Ep 30: Becoming the Doctor My Mother Needed

This episode is a special one. In honor of Menopause Awareness Month, I wanted to take a pause and share the story that started it all — my journey to becoming the doctor my mother needed.

From watching my mom struggle to get answers about her heart to facing my own midlife health changes, this is the story that shaped everything — my career, my purpose, and how I show up for women in their 40s and beyond.

It’s a story about how we listen.
 How we heal.
 And how midlife can be a beginning — not an ending.

✨ Because when we understand what our bodies are trying to tell us, we take our power back.

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Audio Stamps:

00:00 | Welcome & intro | Why I’m sharing this story now

01:05 | My mother’s diagnosis | The moment that changed everything

02:34 | My journey into medicine | Seeing what others missed

04:51 | The doctor who didn’t listen | Turning anger into purpose

6:33 | Becoming the doctor my mother needed | What listening really means

7:46 | My own midlife health story | Perimenopause, lipoprotein(a), and intuition

10:45 | Building Eastside Menopause & Metabolism | A new kind of space for women

13:21 | Reflection | The link between generations of women

Thanks for listening. Find more info about Reset Recharge on the website or Instagram.

Transcript

Dr. Komal Patil-Sisodia 0:02

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