The Female Pain Docs, Dr. Meera Kirpekar and Dr. Alopi Patel

My guests Dr. Meera Kirpekar and Dr. Alopi Patel are two young anesthesiologists and fellowship trained Pain Medicine physicians who created a podcast and social media platform, The Female Pain Docs, to educate and empower patients as well to promote the use of social media for effective branding, networking and advocacy in the field of anesthesiology and pain medicine. They use social media to educate patients about our profession and allay any hesitations they may have from medical misinformation they may have seen online. 

As women physicians, both Dr. Kirpekar and Dr. Patel find themselves “a minority in the field of pain medicine, and their experiences have led them to believe that the female population is underserved in the global understanding of female-based pain syndromes. They are passionate in advocating for women’s health, and as a result, their practice focuses on female patients.”

Follow Dr. K and Dr. P online @thefemalepaindocs
Listen to their podcast, The Hurt by the Female Pain Docs 

Connect with Dr. Asha Padmanabhan:

🌐 Website: www.theleadershiprx.com
📝 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/asha.padmanabhan.9
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/asha.md/
💼 LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/ashapadmanabhan

Subscribe to my email newsletter for more actionable tips, click here
https://asha-padmanabhan.mykajabi.com/newsletter

✨ If this episode resonated with you, be sure to subscribe, rate ⭐️, and leave a review ✍🏼. Your support helps us bring these conversations to more women physicians.

 Subscribe to my email newsletter for more actionable tips, click here
https://asha-padmanabhan.mykajabi.com/newsletter


To explore how Coaching can help you, DM me on LinkedIn or Facebook

Transcript

[00:00:00]Dr. Asha Padmanabhan:  Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Leadership Prescription Podcast for Women Physicians. Today, it's really exciting because I have not one, but two guests. Two physicians, two anesthesiologists. So that's close to my heart. Pain physicians as well. And the exciting part also is they are young! And I'm looking forward to learning so much from them.

[00:00:51]I caught sight of their new podcast, which I will have them talk about on the show. And it's exciting what they're doing in that space. So I'm looking forward to this. So my guests today are Dr. Alopi Patel and Dr. Meera Kirpekar, and I am going to let them introduce themselves.  So, do you want to start, Alopi?

[00:01:10]Dr. Alopi Patel: Thank you for having us. And we're excited to be here. I'm Alopi, I am an anesthesiologist as well as a pain physician and I am a wife and a mother. I wear many different hats and I am also a women's health advocate. 

[00:01:25] Meera and I started this project and a social media platform in general, including the podcast, to create an education platform as well as a way to empower our fellow women.

[00:01:34] So we're excited to share that with you today. 

[00:01:37]Dr. Asha Padmanabhan: Thank you. And Meera?

[00:01:39] Dr. Meera Kirpekar: Of course. So I'm Meera Kirpekar, I'm also an anesthesiologist and pain physician. And Alopi, and actually met during our fellowship. And we started to see that there really isn't a lot talked about in terms of women's pain and women's health in general.

[00:01:52]It definitely there's a lot lacking in that space. So we wanted to create a podcast and a social media platform as a way to empower women to be able to take charge of their own healthcare and have better access to information because a lot of times they don't.

[00:02:05]But yeah, so we did that recently. We're very excited about it and we just want to see where it goes. 

[00:02:10] Dr. Asha Padmanabhan: Okay. Excellent. Excellent. So, as you guys know, this is a podcast for women physicians and leaders in the field. So I don't think that could be anything more than. You guys are what, two years out of fellowship?  And two to three years, almost three, almost three. And for you to get started on this, where most physicians that I know at this point in their career are really focusing on growing their careers and getting their clinical skills done.

[00:02:35] So for you to not just do that, but to get started on this extra step of almost well, it is entrepreneurship and leadership and getting the word out. So where did this start? 

[00:02:46]Dr. Meera Kirpekar: You know, I think that we actually had talked about doing something together. Not really this idea, it hadn't fully formulated in any way.

[00:02:54] And I feel like even now it's still formulating. We're still learning. We're still figuring out where we're headed with this. But we had talked about it during fellowship because that's when we became friends. Or, you know the way Alopi and I would put it is that I forced her to become my friend is really what happened.

[00:03:10] So it was like, we're becoming friends against your will. And we talked about doing something together, but it's very hard. Once you become a brand new attending, you're just, learning so many other things, you're learning a new potentially, for me anyway, learning a new hospital system. And just, you're just getting your feet in terms of learning, how to really be a doctor where you are fully responsible for the patient.

[00:03:33] And so things went on a pause for a couple of years. And then after that, during the pandemic really is when things, things sped up in some ways at work and also slowed down. Globally. And we had more of a chance to talk about it and see what we could come up with together.

[00:03:52] And if we sort of came upon the idea, together in a way, alopi brought it up and we talked about different avenues we could go with it. And it was just a very mutual collaboration. And it worked out well. 

[00:04:03]Dr. Alopi Patel:  Meera and I, like she said, we became friends during fellowship and we also spent 12 weeks studying for our oral boards together.

[00:04:10] So that was six to seven days a week for 12 weeks. And somehow we managed to stay friends. And then, she convinced me, she's the fun one is what I say. I'm the boring one. She somehow convinced me to join her on a trip to Eastern Europe for three weeks. And we further solidified our friendship there. And we just knew that we wanted to do something together.

[00:04:30]We both had very similar passions, very similar interests. We were both very much women's health advocates and wanted to do something for our patients. So it was an idea that kind of came together organically and the pandemic was near us at the perfect sort of opportunity when everything's sped up, but also slowed down for us to really talk about, so we wanted to do  something related to women's health. 

[00:04:50] So, what can we really do? And in the sort of digital world, social media world, where we realize that patients are getting a lot of information from the internet, was really the best way to create a podcast and a social media platform.

[00:05:02] So we can connect directly to patients. And that was another sort of area we recognized. There needed to be a bit more physician sort of presence. And during the pandemic, when we noticed that there was a lot of misinformation, but that was also a prime opportunity to create correct information, being educated to our patients and other people in general.

[00:05:23] So our first idea  let's put together information in a podcast form. And then once we created a podcast, we realized, adapting to the social media era as well would help amplify that information. 

[00:05:35]Dr. Asha Padmanabhan: So the pandemic birthed this podcast, or it only just brought it to fruition because the idea was there before, from what I'm hearing.

[00:05:43]Dr. Meera Kirpekar: Yeah. Yeah, it was it was, but it was life, always gets in the way or you use, life's getting in the way as an excuse, a lot of times to say you don't have time for it. And then I think with the pandemic in lot of ways, it's yes, you were working in the hospital, you were responsible for a lot, but you also everything slowed down.

[00:06:01] So you couldn't use that excuse as much in terms of getting in the way. And so we decided to really. We just, I don't even, I don't even fully remember the day, but we just, somewhere in that I remember the week where we just decided okay, let's talk about it. 

[00:06:13] And then we just got on the phone and then spend some hours talking about what we could potentially do and putting it together. And then we spent months going back and forth.  Obviously you have a podcast there's so many edits, so many different things, just testing things and failing over and over again, in terms of just so many growing pains for it to finally come to fruition six weeks ago.

[00:06:35]Dr. Asha Padmanabhan: Yeah, it's not easy, you think you can do a podcast and then you start thinking about putting it together and the details are enormous. So now you guys are both in New York. Okay. So you went through the worst of the pandemic in the beginning stages . So tell me about some of the learning points each of you went through, because now you are fresh attendings.

[00:07:00] About a year out of fellowship and now you're faced with the situation in the hospitals. How was your practice affected? What did you see? Where did you see the leadership opportunities?  

[00:07:13]Dr. Alopi Patel: So for us, we were about we're completing our third year. So we were about at the end of our second year of being attendings.

[00:07:21] And like you mentioned, there was there was a lot of growing. There's always a lot of growing in the first few years of being an attending, learning how to be an attending, learning how to practice the nuances of even a pain practice as well. So we were learning that and I had also become a mother, within my first year of being an attending, which caught me by surprise. 

[00:07:39] So my first year of being an attending was a lot at once of trying to be an attending, then finding out I'm pregnant within a couple of months of starting and then being a mother within my first year. And then adapting to that only to have a pandemic sort of, thrust upon us before my baby was even one.

[00:07:55] So it was a lot of growing and adapting. And it happened very quickly in the sense that we knew it was brewing, but in New York it went from okay to bad, to worse very quickly. And we both work in New York City hospitals that were affected pretty drastically. Although we weren't in the worst areas of New York City, we still had it pretty bad.

[00:08:14] And we were worth working in COVID units. COVID intubation teams, operating room with COVID patients. So, it taught me personally about adaptability in the face of adversity, as well as resilience. And I'm still coping and understanding, and really digesting everything that happened in the past year and what's still happening.

[00:08:35] So in terms of how that formed me as a leader, I would say adaptability that, we were blessed enough in our life until now not to have experienced as such a sort of severe life threatening event and to adapt to that, but also maintain your resilience and to be able to persevere past it.

[00:08:54] Made me a better mother, for sure. Absolutely. It made me a better leader in the sense of, and I feel like I'm still very young in my career. So when you use the word leader I'm like me I'm the leader here? But I could see that it's, we are slowly becoming, leaders in, in our own way. And it made me a better leader by understanding that we are a team.

[00:09:16]And to see my colleagues, the way we functioned in those COVID ICU, our PACU became an ICU, right? Literally overnight in the sense that the whole area was pretty much transitioned into a negative pressure unit. And to see my colleagues, my residents, fellows, who were pain fellows were working in COVID ICU units, who hadn't been in the operating room for months.

[00:09:37] So it was really interesting to see my colleagues really rise to the occasion, like every single one of them, and to look around me and see that every day really empowered me and inspires the people around me inspire me every day. So I think in the sense of the pandemic being a leader I learned from the people around me to grow and to continue to be resilient.

[00:09:57]Dr. Meera Kirpekar: I absolutely agree. So for me, my wedding was actually supposed to be pretty much the week after the pandemic hit. And so I went from, literally like the Thursday, it was a Thursday when sort of the city went into lockdown. The country started slowly going into lockdown.

[00:10:17]And my wedding was the following Saturday, was supposed to be the following Saturday. So it was a very last minute sort of cancellation because no one really knew what was going to happen. No one really knew. I mean, it was like you knew, but you didn't fully know. And it was very, it's very funny because my husband actually saw this coming, earlier than I did. 

[00:10:34] And that's probably has to do a lot to do with, if you're a bride, you're not thinking to yourself that you're gonna have to cancel your wedding. Like you're not really thinking that to yourself. And for him, he saw that coming in February.

[00:10:45] Like he was like, I think that's, what's going to happen, but he didn't tell me because he was like, oh my God, she's going to think that I don't want to get married and that I'm having cold feet. And he was like, no, it's not cold feet, it's a pandemic. And so finally it was. Few days leading up to the Thursday when he was like, I think we're going to have to cancel.

[00:11:02] And I still didn't really want to believe it. But then we did, it was Thursday night, we  canceled the wedding. And then the following Saturday, which was supposed to be the wedding date, I was working in the hospital. And it was a very big change was very not something I was expecting to happen.

[00:11:19]I was expecting to, be getting married and being on vacation. And so it was jarring to say the least for that aspect of it. But I feel like it made me throughout that whole process throughout that whole experience, it you learn not to sweat the small stuff in a way.

[00:11:35] The canceling of the wedding, which was a very big deal for a couple of days, became not a big deal by the next week. And it became very much it'll be fine, we'll reschedule, we'll figure it out. It'll be fine. And that kind of happened with a lot of things. And even with a lot of things that we were doing in terms of the podcast, like later on, we started talking about that.

[00:11:54] It was like you, you learned going through something like a pandemic and working in a hospital and being, and seeing awful things in that arena, you learn to take a step back and realize that things that you're worried about are they really worth worrying about? And there's so many things that are, there's so many bigger things that are happening. 

[00:12:13]A lot of things that are happening to you. A lot of sacrifices that you may have to had to make a lot of people have to make more sacrifices. So I definitely put my own life and my own worries in a lot of ways into perspective. And made me calmer, in a way and made me , not worry about things so much.

[00:12:29]Still do. It's human nature, but less so I think less, less worried about things in general. And then I a hundred percent agree about the adaptability. That's a major thing that I think the pandemic probably taught a lot of people. And I think humans in general are very resilient and humans in general are very adaptable.

[00:12:45] I think that's one of the major qualities of being a human being is that you're adaptable to all kinds of situations. And this certainly put that into perspective with having to be in the hospital and working with colleagues that also didn't expect that's the way things are going to go.

[00:13:02]But learning to work with colleagues about that. And, I really, I agree with Alopi. I really learned a lot from my colleagues that were true leaders in that arena because I still saw myself as a junior attending. And I mean, I still am, I guess, but I saw myself as a junior attending and saw myself as the desire to be a leader in a way, but then also recognizing the people around you that really are, and how their experiences and how much their training and their experiences just being an attending for many years have made them exceptional leaders.

[00:13:33] So I feel like I learned a lot from them. 

[00:13:36]Dr. Asha Padmanabhan: That is interesting because I think what this pandemic has done is reset a lot of things in terms of. You can go forward from here and say, okay, if we could handle this, there's really very little that life can throw at us that you cannot handle. And as women physicians and junior attendings, you talked about people that you saw who had been attending for a while, and what you learned from them as leaders and what someone who is a resident or a fellow now can learn from you guys who yes, you were junior attendings, but that crucible of the pandemic took you through the fire.

[00:14:16] And gave you strengths that probably a junior attending would not have had three years ago.

[00:14:22]Dr. Meera Kirpekar: Yeah. That's 

[00:14:25] Dr. Asha Padmanabhan: an interesting way to look at it. 

[00:14:26] So what are the leadership things with your attendings that you saw Meera, that made you think that's how I want to be? 

[00:14:32]Dr. Meera Kirpekar: I would say for one, just being able to be authoritative and making decisions. Fast, sort of fast decisions. Learning how to delegate tasks, where in that kind of space, when you don't have time, really, you don't have as much time to think about it.

[00:14:48] And you know, we're anesthesiologists.  So it's not like we don't do that or don't see that in an operating room. When things happen in an operating room, of course, as the anesthesiologist, it is your responsibility to delegate and to be that leader in that room. But I think it's a different scale when you're doing that for an entire ICU or an entire or PACU that has become an ICU.

[00:15:10]And then also having to figure out, just in terms of how pressing things are, where, you're also trying to do emergency cases while having these, it's not like that doesn't stop that, that still is an aspect of it that still continues going. You still have, there are still patients with other needs that are beyond COVID that you have to be able to also take care of. 

[00:15:31]And also, still be a doctor for. And so I think seeing that leadership aspect on a bigger scale. 

[00:15:37]I think another major part was seeing the leaders also address how everyone's doing in terms of how all of their staff are doing mentally. How they're coping with it, how they're dealing with it.

[00:15:52] Also, keeping in tune with that, not forgetting the physicians, nurses, like the staff that's involved in taking care of this. Cause it takes a big mental toll. And it's, it is yes, of course, about the patients and keeping them safe. But it's also about keeping.

[00:16:05] Your own staff safe and your own staff safe both physically in terms of PPE, but also mentally.  

[00:16:13] And, even shifts.  Dividing that up so that no one is overburdened. No one feels like they don't have the ability to go home and process and take mental breaks that are needed to be able to function and be a good doctor.

[00:16:26] So I think it was like, seeing those leadership things that you see normally in an operating room or in a pain office.  You see those things, but seeing it on a, sort of a bigger scale and also taking into account how their staff is doing, I think was a big part of it for me. 

[00:16:40]Dr. Asha Padmanabhan: You, again, bring up a really interesting point because.

[00:16:43]Something that's coming out of this pandemic now a year down is, the brunt that has taken on physicians, on our mental health. And to know, it seemed like Meera that you were speaking to a few different people who you saw the humanity and who they took that time to check on their staff and make sure that you guys are doing well.

[00:17:03] Is that something you saw to Alopi at your hospital? 

[00:17:06] Dr. Alopi Patel: Absolutely. I am very blessed.  I am very happy with my job. I'm also very blessed with the leadership in my department. And I agree with that, that the leadership in our immediate department, as well as, the extended department all were very motivating, inspiring.

[00:17:21]They also checked up on us and, my chair woman is great and she's one of my women sort of mentors and also a person that I always have looked up to. And she personally reached out to when she found out that I had separated from my daughter for the sake of, her protection. Cause we lived in a high rise and we didn't know what COVID was going to do to children.

[00:17:41] And I was living alone and many people in the department were taking care of each other and. It was so nice to see that, that people who were still beyond us still cared for every single person in the department and that they saw the best in each of us and recognize the hurdles each of us were going through.

[00:17:58] I wasn't the only person in my department that separated from family. We had multiple people that within 24 hours, they were with family and then made the decision to send their children away. For one of my colleagues sent his children away for almost three months. I remember. I was separated for about five weeks or so.

[00:18:15] And so were some of my other colleagues, but just adapting to that, recognizing that we're all human, we're still emotionally struggling and coping by being alone or working through this very grim reality in front of us, seeing other people's parents and other people's children die in front of us.

[00:18:31]We had young deaths in our hospital as well. And seeing that. And seeing our leaders be human to us and be vulnerable with us and relate with us. It was  comforting to see that we were all human at the end of the day, no matter where in our career we were all human.

[00:18:49] Dr. Asha Padmanabhan: I think you guys saw something that many of us through our entire career never see, and I don't mean the pandemic or the virus or the effects of that. What I mean is for most of our careers, as anesthesiologist were isolated in, in, like you said, the OR or the pain suite. And we never see this human face of our department of the department pulling together.

[00:19:11] And for you to have seen that so early in your career and see the leadership that it takes to actually make that happen. Where, like I said, I am now 18 years into my career, and that has not happened where the department has had to pull together in this way. Where we recognize that we are human and we need the support, not just the medical care.

[00:19:33] So that is a huge leadership lesson, I think, to take away from your leaders in the hospital and for you to do that so early in your career, how is that going to affect you as a leader going forward?

[00:19:48]Dr. Alopi Patel: It actually was a huge lesson to me. I feel like. So I, like I said, I was, I became pregnant in my first year of being an attending. I was a mother during my second year, and then the pandemic hit just as my second year was ending and I was starting my third year and I had always not hid my sort of humanity.

[00:20:04] You don't need to talk about emotions at work. You don't need to talk about, oh, my baby was up all night. I was up at the middle of the night pumping. I'm only here on four or five hours of sleep. You don't talk about that because you just keep on going through it. Like we're all as physicians, we're all very, we have a very hard strong work ethic and I never really talked about anything that may have bothered me or if I was tired or anything like that.

[00:20:27] But. When the pandemic hit, we were talking about mental health finally. Are you getting enough sleep? Are you eating okay? Are you doing okay? Like we were all checking up on each other and I felt like it made us all human. And it finally brought to the forefront the talk of mental health and physicians. 

[00:20:42] And it was something that we didn't always talk about, but now it was okay to talk about it. We were encouraged to talk about it and that's something that I've really taken away. And  my cousins and we have a group chat and I, we jokingly. No, not jokingly, but we just text each other. How's your mental health? Like that became normal because that's not something we would have said before, but we knew mental health was something that we were now really focusing on.

[00:21:06] And, as Indians, South Asians in general, we don't always talk about mental health. And before the pandemic, those were two words we didn't very commonly say at least, in my family and during the pandemic, we were like, just not instead of how are you doing, but how has your mental health?

[00:21:21] And I think that was a big sort of takeaway that we all became human in each other's eyes and it was okay to be human. It was okay to address the fact that you were upset or you were tired or your cup is overflowing right now. And you need to just take a step back and take a minute to take care of yourself.

[00:21:37] And that's okay now. 

[00:21:39]Dr. Meera Kirpekar: I feel like in some ways I learned more about my colleagues. We learned more about each other's lives through the pandemic, because you just became more open. You just talked about things more openly, like exactly what you were saying. And you also felt like you felt like it was okay to show some emotion.

[00:21:59]Which normally I completely agree, we don't and I think especially, yeah. I think, especially as women a lot of the times in hospital, in a hospital setting, you don't want to show emotion because you don't want to be seen as unstable or seen as emotional, or you don't want to be not taken seriously because you're having a very human reaction to something terrible happening.

[00:22:20]But here it made it okay to do that because. Because it was just became normal. It became normal to have a strong reaction to something terrible. Became normal to talk about your own life and hear about the lives of your colleagues too, that were either separated from their families was staying in hotels now during the pandemic because they didn't want to, go home and they lived out of state.

[00:22:41]And or, they'd lived in New Jersey and didn't want to commute and everything. And so they would just stay in a hotel.  I had several friends whose weddings were canceled and postponed all in medicine. So we, or people that weren't even that close friends before, but now are because we bonded it over that. Plus for me, my, my husband and I are long distance.

[00:23:00] We've been long distance for the past two years, we're going to be long distance for another two years. And so that was initially very tough too, because you felt alone because you, kind of, you were already alone. And then on top of this, it was scary because we weren't in the same state. And so eventually he managed to like work remotely and come down here for a while.

[00:23:19] But initially you were just like you felt.  The state is on lockdown. The city is on lockdown and people can come in and out it's nerve wracking, and then you feel alone on top of that. And so your outlet, a lot of times was to talk about it at work. Was to go to work. And then when you had breaks in between there, you were with your full N95  face shield, whole thing, sitting there next to each other and talking through that and talking about, oh so I baked this the other day.

[00:23:44] I got very into baking. I bake so many things. And we started a book club. I started a book club. There's so many things. Well that the book club was already in existence, but then we started, we transitioned to zoom and continued with zoom book clubs so that we would have more human connections to be able to continue talking and keeping up with each other and checking in to make sure everyone's doing okay.

[00:24:04] Same thing with baking. I just got very into baking sort of show people, my baking sort of bringing, bringing my friends and colleagues at work, things that I would bake. And then they would separate off to go eat it, take off all of our stuff. But it started doing that. It was just like little moments of continuing keeping that human connection, because it was like here, I brought you a treat, I brought you some cupcakes, go home and enjoy that.

[00:24:25] And so it was. Ways where things that might not have happened before. I think one, because we're not, we're trained to not show emotion that's for starters. And I think also because everyone gets very wrapped up in their own lives, naturally. It's just natural to where you don't end up connecting a lot of times with people that you work with because you just, you go to work, you do your job and you, you don't end up actually talking to one-to-one in a human way with the other colleagues that are at work with you, but here, because things slowed down in that respect and primarily what you were doing was everything dealing with a pandemic. You began to connect better with other people. And so I think I would really like to see that continue to happen. Things are very slowly going back to normal. Very, Very slowly.

[00:25:12]Even when they completely, at some point go back to normal or a new normal, I would like the new normal to include where you still are able to and allowed to show your emotion. And I think as a leader that should be promoted,  continuing to check in with your staff, check in with your colleagues to make sure that they are doing okay mentally.

[00:25:30]And being able to talk about things that are personal or talk about things that are emotional and you don't have to only be a particular way at work, you can still be human. And I think that would be a nice thing that I hope continues to happen post pandemic. And I hope that we, the two of us as we continue to, take on more of this sort of leader role, which is still feels a little bit like imposter syndrome to me, whenever someone says, calls you a leader. 

[00:25:56]But that's one thing that I would want definitely to be continued. And I still try to do that in the work setting now to checking in with the rest of my colleagues and stuff, to see how they're doing and my residents as well.

[00:26:07] Dr. Asha Padmanabhan: Yeah, that's exactly what I was going to say is, do you see this continuing afterwards and things get back to normal where you're back in the operating room and the time is short and you're rushing to do your stuff, and you're not having that much time to sit and check up. 

[00:26:21] And so how would you make sure that you with your residents or your junior people or fellows, how would you see that carrying forward once you get back to the normal state? 

[00:26:33]Dr. Alopi Patel: I call myself their annoying older sister or tiger mom. I say that to them. I'm like, did you eat? My fellows all make fun of me because when it's a busy day in procedures and I'm on the second half of the afternoon, usually I always ask them, did you eat?

[00:26:47] And it's just the Indian mom in me asking them if they're okay, sort of thing. And I think it just humanizes us and I would love to continue it. I hope all of us can continue it and just asking, are you okay? If I know that they're a parent, for sure. I'll ask them, are you okay if they're pumping or whatever, I'll make sure that they get their breaks and more, same thing if they're pregnant and even, the male residents as well we, it's just as important to just be like, are you okay?

[00:27:11] You're doing okay. And just spend some time chatting with them. 

[00:27:14] Dr. Meera Kirpekar: I mean, I think I've definitely learned more about my fellow and residents lives outside of work through this, through the pandemic. And so now, I'm definitely that attending that chats with them about things that are beyond work and, constantly checking in about oh, what are you going to do for a job next year?

[00:27:34] Try to put them in contact with people. What are your long-term goals? Like trying to continue the conversation about not just what long-term career goals, what are your long time life goals beyond medicine. And so that you can find something that is a nice balance between those two things.

[00:27:49] So that's the conversations that I'm constantly having with my residents and fellows, but yeah, I feel like I've learned a lot more about my colleagues and also residents and fellows through this about their personal lives.  And you just, it's just so easy to forget how fascinating other people are and how interesting their lives are beyond medicine.

[00:28:09] And a lot of times we're so focused on, when we think of being a leader, when we think of building your career, you're so focused on your career and medicine that you forget, that people have interesting facets of them. Beyond medicine that could also be beneficial in medicine because it adds a new layer that they can relate to other people better with. 

[00:28:29] Anyway, so that's how I continue to connect with people. And I hope that continues. I will do my best to make it continue if I do, hopefully that continues all around. 

[00:28:37] Dr. Asha Padmanabhan: Yeah, the learning lessons of the pandemic.

[00:28:38] So there was some good things that came out of it with all the horrible things. And I heard you say Alopi about the separation and that must have been really tough. I cannot even imagine.  What do you wish had happened during that time? Anything that you wish could have changed? 

[00:28:54]Dr. Alopi Patel: It was definitely mentally a lot to digest at that time, but I don't, as, as much as it happened and it needed to happen. I don't know what I would have changed about it necessarily. I think it really grew me as a mother. It taught me how to be strong as a mother, as a physician, as a wife, my husband too.

[00:29:15] It was a really testing time for him to be with his daughter. And he was at my in-laws. My in-laws were like, come in anytime. My mother-in-law is a high risk patient, but even in the middle of the pandemic, they opened their doors and they're like, come in and stay as long as you need to.

[00:29:30] And that tested all of our sort of resilience and my daughters too. She was growing. She was learning how to walk at that time. So I missed an important sort of developmental milestone. She was just learning as we were right before they separated. And then she learned how to walk at their house.

[00:29:45] And that was great, but I wouldn't have changed anything because I felt like it needed to happen in the middle of a pandemic. I think it made me stronger. It made me understand that. In a weird way. It made me connect with my parents who were struggling immigrants when they first came to America. And it made me understand because my parents also had to make a decision similar to that when I was a toddler, it made me understand that sometimes being a parent tests, your own sort of fortitude and pandemic or not, I don't know if I would have ever known that.

[00:30:14] For myself, I would have taken it for granted. And the pandemic allowed me to really understand that, we can be resilient. We can be adaptable. That I'm blessed and very fortunate to have great, family colleagues, friends. So I, that's a very interesting question.

[00:30:30] And I guess a long-winded answer and maybe no answer in the sense that I wouldn't have changed anything. I wish  it hadn't  happened, but the fact that it did has made me a better person for it. 

[00:30:41]Dr. Asha Padmanabhan: Yes. Finding the positive in what happened, correct? Yeah.

[00:30:46]So Alopi, talk to me about the leadership experience that you've had in your department and how that has helped you become the leader that you are now and what you hope that you will give to other women physicians coming behind you. 

[00:30:59] Dr. Alopi Patel: I have a very supportive woman in a leadership position, my chairwoman, Dr. Meg Rosenblatt, and she's always been a great supporter. And she's been in her department for almost seven years. I want to say. And even when I was a resident and I would have questions or ideas, it was always an open door policy. You can always ask me anything. And to just have a woman in a leadership position, be able to encourage you, empower you, critique you, if she felt but there are ways to improve this and different ways to do it.

[00:31:29] And then also connect me with other women. One of the other women that she connected me with when I was a resident was Dr. Himani Bhatt, and both of them still to this day play a very important role in my life as mentors. They encourage me, they empower me, they elevate me and I'm very grateful for what they've done for my career.

[00:31:45] And I hope one day I can be the same and same with Meera, I hope we can both be in a position where we can also elevate the people behind us as well and help them up and other women who, you know, that we can one day be in a position to help and inspire and encourage. And that's a lot of why we do this because other women helped us get to where we are.

[00:32:05] And we hope to do that for other women along the way, one day as well. 

[00:32:09]Dr. Meera Kirpekar: Absolutely. And that's really why we created this together in the first place is that, one, we obviously work very well together, but the two of us together, I think the two of us as a duo. We empower each other. We help each other.

[00:32:25]And we have helped each other starting from fellowship. Even when we weren't doing a podcast together, we've always been all about empowering other women and helping other women achieve whatever their goals might be. And so that's what inspired us to do this together in the first place, because I think we're better together than we are just as individuals.

[00:32:41] You don't have to necessarily stand alone. If women help each other, especially in medicine and empower each other, they can go further. And there are, Alopi said this earlier, but there are a lot of seats at the table. Most of them are not filled by women, but if there aren't enough seats that can always expand it, you can always add more seats on.

[00:32:58] So if women help each other and they bring each other on board, then we will have more representation. We will be able to achieve more together than we would separately. So that's why we did this together. And we hope to bring that message to women that are junior to us that would be coming up and want to guidance with their own.

[00:33:15] careers 

[00:33:16] Dr. Asha Padmanabhan: Well said, having a woman at the table definitely makes a big difference. And especially having a woman in leadership position where you can not only look up to that person and try to be mentored by that person. But to have that support, like you said, Alopi, that open door policy that you were mentioning when we were on a break about you wanting to write a book.

[00:33:38] She supported you without even knowing what it was. So that's the kind of support that we need and we can provide to other women physicians. It doesn't have to be anything about medicine. It could be career. It could be a lot of other things, but just having that support is where we need to take leadership and why we need to have more women leaders in our hospitals, in our C-suites in our organizations.

[00:34:04] Dr. Alopi Patel: I agree. And we hope we can provide that for other women along the way, at some point in our career. And my sister is also an anesthesiologist by the way. So part of my drive to do stuff comes from that four years behind me is my younger sister who I love very much. And she's an anesthesia resident.

[00:34:19] And how can I do something that will make the world better for her as well? And that easier, the road easier. And she's my little sister, but there are many other, residents out there that will, hopefully we can help along the way. 

[00:34:32] Dr. Asha Padmanabhan: So where did the podcasts start and why did it start? You gave me a little bit of an idea in the beginning of you were talking about what needed to happen. So why the focus on women's health and as pain physicians, that's not something that I have seen other pain physicians do. So tell me about that.

[00:34:53]Dr. Meera Kirpekar: So you're right. As far as pain physicians go, we're already in a minority because only 18% of pain physicians are women. And then that coupled with women's pain in general is very, it's everything it's under studied, under reported. And it's also not really, generally speaking in hospitals, it's not always taken as seriously as when a man presents with the same complaint. And so we just it's combination of seeing that in person just throughout our entire lives, really lives training everything. And then also wanting that to change because.

[00:35:33]We wanted to be able to help this population that we fully relate to as women that weren't really getting the attention, the research, all of that to help them with their pain. And so it was born from pain because so much of women's pain, particularly if you think of like pelvic pain is often not just not treated appropriately.

[00:35:56] And it's not necessarily the fault of anyone in particular or something like that. It's more that it's just not, it's difficult. It's difficult to treat a lot of times and because difficult to treat, it's not studied as much. There's not as much research on it. And women end up suffering.

[00:36:09] And so we really wanted to target that. That was our initial thought with it. And then this kind of became extrapolated to other aspects of women's health, where there's so many things.  There are so many aspects of women's health that are just not focused on much. And so it really started with women's pain and then it became bigger in terms of women's health in general.

[00:36:35]And seeing it really from the perspective of pain physicians and anesthesiologists, because those are the patients that we see in the hospital. That's like our, niche, if you will, it's like our patient population. And we learned so much from our patients too,  and so many of our ideas, so much of our inspiration has come from our patients and what they're telling us and their experiences that have really inspired us to want to do this in the first place. 

[00:37:01] And then Alopi was the one who came up with the idea for a podcast. Specifically, we were just talking about wanting to do something with this in terms of a bigger scale, something that's more open to public.

[00:37:11] Cause something that's more understandable for not just people that are in medicine, but outside of it. For women in general and men, and their male partners, to be able to support them. And Alopi came of the idea for the podcast. And then we talked about it and decided on a social media platform and that's how it all began.

[00:37:30]And then as we creating every episode and researching it and, making sure that we we're providing all the correct information. It became bigger beyond women's pain. There also wasn't as much in terms of anesthesiology, in terms of a podcast in terms of like specific information for person for women.

[00:37:49] And so we kind of went that avenue as well. And then now we're both in the process of getting another board certification because why stop at two? We're getting our board certification in lifestyle medicine? And so we also want to focus on that as well, sort of, the way that our patients, people in general, can kind of take charge of their own healthcare and things that they can do from their end to also improve their pain and their health. 

[00:38:15]Dr. Asha Padmanabhan: So this is a podcast for patients or physicians. 

[00:38:19]Dr. Alopi Patel: So that's a great question. We intended it to be for women and we make it digestible enough for all women, including physician.

[00:38:28] So it's patients and women, but also men because pain is obviously, non discriminant it, everybody can have it, but also we also have transgender patients as well, and we want it to be digestible to all sorts of people. And because we have this niche of pain, even our fellow physicians, if they're primary care or urology or whatever it may be, they all can also take in the information.

[00:38:51] So for example the primary care physician may not know about labor epidurals and they're pregnant and we have a whole episode on labor epidurals, including, any questions that they may have in terms of what are the side effects, what are the long-term effects, if any. So we really make it digestible in the form.

[00:39:08] For patients and physicians, if they're interested and we try to keep it scientific, but also explain the scientific words that we're using for the lay people that may be listening to it. So we keep it evidence-based in the sense that everything has been researched, we have resources for everything as well, including our statistics.

[00:39:26] And I jokingly said to my husband the other day, I feel like I'm doing another fellowship outside of lifestyle medicine, but we're spending so much time really researching. Late into the hours of the night, sometimes even. Researching reading papers, looking stuff up for a podcast and we're constantly learning.

[00:39:42] And I think Meera hit the nail on the head in that sense that we were, we went in with one idea and then we realized, how can we only talk about pelvic pain? Because everything is so connected. And the more we. Research, the more we realized how much sort of gender disparities, there were also sexism and history and we'd call each other like excitedly 10 times a day.

[00:40:03] Did you know that dyspareunia meant this? Did you know that, pudendal nerve name comes from this and we were just learning so much and getting so excited by how much we're learning. So I was joking with my husband. I feel like I'm doing a women's health fellowship because I'm learning so much.

[00:40:16] And so is Meera and we feed off of each other's energy in that sense that we're always inspiring each other to continue to think outside the box and what else can we educate on? 

[00:40:25]Dr. Meera Kirpekar: That historical aspect has also been really fun and really interesting to us because there's so many major historical tidbits in history that we didn't know ourselves.

[00:40:34]And that we learned throughout this research for the podcast. And so it's great because  those are sort of things, we'll call each other on, and be like, it's you hear it? Did you hear about that? Did you know about that? And it's it's fascinating for us because obviously the medicine aspect of it.

[00:40:47] A lot of that, we that's what we do on a daily basis. And so that part we may know, but the, some of the statistics were surprising to us even as we researched them. And the history, certainly a lot of the history was  surprising to us. And just fascinating. And so that was also a great thing that we wanted to add to the podcast, because I think when you understand the root of it and you understand the history behind it, the present day approach to a lot of aspects of medicine makes sense, because you're like, oh that's where it comes from.

[00:41:16] Okay. And that's why it should probably change, but it originally came from, so yeah, it's been a lot of fun.

[00:41:23] Dr. Asha Padmanabhan: And so where can people find this podcast? I'm going to put it in the show notes, but just tell us. 

[00:41:28]Dr. Alopi Patel: So it's on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, Pandora and Gaana, which are south Asian streaming platforms. Did I miss any we've covered platforms.

[00:41:42] Dr. Meera Kirpekar: All of them. 

[00:41:44]Dr. Asha Padmanabhan: Yeah. And the name? 

[00:41:45]Dr. Meera Kirpekar: The hurt. And if you look it up, it's The Hurt by The Female Pain 

[00:41:48] Dr. Asha Padmanabhan: Docs.

[00:41:49]So before we leave one or more pieces of advice for young female physicians, junior attendings, coming through the ranks. 

[00:41:59] Dr. Alopi Patel: For me, I would say. I always talk to myself in the sense of a positive way. I'd say I can do it and I will do it. I remind myself that sometimes out loud and I say that to my residents and fellows too. You can, and you will. You just need to, put your mind to it, be passionate.

[00:42:15] And if you're passionate about something, it doesn't feel like work. And be yourself, do what you want to do and you will do something. So have faith and keep on going. 

[00:42:23] Dr. Asha Padmanabhan: Beautiful. 

[00:42:24] Dr. Meera Kirpekar: Absolutely. It's like the quote, if you build it, they will come.  If you really believe in something and you, like you said, are really passionate about something, then you just have to do it.

[00:42:35] And there will be naysayers along the way. You will have a lot of doubts. You will have a lot of doubts, both in your idea and yourself, and also doubts from other people. And that's just natural. And that's what happens whenever you're trying to build something. But if you really believe in it and you are focused on it, and you do the work for it, you really put in that time and effort, it will happen.

[00:42:59] And so you just have to stay focused and believe in yourself, which sounds cliche in a lot of ways, but it really that's honestly, that's what we've been. That's what we've been doing is we've just been putting in that effort, putting in that time and really believing that we're providing something that is going to be worthwhile for society as a whole. 

[00:43:21] And so really that's what we want to accomplish. That's we want to put out there. And so we are putting in the work for it, and that's what I would say to any young female physician is just put in the work for it and it'll happen. 

[00:43:33] Dr. Asha Padmanabhan: I don't think we can and on any better note than that.

[00:43:36] So it was such a pleasure talking to the two of you and check out their podcast, The Hurt Podcast by Female Pain Docs, the Female Pain Docs, The Hurt Podcast by the Female Pain Docs. And I will put the link in the show notes and thank you both so much. It has been such a pleasure.

[00:43:53]Dr. Alopi Patel: Thank you for having us. 

[00:43:54] Dr. Meera Kirpekar: Thank you.