New Medicine in an Old-Fashioned Way

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Bringing Back House Calls

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In “the good old days” doctors didn’t have offices. They had a black bag with all the tools of their trade, and they traveled to their patients’ homes, spending time healing the sick and fixing the medical problems of the people where they were most comfortable. At some point, the model changed. Perhaps because having […]

54-year-old medical student at Wake Forest School of Medicine is living her dream

Suzanne Watson couldn’t help but laugh when she received her AARP card and her acceptance letter from Wake Forest School of Medicine in the same week at the age of 50.

“I sold my SUV and bought a convertible, and I got the license plate REV DOC,” said Watson, who spent 15 years in the ministry before applying to the medical school.

Now, at 54, she is a fourth-year medical student, pursuing a second career that in many ways takes her full circle to her early life.

Watson grew up in San Diego, Calif., living next door to her grandfather, who was a psychiatrist. She graduated from the University of California at San Diego in 1985 with a bachelor’s in biology and economics, then worked for a time before going to medical school in California. She married David Paul Watson in the late 1980s and for a while helped him start his private practice in the 1990s in San Luis Obispo, Calif.

While she was enrolled in medical school, Watson became pregnant with her second child, so she and her husband decided she would withdraw from the program while he continued his career path in neurology.

“It was a big decision and it was very hard because you do give up a part of your identity when you leave something like medicine,” Watson said.

Still, she said her decision was best for her family.

She missed her first child’s first step while she was in school and didn’t want that to happen with her second child.

Watson later chose to pursue a career in the ministry.

“I was starting to feel a call to ministry for a lot of the reasons I was called to medicine,” she said. “It was that ability to impact people’s lives.”

Three months before she graduated with a master’s of divinity from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., her husband committed suicide in 2002.

Watson said he had suffered depression in silence for years and was afraid to ask for help because of the stigma of depression and the financial implication for his practice and family.

“I had four kids under the age of 9,” Watson said. “Life insurance doesn’t pay in these circumstances, and I had physician-lifestyle costs with a mortgage and everything and really no way to pay it.”

She said she ended up putting her house on the market, getting her children out of private school and finding a job to put food on the table. Her first job in the ministry was as an associate pastor at St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Carmel, Calif.

Watson and her children moved to New Zealand for a year, then back to the United States where she got a job with the Episcopal Church headquarters in New York. While serving as head pastor of St. David’s Episcopal Church in San Diego, Calif., Watson said she decided to return to the field of medicine, partly because some family members struggled with bipolar disorder.
Read More: http://www.journalnow.com/news/local/year-old-medical-student-at-wake-forest-school-of-medicine/article_8a13a827-1990-51d3-a46b-5215d981f700.html
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