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Student learns how to handle family, school

by Dawn Brazell, Special to The Catalyst

From left are: Brian, 6, Patrick McFadden “Mac”, 3-months-old and Molly, 2. Holding Mac is Patti Gilroy.

Patti Gilroy felt the kicking baby inside her and wondered when it would arrive. If it came on a Thursday night, that would be perfect. Her medical school classes were Tuesdays and Thursdays. If she went into labor late Thursday, she'd be back in class Tuesday.

As fate would have it, her second child, Molly, arrived at 1:15 Friday morning.

“I was back in class Tuesday,” she says, smiling.

Gilroy, a part of MUSC's 1999 graduating class, smiles down at her now vocal and feisty 2-year-old who is borrowing her mother's necklace. Her 6-year-old son, Brian, shows her some words he's studying. Sleeping contentedly in his carrier is 3-month-old Patrick McFadden known as Mac. That Gilroy had a baby at all during medical school is amazing, let alone two while already raising her first-born son.

Gilroy says her time-management skills have been sharpened. For a part of the time in school, she and her husband, Brian, hired a nanny to help. She also had a list of 15 baby-sitters on call in case of emergencies. She has been able to enjoy the last few months with Mac, the first maternity leave of length she's ever gotten. She knows she'd better enjoy it.

The family soon leaves for Danville, Pa., where she will be doing a residency in otolaryngology (ears, nose and throat) at Penn State Geisinger Medical Center. Danville is a small town, where people can leave their doors unlocked—just the kind of spot Gilroy, who comes from a large Irish-Catholic family, wants to raise her kids, she says.

Because she knew she wanted a large family is one reason Gilroy didn't wait until after medical school to start her family. She is the youngest of five children and her husband is the oldest of four. Gilroy first met her husband, Brian, through a friend while in high school in Philadelphia. They married after her sophomore year at Villanova University, and she followed her husband to Florida, where he had flight training for the Navy. Her family was afraid marrying that early might mean she'd drop out of school.

That never crossed her mind, she says.

She went to the University of Florida and got her doctorate in pharmacy in 1992. That meant balancing a 110-mile, round-trip commute to school, while holding down a job as a cocktail waitress. When her husband was transferred to Columbia, S.C., she got a job as a clinical pharmacist in neonatal ICU at Baptist Medical Center.

Doing rounds and researching treatment options gave Gilroy a taste of what it was like to be a doctor. She found it exciting, and it reminded her it was something she once thought she'd like to do. She always had come up with excuses, including that it was too time consuming.

“Time is irrelevant. It took me awhile to get the maturity that life is something you live, not something you wait for to happen.”

When she approached her husband, who was starting a pizza delivery business, about going to medical school, he said to go for it.

Gilroy, then 26, did.

“I don't want to have any regrets. I was still thinking about medicine and decided I didn't want to be 40 years old going, ‘what if I had tried?’ I thought this was neat, and this is what I want to do.”

Despite working full-time and serving as an adjunct associate professor at the University of South Carolina in pharmacy, she took the MCAT and got accepted at MUSC. She liked the university's problem-based parallel curriculum. It is a less structured but very rigorous curriculum focusing on collaborative learning and independent study, which has been a wonderful method of learning for her, she says.

It still has been tough. Her daughter, Molly, was born in September of Gilroy's second year. She remembers feeling nauseated when carrying Molly, having to lie down in the bathtub with saltines and Ginger Ale while studying for an exam. The night Molly was born Gilroy was at a student alumni dinner, logging contractions on her paper placemat. She went home and called her doctor, who told her to come in to be checked.

Gilroy had her daughter two hours later.

Fortunately, all her children have been good babies, which was particularly important when she hit her third year of medical school. It was the most challenging in trying to juggle everything. She had to budget for 10 hour days, being on call and studying. Her ‘down’ times were spent playing with the kids.

“You had to be accountable at all times.”

Her next hurdles were interviewing for a residency seven months pregnant and, of course, having baby number three. Compounding the problem was that Gilroy felt herself drawn to otolaryngology, a highly competitive field. She had been leaning toward neonatology, but was surprised to find out how much she enjoyed the intricacies involved in ENT surgery during an acting internship at MUSC in July 1998. Gilroy was accepted into acting internships at Johns Hopkins University in pediatric emergency medicine and otolaryngology in fall 1998.

The timing couldn't have been worse.

Her husband was tied down running a new business, Gilroy's Irish Pizza Pub on King Street, and couldn't keep the children.

She was lucky her brother's wife in Pennsylvania and her parents volunteered to help keep the children. It was a wonderful experience, she says, and Gilroy returned home to be told at Christmas that she needed to reduce her activity level.

“That meant I took the elevator instead of the stairs,” she says, smiling. She was doing a surgical rotation, which meant being on her feet. Close to the end of the rotation, she went into labor. “I had 35 minutes of active labor. He came shooting out like a cannonball.”

Gilroy says she has no regrets about proceeding with her family during medical school. She has put to use a lesson she learned as a Navy wife when she was waiting around for her husband to return from a six-month deployment. “You realize you wished your time away. I thought, “I'm going to enjoy my life...Life is to be lived. This is four years of my life—not four years out of my life.”

She knows her residency will mean long hard hours, but she's comforted that her husband will be taking a much-deserved break to be with the children for awhile.

“It's like I'm at the base of this tidal wave, and it's nice and dry here, but I'm just looking at this wall called residency, and it's just going to douse me.” But she knows she'll get through it.

“It's given me a good perspective on how to manage time and prioritize. Some things are only important for the moment, and some are important for a lifetime.”

Patricia Gilroy

Age: 32 How you handle stress: Play sports, organize my thoughts and develop a plan of action

Favorite Disney movie: Cinderella

Goal yet to accomplish: To raise a healthy and happy family

Favorite saying: I have two. Where there's a will, there's a way. Take time to smell the roses.