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Fearlessly Female Uncensored
A comedic podcast featuring two friends sharing unfiltered stories and hilarious takes on life as modern women.
Fearlessly Female Uncensored
Convos with a Surgeon: Life as Dr. Death
Click Here to Chat with Us! We're all ears (& probably wine).
Ever wondered what really happens in a trauma surgeon's day? Dr. Mallory pulls back the curtain on emergency medicine with stories that will make you laugh, gasp & maybe cross your legs a little tighter.
From saving a woman crushed by a car driving through her living room to removing objects from places they definitely don't belong, Dr. Mallory's candid accounts offer a rare glimpse into the high-stakes world of trauma surgery.
Dr. Mallory's journey breaks stereotypes about medical professionals. Unlike the straight-A student path many might expect, she struggled academically in her youth, living in the shadow of her gifted sister. This relatable story challenges our assumptions about who becomes a surgeon and reminds us that finding your passion sometimes happens through unexpected routes.
Join us for this unfiltered, enlightening conversation with a female surgeon breaking barriers in a traditionally male-dominated field. Your view of emergency medicine will never be the same!
🎙️fearlesslyfemaleuncensored@gmail.com
Welcome back to Fearlessly Female, where two blondes make and write. We are Brittany and Megan, the host of Fearlessly Female. This podcast was born out of ambition, drive and a lot of wine. We're two powerhouse comedic women having uncensored conversations about topics that affect women. We're airing all the dirty laundry, so grab your favorite drink and give us a listen.
Meghan:Today's podcast is a little slicing and dicing, maybe a bit of hacking and definitely pumping the meds.
Brittany:Wow, megan, you could just say we have a female trauma surgeon joining us today and although women now compromise more than half of the medical school enrollees and about 35% of all active physicians, they are still scarce in the surgical field. That's right. You're probably getting sliced, diced and hacked up by Dexter. So before we get into it, this is our disclaimer Warning calm your tits. Offense will not be taken here. Grab your favorite drink, especially today. Burn your bra and let's have a good time.
Meghan:I am super excited about this conversation and just a little backstory when we have an idea for a podcast, we write out a general outline of the topics we want to cover and flow. So hopefully it makes sense to you, the listeners, which I know somebody is going to write in and give us some feedback about that. But I knew I wanted to have Mallory on this podcast because she's my favorite cousin that is a surgeon. For my cousins that are listening, I also have a favorite cousin that is a lawyer and one that's the best line dancer ever.
Meghan:I don't want anybody to get jealous, but anywho, mallory has a superstition around tests and goes on vacation afterwards, which has worked 100% of the time now. So she always passes her tests when she goes on vacation. And I was the only cousin available when we headed to San Diego for a weekend after one test and I spent like the whole drive interviewing her about her job and asking all kinds of questions so I could get the flow for this podcast. Mallory, do you remember what you said to me during that conversation?
Dr. Mallory:Oh, my God, Meghan, you know I can't retain useless information. We've been to Fiji and back. How am I supposed to remember?
Meghan:Well, it was. No one's asked me this many questions about my job before it made me laugh, because I just love listening to your stories, getting your pictures not so much, but your stories, yes,
Brittany:Oh, my gosh pictures.
Brittany:I can't even imagine.
Meghan:Yeah, she's received a couple lectures about how I need warning and coffee and booze in my system. There's nothing like seeing a severed whatever to wake up the senses.
Brittany:Well, good thing I'm on the East Coast because I need to get on this group text, because it sounds like a blast. Like gunshot blast.
Dr. Mallory:That would be awesome.
Brittany:So, mallory, what has been your most exciting surgery? I'm sure you have a ton.
Dr. Mallory:Yeah, there's a lot. One that stands out is probably I had a young woman who was sitting at home she's actually sitting on her couch in her living room and a car went through the wall of her living room and crushed her and broke her pelvis and she was bleeding pretty severely, and so we took her to the operating room. She was really unstable and she was. Unfortunately, the pelvis has a lot of blood vessels, so she was bleeding a lot and we had three surgeons working on her trying to stop the bleeding, and every unit of blood we gave her would just come right out. And one of the surgeons said you know, this isn't working. She's not going to make it. We can't control the bleeding. And so the other surgeon said well damn, it would just really suck dying from sitting at home. And so I said well then, let's keep going. And five minutes later we got control bleeding and she survived.
Brittany:Jesus Christ. Oh my God, can you imagine, just like you know, like sitting on your couch in the morning, waking up, having your coffee, and then all of a sudden, this fucking car like plows through your fucking living room Like, oh my gosh.
Dr. Mallory:If it were Megan, it would be a mimosa.
Meghan:And you guys all know how I like my mimosas,
Brittany:The essence of orange juice in the air? Oh my gosh
Meghan:Not even.
Brittany:I can't even imagine, Do you? I mean, I'm sure you probably experienced a lot of death in your field.
Meghan:Mal, you have to tell her.
Dr. Mallory:Well, in medicine there's a superstition that if you get a lot of consults or a lot of bad things happen when you're on call, or you just are very busy, you're considered to have a black cloud, and my black cloud is particularly strong, and so because of that, I was given the nickname Dr Death. So, yeah, it's a name that stuck with me for a while.
Brittany:Oh my gosh. Dr Death, what a nickname. I've had a lot, but I don't think any have been that strong. How do you handle something like that? Or you know, like process a sitation like that?
Dr. Mallory:I think it's kind of patient by patient. You know you have to remember while you're working on them that this is someone's brother or son or uncle and you do everything you can as if they're your own family. But as soon as you lose them you have to just move on and remember that it was their mechanism. You know it was their car accident or their stabbing or their gunshot wound that took them and that you did everything you could because you have to move on and take care of the next patient.
Meghan:So you talked about kind of one of the surgeries that was, you know, most exciting. You felt really proud that you were able to get this woman back from, you know, just sitting on her couch and having something super bad happen. But do you have a worse surgery?
Brittany:Thanks, Megan, for being a Debbie Downer. I'm already crying here. You really have to bring up the worst surgery.
Meghan:I do!
Dr. Mallory:Yeah, it's usually involving kids. You know those are always hard situations, so you have to just try your best and it's great when you can save them try your best and it's great when you can save them.
Meghan:Well, now that we've got everybody all sad and thinking about that, let's talk a little bit about before you become a surgeon. I think there's a little bit of a process to get into medical school. You want to talk about that?
Dr. Mallory:Yeah, that process is wild. Getting into medical school and getting a residency is a really strange process. But basically, in order to get into medical school you're encouraged to have you know perfect grades and you know a great MCAT score and have volunteered and have clinical experience and started your own Fortune 500 company.
Meghan:Whatever happened to just becoming a doctor?
Dr. Mallory:I know right.
Dr. Mallory:So after you apply, you fill out a bunch of essays and this whole application, you get invited to go to an interview and so you travel the country going to interviews and my first interview was in Nebraska, of all places. So I flew out there and was in my suit and I met with this physician. We sit down and the first thing he says to me he looks at my application and I went to the University of Southern California, or USC, and he said I see, you went to the University of Spoiled Children, which of course I've heard that joke before and I wanted to come back with a cute, smart response. So I said well, I like to think of it as the University of Smart Children.
Dr. Mallory:And unfortunately I found out during that interview that his son failed out of that school, so it got a little awkward.
Brittany:Oops, that's right. Go against the system.
Brittany:I see you know you're already in Nebraska meeting with Warren Buffett for your Fortune 500 company, so I guess that was a good start.
Dr. Mallory:Yeah exactly!
Brittany:So tell us about the school.
Dr. Mallory:It's a crazy experience. You really form strong bonds with the people you meet in medical school. You're with them so often. We do anatomy lab during our first year, which is an amazing experience. People donate their bodies to science and they're preserving formaldehyde, so you can imagine the smells get a little potent in the lab, but we used to study in there as a group for hours preparing for our gross anatomy exams, and then you know formaldehyde makes you really hungry, so we would finish up there and just go get Philly cheesesteaks.
Meghan:I really used to like Philly cheesesteaks, but now all I think about is like formaldehyde and you cutting up bodies. I'm not sure why you had to ruin it for me.
Dr. Mallory:Sorry, Meghan.
Meghan:Alright, well, I think it's time let's talk about butt stuff.
Brittany:Butt Stuff. Meghan, are you kidding me? Are you 12? For the record, Meghan just sent me like a video on butt stuff. So flared base, everybody flared base.
Dr. Mallory:Well, it actually happens a lot. It's technically called a rectal foreign body and about 99.9% of the time patients will say they sat on it. They never admit to putting anything up there. But funny enough, I made it to 34 and I sit all the time and nothing's ever managed to go up my butt while I'm sitting.
Meghan:So it's normal stuff, right, like toys made for such adventure.
Dr. Mallory:If by toy you mean Barbie doll, then yes, I've pulled all kinds of things out Vegetables, axe body spray, light bulb. And yes, it shattered on the way out,
Meghan:Not on the way in?
Dr. Mallory:No, the most recent one was a pool ball and any guesses on the color and number?
Brittany:Oh, oh, oh.
Brittany:Black 8-ball. Black 8-ball has to be Black 8-ball.
Dr. Mallory:Ding, ding ding, Definitely a winner.
Meghan:All right, Mallory, it's time to tell the story. You know the one.
Dr. Mallory:So Meghan's favorite medical story that I've told is when I was a resident and I was still in training. We have to do rotations on other services, so I was on a medical ICU rotation and the emergency department called and said hey, we have a patient here that just had a cardiac arrest. Their heart stopped and so you know we need you to come and meet the patient. They're on the ventilator. And so I go down there and I talk to the ER doc really quickly and you know she gives me a little bit of information.
Dr. Mallory:I go in and I look at the patient and it looks like a child, and so they go back out and I say I think you gave me the wrong room number. I'm looking for an adult patient, I'm taking care of the adult ICU. And she goes oh, no, no, no, it's a dwarf. So I go back in and the cardiologist, the heart doctor, is there assessing a patient because he needed to do a procedure and he is freaking out because he isn't sure if the equipment will fit in the patient because we're an adult facility. And he turns to me at one point and asked if I was pranking him. I wasn't. And then you know, after a cardiac arrest, we usually put the patient on something called hypothermic protocol, where we cool their body temperature to allow for healing, and so I did tell Meghan that I froze a dwarf.
Brittany:Oh my gosh.
Dr. Mallory:So she definitely likes that story.
Brittany:I'm speechless on this one, especially as a resident, Like code blues, Obviously I'm not a surgeon. Someone call Snow White. We just froze one of the dwarves.
Meghan:I just love that. The guy was like are you pranking me? Like yes, I just have spare, like friends around that want to like lay in the hospital, that happen to be dwarves.
Brittany:So the stats we were talking about earlier is women being in male dominated industries. So I guess part of the trauma of dealing with that is being in a male dominated industry. So what's that like? How do you deal with that?
Meghan:Yes, so I like to call her triple board certified, but she calls it board certified with a certification in trauma. My version sounds better, so we're going with it.
Brittany:Trauma as in dealing with men?
Dr. Mallory:I mean yeah, yeah, there's definitely some male egos that involve some major trauma in the hospital. But honestly, I got trauma, I did training in trauma because it's easier to get a job at a trauma center and I really love trauma and I love critical care because I like thinking about physiology and the whole body and how different body systems interact physiology and the whole body and how different body systems interact. For example, you know if a patient has a perforated intestine or you know ruptured colon, they need a surgery. That's the mechanics part. You take that part of the colon out but then the body goes through a whole reaction afterwards, and so I really like understanding the physiology of how the reaction affects the patient and dealing with kind of the aftermath of that.
Meghan:So you like dealing with the whole enchilada.
Brittany:Enchiladas, really, while we're talking about intestines, I like the analogy, but a little gross.
Dr. Mallory:Well, it is the truth and I like looking at how everything's connected versus, you know, just fixing one part and moving on. I think it's nice to know and understand what else is going to be impacted.
Meghan:Anyone up for chips and a margarita?
Brittany:Clearly, Meghan just came from a formaldehyde lab talking about all this food. What about role models? I mean, Meghan is my role model when it comes to our focus on food during this interesting conversation. But what about you? You have like role models at work or growing up.
Dr. Mallory:I mean, honestly, there were a lot of female surgeons that I got to work with as a trainee and they really showed me that it's possible to have a work-life balance and to be a surgeon and have a life outside of the hospital, and I don't mean just with family, you know. I think they juggle a lot of different things and the profession used to kind of be off limits to women because it was prohibitive to having a family, and I think that barrier has really been broken down by a lot of the women who have come before me.
Meghan:That's really cool to hear you see it dramatized on TV shows and movies so much differently.
Dr. Mallory:Oh gosh, Don't get me started on the inaccuracies of doctors in TV shows and movies.
Brittany:After all these seasons of watching Grey's Anatomy, I'm not qualified to be a surgeon.
Dr. Mallory:Oh, but you're probably qualified to have sex in a call room or in a closet in the hospital.
Brittany:Fair enough, fair enough. This sounds like a round two podcast coming on.
Dr. Mallory:Yeah, definitely.
Brittany:What about growing up Like did you know? You always wanted to be a doctor.
Dr. Mallory:You know, interestingly, I was never a great student growing up. In middle school and high school it took me a while to kind of figure out that I liked learning and I think I just hadn't quite figured out my interest yet. I was put in like an honors geometry class and I remember my teacher just yelling at me for not applying myself and I just thought it was because I didn't have the intelligence to do it. You know, I grew up with an older sister that was very smart and she just, you know, kind of had this you know shadow cast and everyone expected me to be as smart as her and I just, you know, wasn't quite ready to commit to school at that age.
Meghan:So in your head were you always imagining being a surgeon.
Dr. Mallory:Yeah, you know, when I realized that I wanted to go into a pre-health field and I kind of clicked into science and found my interest in, you know, human physiology, I knew that I wanted to do you know something with my hands and be a surgeon.
Meghan:So you talk a little bit about your sister and kind of casting that shadow. Do you think that you know thinking about when you were talking about being in high school and not applying yourself and not thinking you were as smart like it all had to do with Mary Ellen?
Brittany:I'm guessing Mary Ellen's, your sister in question here.
Meghan:It is Well for the crowd. It's Mallory's sister, but she taught herself Japanese at nine years old, took a Spanish class from a Japanese speaking instructor, so just kind of off the charts in the intelligence standpoint. So I could see like that's a pretty specific shadow to be cast on Mallory.
Dr. Mallory:Oh yeah, I know, we always went to the same school growing up and the teachers definitely expected me to be the same kind of goody two shoes that she was. And I think, because I wasn't, you know, as interested in school I was always, I always felt like kind of a disappointment to teachers. And you know it's funny, when I finally did figure out my interest in science and I was, you know, kind of interested in human physiology, I asked my mom what's the most prestigious job someone can have? And she said Well, you know, it's probably a doctor. And and I think that in there I decided like I'm going to become a doctor, to one up my sister and I'm probably a doctor today because I wanted to compete with her.
Brittany:I don't blame you. Intelligence comes in many facets and I think too, like at a young age, it's very different for a lot of people. I mean, obviously you and your sister are like a great example, right, like you know she's one way, you're another way. Like I'm sure you're not drawing. You know geometry figures on your patients to figure out the angle, you know on which to pull something out Exactly.
Brittany:But you know there's stupid ones for sure that obviously sit on pool balls and I hope we get better as a society, recognizing that intelligence doesn't always look book smart.
Meghan:Clearly, Mallory has some book smart there. I think there's probably a few books in medical school.
Brittany:I hope so. I hope so. Well, this has been a very enlightening podcast, so thank you, Mallory, for sharing your experiences. As we leave today's listeners, what would you have like one piece of advice if they're interested in being a doctor, or to you know, maybe be a better patient other than maybe don't put things up your butt or drink coffee in your living room.
Dr. Mallory:Yeah, you know, definitely for patients out there. Definitely for patients out there, don't put anything out there that doesn't belong up there. For anyone else I would say you know, focus on relationships, especially in your 20s. Build really good relationships and never sacrifice a relationship for work or for whatever else you think in the moment is more important, because you never know when that relationship is going to help you in one way or another. And unfortunately, as we get older, it's harder to meet people and harder to build those strong relationships. So really focus on that and never sacrifice it.
Meghan:Some sound advice and really remember. The butt acts as a vacuum, so be careful what you put on there.
Brittany:That is some great advice, I guess, from both ends. No pun intended, but yeah, I agree. You know, as you get older it is harder to meet people and form relationships, and you do make a lot of sacrifices I think some people do when they're younger, and it's always nice to kind of hear that from somebody that's older and just echo it, keep it in mind. And of course, Meghan had to end with the butt stuff. So just make sure it has a flared base.
Meghan:It's the end, though, but if you yourself have ambition, drive and booze in your system, we would love to have you as a guest or hear your ideas. Email fearlesslyfemaleuncensored@ gmail. com.
