After graduation in 1975, I headed off to Montefiore in New York for an internship in internal medicine. The following year, inspired by a previous clerkship in gynecologic endocrinology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and with the help of one of my favorite Brown mentors, Milton Hamolsky, I moved to Yale’s Ob/Gyn residency. I was in the second year that women were admitted to that residency. 

I found a compatriot in my second year of residency, as I was teaching him how to do a circumcision, and soon married him. 

He wanted to fly airplanes, so despite our grueling schedules, we both took flying lessons at Yale aviation. On a December 1977 trip to his family in Detroit, we had landed the Cherokee 180 in a precarious position. I signaled him from the ground to turn off the motor, as I was trying to remove an obstacle. Unfortunately, he did not do this, and my left (dominant) arm was crushed by the propeller. I begged the surgeons not to amputate since I still had my median nerve intact (my ulnar nerve and artery were gone). The bone fragments were threaded onto a metal rod, which I still have, along with a skin graft. 

Thanks to Drs. Homer and Hazeltine and Dr. Ruth Litz at Yale, I finished that year in consultation psychiatry and entered the psychiatry residency the following year. 

Since the psychiatry residency was so easy for me compared to ob/gyn, I simultaneously did a three-year sex therapy training with Dr. Phil and Lorna Sarrel, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health. 

While I worked, I also gave birth to two sons (a year apart on my birthday weekend!) and flew to Tampa (where my husband decided to move) with a 1-year-old and 1-week-old and sat for my written boards in psychiatry the next week (which I passed!). 

After that, I obtained a position at the University of South Florida in Tampa and opened a private practice in psychiatry and sex therapy. My practice grew to 3,500 patients with three therapists and three nurse practitioners. I lectured around the country on sex, drugs, and antidepressants, became the president of the Society for Sex Therapy in Research, and gave a Ruth Sauber Distinguished Alumni Lecture at Brown. 

I retired from my practice in June 2022. I am still a clinical professor at USF, and I lecture about PTSD to first responders.