Note: The Nocturnists is created primarily as a listening experience. The audio contains emotion, emphasis, and soundscapes that are not easily transcribed. We encourage you to listen to the episode if at all possible. Our transcripts are produced using both speech recognition software and human copy editors, and may not be 100% accurate. Thank you for consulting the audio before quoting in print.

Ashley McMullen

You're listening to The Nocturnists: Black Voices in Healthcare. I'm Ashley McMullen.

We all have our stories of becoming. Where we come from and where we go is different for all of us. We might move forward with a laser focus, or bounce from chapter to chapter. We may find ourselves in unexpected places because of chance opportunity, because of circumstance, or perhaps because of faith. I didn't see any Black doctors growing up. Who I did see was my mom, a nurse. I saw how hard she worked. And the impact she had on her patients made me want to be a doctor.

There were many times I thought about quitting pre-med, though, and it was my mom who encouraged me to keep going–to do something no one else in our family had done before. From med school to residency, and chief year to faculty, I am still becoming the amazing Black, queer woman that I am. This week, we'll hear about all the roads you've taken to become who you are, and celebrate the folks who supported you along the way. Here's “Episode Six: Becoming."

Patrick McMurray

I'm a second-generation nurse. And when I think about my story of becoming, it all goes back to my mother. My mom has been a nurse twenty-one of the twenty-seven years I've been on this earth. And when I was about eight or nine, she worked for a home health and hospice agency. And they had a “bring your kid to work” day.

And so, it just so happened that my best friend at the time, her mom was also a nurse and worked for the same company. So, we both went with our moms to work. And I remember walking into the building that day. And it's like this two-story building that has, like, a mezzanine area. And I remember it smelled like clean paper and ink and importance. My mom gave us pens and papers and these little kid stethoscopes. And while they were discussing plans of care, me and my best friend were in the conference room, which smelled like old coffee, acting like we were nurses, discussing our own plans of care. And we would take the stethoscope and listen to each other's chests, completely in the wrong areas, I'm sure, but it was a great time.

And, not only on this day, many times my mom, because she was a single mother at the time, would take me on certain visits that she had to do as a part of her job as a hospice and home health nurse. And so I got to meet some of her patients. And this one patient in particular that I got to know fairly well, because every time we went there, she would always give me cinnamon candy and butterscotch. She was so sweet. She was always like, "Come on, baby. Let me go get you some candy." And I remember she would let me watch cartoons when my mom was there. And my mom would, like, take a listen to her lungs and do a head-to-toe assessment on her. And she would, you know, set up her medications for the week and teach her about what she needed to do. The lady had fallen and had a pretty bad wound that was, kind of, healing, and my mom would change her dressings. And I remember her pouring some kind of liquid on it, and cleaning the wound, and then putting this bandage that she got from a supply bag from her company.

But I remember one time we went to visit the house and I wasn't allowed to go in. My mom said, "Baby, I need you to stay in the car for a little while, okay? And lock the door." And I remember there was an EMS truck at this house. And this is this lady that I always loved. And I was like, "Why can't I go in?" And she said, "I just need you to stay in the car, okay?" So she went in, and about probably fifteen to twenty minutes later she came back out. And I had saw them come into the EMS truck and get a gurney and go into the house. And when she was leaving out, I saw her hugging some of the lady's family members. And I was like, "Well, where's the lady? I didn't see her.”

And my mom came and told me that the lady had, had died. And at eight you have an understanding, you know what death is. But I just thought it was so sad. And she said, “It is sad. But sometimes when people are really sick, death can be a release, and death can actually bring them relief from the pain that they've been having.” That was kind of the first time that someone had explained to me that death, though it hurts, isn't always horrible. It isn't always bad.

And I remember thinking that I wanted to be like my momma. When people were hurting, I wanted them to be at ease with me. Like with her other patients. They feel comfortable asking her questions. No matter how silly they thought they were, they weren't worried about being perceived as, you know, ignorant on a subject. They felt like they weren't necessarily talking to a healthcare provider–that they were talking to a friend, a niece, a cousin, a daughter. And I remember just saying, “I want, I want people to be that comfortable with me.”

What I appreciated about my mom is that she never really told me what I had to become. She told me I had to apply myself, I had to work hard. But at eight, when I said I wanted to be a nurse like my mom, who was a single mom, who was fantastic, people told me that boys are supposed to go and be doctors. So I felt that peer pressure. I debated lots of different other things. But about fifteen I was, like, forget that. I've always known what I really wanted to do. Nursing gave me the love for science and the love for service that I wanted, that my mom had helped me establish. So I went to nursing school at eighteen. And I finished when I was twenty. And I started working in the CVICU. And I've grown so much as a nurse, and I've become an educator, an advocate. And it all goes back to my mom.

Corinne April Iolanda Conn

Today I got myself out of bed at 7:30 in the morning, and got on my bike that I got from some anesthesiologist who was moving to Italy. It's an old bike, it's heavy, and it was super cheap. And it was, it is, the best thing I could have gotten myself before all of this “shelter in place” happened. It's like my noble steed, it just takes me where I need to go. And this morning, I just went. I biked throughout the inner sunset in the Presidio, and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. And I, I just kept going higher and further than I've gone, ever, since I started biking in San Francisco, which, I mean to tell you, my calves are becoming something, something that I have never seen before. It's not a bad thing. But what's, what I've noticed when I bike is how, I guess, how much of the world and the worries of the world seem to fall away. My mind just takes in the sights and the sounds and, like, the feeling of my thighs burning as I try and climb one of these hills, and the wind when it blows, making me feel as if I'm, like, trying to cycle through a wall. It's marvelous.

And I never thought I would be becoming a biker. But I found out from my mom that our great, great grandfather, in Trinidad, used to be a bicycle messenger. He would bike all over the island delivering messages around, and I was blown away. I just thought it was like, “Wow, this, this has always been in me. This has been in my ancestral DNA.” And who knew? Who knew how it would manifest, this movement within me that's found expression in this way, right now. It's like I knew it was there. Ever since I was a kid, ever since I learned how to bike, I loved biking. But I never, kind of, made it this–I never had it as a habit. It was something fun to do in the neighborhood, going around the cul de sac with my brother and his buddy. And it occasionally was something that maybe the family would do together on a short, kind of, bike ride around the park, ending up getting ice cream. And so it's always been this pleasant experience.

But this, this thing I'm doing now, where I look around and I see these older, usually Caucasian men do quite religiously and with such passion in, in how their legs pump on their pedals, and I, now I'm like, “Yo, I think I'm becoming one of you!” And it's so cool. And when it's, like, now, for me is something I'm just so stoked to keep giving energy to and let it become whatever it's meant to be.

Fiona Miller

So, I have this memory of my dad. I was probably about, maybe, six years old. We were riding in the car with my little brother. We were driving down the road, and we were at an intersection. And just off to the side, we saw that there was a bicyclist who had been hit by a car. And the bicycle was on its side and the bicyclist was on the ground. And people are starting to gather around. And I remember my dad pulled the car over, right away, and he got out and he said, "Guys, stay here, don't move. I'm going to go see if this guy's okay." And I remember, kind of like, straining my head through the window, trying to see where he was going.

And I remember watching him kneel down by the injured man. And the people who are gathered around sort of, like parting to let him through. I don't know what he was doing. Probably taking a heart rate or maybe stabilizing a spine. But I remember just watching all these people standing around, and my dad kneeling on the ground, doing something to help this guy. And I remember thinking, “Wow, my dad's so cool. I hope I can be cool like that someday.” And part of the reason that this memory really stands out is because when I was growing up, I never really wanted to be like my dad, didn't aspire to be like him. He was a physician. He is a physician. And I mostly remember him being away a lot at the hospital. And I did not really understand what he did. I knew he delivered babies. That was pretty much all I knew. What I really loved was reading and writing and drawing. And when I was a kid, I used to say that when I grew up, I wanted to be a children's book author and illustrator. But I didn't, I didn't have any aspirations in medicine.

And that started to change one summer. It was the summer after I graduated from high school. I was, I was living with my dad for part of that summer. My parents had just split up and he was kind of moving around. He was working a lot. And I could tell that he was feeling sad. And I really wanted to spend time with him but he was working so much that the only way I could do that was to go to work with him. One day I, I found myself in the hospital. And it was the first time that I had been in that environment and seen it through the perspective of my dad. My dad is a perinatologist. So he takes care of pregnant women, delivers their babies, especially the ones who are really sick or really high-risk. And I just remember, sort of, following him around everywhere and seeing the way that he could walk into a room and people breathed a sigh of relief.

My dad is a Black, male doctor that delivers babies. But it wasn't really until I had my own children, that I decided for sure that this is what I want to do. Going through that process of being pregnant, and bearing a child, bearing witness to the incredible, incredible things that our bodies can do, and how perfectly everything needs to align, to make it work every time, is just so beautiful, so mysterious. That's when I realized that I do want to be a part of this. So, you know, I'm in my 30s. I have three children. I'm a second year medical student. So I have taken a very meandering path to get where I am. But I know, I feel very deeply, that I'm in the right place.

Chivon, AD of Clinical Research/Nurse

Becoming. That topic takes me back to my high school years, where both Michelle Obama and I attended Whitney Young High School, back in the ‘80s. It was a magnet High School, still is, where students were selected from every zip code in the Chicago area. And there I was, a young girl from the hood, who grew up on the south side. There was kids from more elite areas like Chicago heights. So, of course, I felt like I did not fit in. I didn't know Michelle at the time. Actually, she was Michelle Robinson. But I'm sure our paths crossed because, when I looked in our yearbook, I saw that she had taken pictures with people that I actually did know.

Whitney Young was a wonderful school, although I only went because my mother insisted that I attend. I did not want to leave my friends in the hood. I remember taking PE classes like fencing and golf, of all things. But the most incredible experience was with two African American teachers who took a special interest in me. It was an algebra teacher and a chemistry teacher. I wasn't doing well in my algebra course. And I remember that teacher pushing me and pushing me. She even called my dad and told him she knew that I could do better. And somehow I actually made it through that course. Then I had a chemistry teacher. He made chemistry so much fun that I excelled. And he saw I was on an allied health track. And he said, "You shouldn't be on this allied health track, you should be on a more advanced track." And he actually took the steps to make sure that I did get on a more advanced track.

I've been a pediatric nurse for over thirty years. Becoming a nurse has been one of the most fulfilling experiences in my life. But the most rewarding experiences were the years I cared for my HIV/AIDS patients. Back in the early ‘90s, we didn't have the potent antiretroviral medications that we have now. So I witnessed a lot of death, especially in children. I especially remember taking care of two young siblings who acquired HIV perinatally. The oldest child was just about a year younger than my daughter. So I loved sharing Ashley's hair bows and dresses with her mom, and we became very close.

The oldest child passed away, and in less than a year the youngest was hospitalized. I remember calling the mom and telling her that our baby was probably not going to make it, and that she should come to the hospital as soon as possible. I assured her that I would, I would be with her baby until she got there. But mom couldn't make it. That was one of the most heartbreaking experiences in my life. I held the baby until she took her last breath.

A couple weeks after that, I got a call for an interview in Dr. William T. Shear's office for a Clinical Research Nurse position in his HIV/AIDS program. He was somewhat intimidating at the time. And he asked me, "So, why do you want this job?" And I said, "Well, Dr. Shear, I just watched a three-year-old die of AIDS, in my arms."

One of my first assignments was to shadow one of the other nurses with her project. And it was about five o'clock in the afternoon. As I was packing up to go, she said, "Oops, nope, I just got a call from one of my pregnant mothers on my study. She's in labor. So we have to go to l&d and hang this IV medication and get some samples from her." Which we did.

So, it wasn't until about halfway through the study that we got a call from NIH, and they, they said we have to open up the study, it was a double blind placebo study where some of the mothers got the actual drug, which was azt, and some did not. And they discovered that the transmission rate from mother to baby had dropped significantly and that, ethically, we had to give everybody the actual drug. It wasn't until about mid ‘90s, when the study closed, that I actually realized what the implications were with all of that. It was plastered all over the news. And, of course, we discovered that the transmission rate dropped from thirty percent down to actually seven percent. That meant that we were going to see a reduction in the number of babies born with HIV. That was a great moment!

Vanessa, Nephrologist

One of the things that's really been on my mind lately is, you know, all the internalized racism, all the constant struggle to convince myself that what folks around me were saying or implying wasn't true–that I wasn't as good as the next person because I'm Black, or that I got into this particular school because I'm Black. Or people acting as if, you know, I don't deserve the benefit of the doubt, in spite of all the training that I've done and all the tests that I passed, just like they did. There will always be folks who are, like, "Oh, you're the instructor? You're the teacher?" And, you know, just not ever assuming that they can learn anything from me. You know, I've been getting these messages since, you know, seven, eight years old, that Black is different. Black is not as good as. Black is not something to be desired. And, certainly, I don't believe any of those things, but it certainly, I feel like it certainly chipped away at my confidence. And, I don't know, it's embarrassing to admit that.

And it's just–It's sad because I feel like if I had it all to do over again, I would have gone to a historically Black college, university, you know, like Spelman for undergrad, Meharry or Howard for medical school. Because what I've heard, or at least what I see, in Black people who have taken that route, they have a level of confidence that I wish I had, you know, because they were nurtured, they were lifted up in their schooling. At least that's what they describe. And they are told everyone around you looks like you, so there is, like, no excuse. I wasn't not even close to happy In undergrad or medical school. Duke for both of those. There are a lot of ugly, overt and subtle, experiences that all just, kind of, chipped away at my spirit. And I feel like, had I gone somewhere where I was a better fit, where there were more people that look like me, or more people that just could see me–me, the person, the potential, beyond the color of my skin or the kinkiness of my hair. I feel like, had I been in a setting like that, I wouldn't be inhibited by the external, put-down voices that, you know, managed to seep inside internally and tell you, you know, the same negative messages. “Who do you think you are, you're not good enough, you're not smart enough, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” As great as I am today, I mean, I feel like I've, based on where I've come from, what I've accomplished is pretty amazing. You know, I'm the first, the first of a lot of things in my family. And I'm the baby of six, but yet I was the first to go to a four-year university, first doctor, all of this with zero guidance. But yet, and still I can't help but believe had I been in a more supportive environment that, that I could be even more.

You know, it's just so disheartening, just how folks’ egos just need to hold on to this. And yet, what it ends up doing is hurting everybody–you know? It is preventing us all from reaching our full potential–the folks who hate, and the folks who are hated. You can't have that kind of energy and be your full self, I don't think. So I just, I wonder what could have been, had I not had those negative voices from inside me and outside me. Oh, well. I just hope that I completely figure it all out, before my time is up here.

Rickisha Berrien-Lopez

I've been thinking a lot about family recently. I grew up in North Tulsa, pretty close to Greenwood where the Black Wall Street used to be. So, these past few weeks, I decided to try to formally look into my history and learn a little bit more about my family. There's a story in my family that I think is in a lot of African American families, about how we're mixed with Native American. My grandma would always say she had a lot of Indian in her. And it was, it's kind of easy to believe. Very light skinned woman. She had long hair. So, I think we all took it as truth. So this past week, I got on ancestry.com along with my two sisters and we started looking into the history. So, the first thing we found was that we, we do in fact have a history with Native Americans but it wasn't at all the history that we thought we had.

I don't know if, in fact, I know most Americans don't know about the history of slavery and Native American tribes. But the five southern tribes that were forcibly removed from the southeastern United States and forced to march to Oklahoma along the Trail of Tears, those tribes participated in chattel slavery, just like a lot of white Southern Americans did in the 1800's. And so in 1830, when they were forcibly removed from Alabama and Mississippi, they took their slaves with them. And so what I began to discover was that we weren't necessarily mixed with Native American, but in fact, we were enslaved by the Choctaw Native Americans. Was very shocking. We found paper evidence of it, you know, on the Dawes Rolls that they took.

So, I remember my sisters and I sending this information to my mom. She was shocked, obviously, with the rest of our family. But we kept digging. So we went back further. That was my, was my great-grandma–the first person we found that was on the Dawes Rolls. Her name was Oda Ann, and she was on there as a four-year-old girl. So then we went back further, and we traced our family through the Dawes Rolls and through other paperwork, all the way to my fourth great-grandfather. His name was Abram, and his wife was Elizabeth. And I remember, we were all on the phone together. And my, my sister said, "Oh, my God, you guys, I just found a document that says that our fourth great-grandpa was enslaved by someone named Henry Folsom." And she immediately, you know, sent us the document.

And so I'm looking. It's a scanned document, very, very old document, obviously scanned. And it had his name, Abram Radford, and a few other columns–his age, around when he was born. It listed him as being enslaved. And then it said that his owner was Henry Folsom. And it was such a strange feeling to, to have, sort of, evidence or, I don't know, to have a name. And so I remember my sister kept saying, "This is so wild. This is wild, guys. Isn't this wild?" It's, yeah, I agreed. And I didn't think there was a better way to describe it, I guess it's pretty wild.

Along with that document, we found an oral history that my, that some family member had taken of, of his family. And it included a history of how they got to the Oklahoma territory in the 1830s. When Abram and Elizabeth were young, they were sold on an auction block to a slave trader, along with a bunch of other African American slaves. They were all tied together and marched by foot from Alabama to Southern territory of what would become Oklahoma. And, he said, they tied them together and marched them for months until the slave drivers thought that they wouldn't be able to escape or find their way home. And then they cut the ropes, untied them and allowed them to walk untethered. And so they walked that way for several more months. But as they got closer to what would be their new home they gave them shoes, and they started giving them more food as a way to, to fatten them up so they'd be a more desirable slave when they got to, to the Indian Territory. And so when they got there, my fourth great-grandpa and Elizabeth and many other African Americans were sold to this man named Henry Folsom. It's pretty wild.

Anonymous, Physician

So, I feel like every good coming of age story starts with a girl. And she was amazing–funny, smart, beautiful–all the things that I really wanted from a girlfriend when I was an undergrad. But we weren't together at that point. She was Puerto Rican and Jewish and she, she loved to dance. I never really considered myself a dancer. I mean, I was, you know, you're, like–I'm Black so I, I got rhythm. But, uh, yeah I never really considered myself a dancer. But she loved to dance. And she loved to, specifically, salsa dance. And I remember when I thought, you know, this is, this is my chance, when she invited me and some of her friends out to go dancing. And I couldn't say no. So we go out to this place. We walk in, it's kind of dark. I think there was, like, an actual live band performing. I was nervous. You know, we had planned to come there a little bit early so I could get the lesson. And at least get the, the ones and twos, the basics down. But we missed that. So we get in there, I'm kind of off to the side, you know, in the corner, not really asking anyone to dance. And she grabs my hands. She starts teaching me the ones and twos. And it was horrible, stepped on our feet multiple times, I was constantly off, be bumping into other dancers on the floor.

All and all, it was an embarrassing night. But I was determined to impress this girl. So I joined the actual, I joined the salsa club at my undergrad university. We would meet in this little back room at the Campus Center for, like, an hour. So maybe, like, ten, twelve of us. Every week, we would meet up for an hour and start dancing. At the end, we'd have some, like, free-range dancing, and I started getting better and better. And then we started actually going out. So, I could just do free dancing at bars and clubs. Initially, it was difficult, but slowly and slowly, you know, more and more, I got my courage. And it became like my thing. You know, I actually started to really enjoy salsa dancing. Up until that point, you know, this was all in preparation for her. I'm going to sweep her off her feet.

But before that a buddy of mine takes me to this place in DC called Pier. It closed down a few years back. It was this small door on, you know, on the front side. I mean, honestly, you could, you could drive right by it, if you were in downtown DC. But it was huge. Primarily Black or Afro-Cuban dancers would meet here. It only happened, actually, once a month, every third Friday. It's hard to explain exactly what was different about this place. I mean, the way that people, like, the way the dancers–like, the Afro-Cuban influences in the way that they were dancing totally changed the salsa that I had known, to be something radically different. Like, the way they syncopated the music, the way that they were engaging their partners, the way that their body moved. I had learned how to dance salsa. But these guys, like, were salsa. This is what it's supposed to look like. And I remember just how amazing that place was. And feeling, like, for the first time, that I wanted to dance salsa for me, as opposed to dancing it for this girl.

We actually ended up dating for about a year and a half until we sort of parted ways right before med school started. But I never stopped dancing. All throughout medical school and residency, salsa dancing has been grounding for me. I can still remember looking into different programs for residencies. And you know, after I evaluate the program for its research and faculty and clinical education and all this stuff, the very next thing I look at is, okay, where are the salsa clubs? And how good are they? You know, I love my colleagues, I love my patients and I love being a doctor. There's just sometimes you just need to, like, really cut loose. And salsa is really the only place that I feel like I can cut loose in that way.

You know, sometimes when people are learning how to dance salsa, they find that it's too restrictive (FADE IN SALSA MUSIC) and that you have to, you know, 1 2 3, 5 6 7, like, the steps are too restraining. But once you understand that the music frees you, it's a feeling that I can't really explain. And then once you get to experience that with a partner at the same time, there's something magical there. And it's really hard to explain to people who aren't dancers. But when you do meet like-minded dancers and you connect on the dance floor, no words need to be spoken. (SALSA MUSIC)

Ashley McMullen

This has been The Nocturnists: Black Voices in Healthcare. I want to thank our core team, executive producer Kimberly Manning, The Nocturnists founder Emily Silverman, podcast producer, Adelaide Papazoglou, sound engineer Jon Oliver, and medical students Rafaela Posner, and Lauren Wooten.

Thanks also to executive producer Ali Block, and program manager Rebecca Groves, and communications intern Cora Becker. Our illustrations are by Ashley Floréal and our theme song is by Janaé E.

Black Voices in Healthcare is made possible by the California Medical Association, the California Health Care Foundation, and people like you, who've donated through our website and patreon page. Thank you for supporting our work and storytelling. If you'd like to add your voice to our project, visit our website at thenocturnists.com We'll be back next week.

Until then, remember: Black lives matter. Black health matters and Black stories matter.