiting team that will improve the quality of care for everyone that does change people's minds.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
You know, funny you should mention that because one of my colleagues here in Utah, we were having dinner just two nights ago and he is just finishing his master's in public health. He's a trauma surgeon. And he said, well, how about we do another edition of this? He's getting his master's at the London School of Public Health and so he wants to carry this forward.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
I think we've learned a lot with, yeah, with the COVID epidemic it focused a lot of people on what surgery and the surgical environment has to offer. both in terms of respiratory health, the systems for ventilation, a lot of hospitals and recovery rooms and ICUs were taken over. People saw the insides and the guts of what's in a hospital and what hospitals have to offer.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
for public health in a pandemic. We also ran out of masks in many places and people took for granted that masks weren't necessary for hospitals, but possibly not anywhere else. And then all of a sudden there was a shortage of masks.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And now I think much of the public and certainly most of the medical community is more aware of the integration of surgical services, including ICUs, recovery rooms, anesthesia, and all of the principles that are needed to have safe surgery with good outcomes are also needed for certain pandemics.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And I think this is more incentive for people to understand how we integrate and that we're not two completely separate, diametrically opposed areas of healthcare.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Yeah, well, I just got back from Zimbabwe. So I was there for the COSEXA meeting. COSEXA is the College of Surgeons of East, Central, and Southern Africa. Getting back to pediatric urology, In many other countries, in fact, most of Sub-Saharan Africa, pediatric urology is done mostly by pediatric surgeons, mostly by urologists. And so the training is, there's a gap in training, I would say.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
The pediatric surgeons don't have as much experience with scopes as we do in urology. but they have a lot of experience with newborns and newborn physiology and managing sick babies, especially sick babies in their low-resource countries. Urologists, on the other hand, have experience with stones, and as it turns out, stones are getting much more prevalent in kids than they ever were.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And so, scopes of all sorts. nephroscopes, cystoscopes, all the scopes we use are not familiar to most pediatric surgeons. And there really aren't any training programs at all in that region, in the eastern region, actually, or the west. And so newly, this is very exciting for me.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
The West African College of Surgeons, as well as the East, Central, and Southern region, are starting to recognize that they need to build in their own training centers. It's been wonderful that IVU and other nonprofits have been going for many years to these places. But it's not sufficient. I mean, they really need to train their own, and we can help support that in good ways.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
So we put on the first ever course. It was really well attended. It was a multidisciplinary course, and it spanned not just...
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
pediatric urology, but transitional urology to adulthood, because God willing, all of these kids will become adults, and they will transition through adolescence, but they still have problems they were born with, and they'll have to navigate adulthood, and sexuality, and for some of them, motherhood or paternity. These are problems that adult urologists deal with.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
The people who care for them as babies need to look forward to them as adults and plan forward. And so now we're starting to integrate these communities and this I think is really the most exciting and most fun thing. I mean, I had a terrific time. I came home from Zimbabwe, you know, kind of walking on air because there are now a critical number of people
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
in the region who are trained, who are interested in training, and who I think are going to carry this forward so I can retire and hang out at the cattle ranch here in Wyoming.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Well, I was the only one during my training. There had been one previous. That would be Linda Shortliffe. And Linda had trained also at Stanford, and she remained on the faculty. But amazingly, I never met her. During the time that I was training, because she was at the VA, and then she was off doing her fellowship in pediatric urology, and by the time she came back, I had finished.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And you can travel around the world and surgery has its own language, but you can
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
So even though we had both trained in urology there, we never were in the same place at the same time. So it's kind of strange to realize that. But then there wasn't another one until Martha Terrace came. And that was after I had finished my chief residency. But Martha and I have stayed in touch. And she's now the chairman of urology at the Medical College of Georgia, Augusta University.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
work with people who don't speak your language because if you know how to set up a procedure and how to work with people who have some experience you can work with anybody pretty much anywhere and I do think that that is a value that many people who go into academics don't experience especially if they go directly from their training.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Although in the year that I finished medical school, half of the incoming interns were women. In surgery. So in the various specialties. So it really didn't seem at that time to be all that strange. At Stanford coming in, we had women in plastic surgery. I think there was one in neurosurgery and several in general surgery, possibly not in orthopedics.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
But at any rate, it did not feel like it was particularly groundbreaking while I was in medical school. It was only once I got into urology and I looked around and there was nobody there that it seemed a little, it's not exactly lonely because there were plenty of guys and I was so busy I didn't have time to think about that. But in terms of mentorship, there really wasn't any.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Well, it was a very small program, so it was hard to be alone. There were only two residents per year. So it was a long trip in a small boat, in a canoe, really, because we all knew each other very, very well. But there were not many women, and the first time I really met other women was five years into my training when I went to the basic science course.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And there, there were women from Baylor, women in Washington. You know, I met several women, other women trainees, and I was amazed that some programs actually had two trainees. or three in the pipeline.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
I finished in 1990. Okay.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Yes. And at that time, I was also raising two kids. So I was married and had two kids. And my husband was a resident in pediatrics and then anesthesia. So we were busy, very busy.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Well, you know, when I was looking at residency, it was before we had hours limits. So when we were on call, we were on call until the next day and somebody else was on call. And sometimes that was every other night. And very often that meant staying in the hospital all night. So looking at work-life balance or work-family balance, there really wasn't any such thing because my husband then, Dana,
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
was also on call in the hospital. So we had to have live-in help during that time. And we planned it this way because I started my residency a little older because I'd been in graduate school. And so I started when I was 30. And looking out at that time, there didn't seem to be other options. You either had your kids before residency or after residency.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And fertility medicine wasn't what it is now. I mean, I know residents and fellows who are women who are freezing their eggs because they want to have children sooner or later. They may not have a partner, they may want to get through their training, and they want to know that it's a possibility in the future. For us, it seemed like you either had them before or hoped it all worked out later.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
So we decided, my chairman at the time, Dr. Stamey, made it quite clear. In fact, he asked me during the interview whether I intended to have children, and I had to make it clear that no, I did not.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Yes. But then, you know, the next woman to come along in the residency, Martha Terrace, did have kids during her residency. And by that time, Dr. Stamey had actually changed his tune on that. And he really celebrated having kids. So, you know, even... Some of the old guys and chairman changed their opinions about it. But when I was coming through, it definitely wasn't a thing.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And so when my male co-residents' kids got sick and if they took a day off, you know, they were heroes for doing this. This was really a wonderful thing that they'd go home and help their wives. But if my kids got sick, well, I should have thought about that before I got into surgery in the first place. and made provisions. So that was the double standard. It was not easy.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And my kids would have attested to that. But then when I was chief resident, then my husband, Dana, died. So everything changed.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
The team approach is a good idea, but actually when you are the one responsible for your outcomes from the beginning to the end, it puts a whole new light on patient care. And I think that's valuable. It also helps you to become a more independent surgeon because you're able to work and set up a case so that you can do that with a tech and pretty much any tech anywhere.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
Yeah, you know, I wasn't quite sure. what I wanted to do at that point. But I did have a job at Kaiser. And Kaiser was really a very good place to work at that time. I at least had control of the hours. So that was a very good thing. I would know when I was working and when I'd be off. That was a novelty. So now even more important as a single mother, right? Yes, that was a good thing.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
You know, I could drive the kids to school sometimes. You know, that was a whole new experience for me. And the other thing about it that was good about Kaiser was that there was no cherry picking of cases. So I got everything my partners got in terms of oncology, women's pelvic floor, pediatric urology, we got the full spectrum.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
That was back sort of in the era where there were true general urologists. And at Kaiser at that time, we were. And so I would one day be doing a radical prostatectomy and the next day, posterior urethral valves. That was the way it was. And the other thing is we didn't have residents or trainees.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And so we mostly scrubbed with techs and sometimes with a partner if it was a really challenging case.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
There was one other who was at a nearby Kaiser. Jackie Newman was also she had trained in Chicago. And she was up at another Kaiser north of me and we became friends. So it was very nice to have somebody else in the neighborhood.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
I think what did it was that I had by that time started working internationally. When I had been at Stanford, one of my professors, Don Laub, who founded Interplast, currently it's called Research, had invited me to go do hypospadias surgery. And we started in Honduras and subsequently in Vietnam and Cuba. But even though I thought I was well-trained, I was a little insecure.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
I wasn't sure I was doing the surgery as well as I possibly could be doing the surgery. And I didn't think you could do everything in urology equally well. In other words, I couldn't do stones and oncology and pediatric and everything else equally well.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
And I felt sort of insecure about that, especially since I was going to teach some of these practices in places where admittedly my experience was greater than most of the people I was working with. And yet, I wanted to be an expert, and I wanted to feel secure in that. So I went to San Diego to do the fellowship.
BackTable Urology
Ep. 212 Expanding Her Scope with SWIU: Dr. Catherine deVries on Navigating Challenges for Sustainable Global Impact
I think it was the only one year fellowship at the time, but that was fine with me because I was already board certified. I had already been working on my own. In fact, back in that time, they could bill for me, you know, because I could run my own clinic and I was already licensed in the state of California. So as a fellow, In fact, I think I did get a faculty appointment.