S7E4: Balancing Medicine with Non-Medical Partners

Laurel: All right. So I am going to keep an eye out for any barking or sniffling or dogs causing any type of disturbance because that is unfortunately the kind of chaotic energy that my household brings to the podcast.

So while this is "Bundle of Hers," this is also a bundle of theirs, in reference to the dogs who run this household.

I am Laurel, and I'm happy to speak with you today with my dear friend Telisha. Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself really quick?

Telisha: Yeah, I'm Telisha. So I'm a fourth-year medical student at the University of Utah and met Laurel during my first year. I'm a little star-struck because I've been a "Bundle of Hers" listener for quite some time. So it's just a joy to be here.

Laurel: That is very exciting for us to get to share this together, for you to be a "Bundle of Hers" guest, and for me to, I guess, be my first episode as a "Bundle of Hers" host. I think you mentioned listening to the episode that I was a guest on decades ago when I started in the MD-PhD program, when my hair was a different shade of pastel, I suppose.

And so we are here today to talk about navigating medicine with non-medical partners. And so I am going to allow the men in our lives to speak. If you want to introduce Ryland and then he can say a few words, and then I'll decide whether or not Peter is going to get to appear on the podcast.

Telisha: Of course. Yeah, so Ryland has been a part of my medical school journey and even before so. We have been together for almost eight years, and I'll let him introduce himself.

Ryland: What's up, everybody? I'm Ryland and I'm excited to be here. Grew up here in Salt Lake City most of my life and a little bit in Hawaii, but yeah.

Laurel: I'm excited for you to be here, Ryland. And because it is only fair, I will allow my partner, the incredible Peter, who has been my right-hand cutie for the past decade to also introduce himself since we are going to be talking about medicine journeys with our non-medical partners. And Peter, I love you. I think you're about as non-medical as it gets.

Peter: Yeah, I'll take that summary. So this is Peter here. Laurel and I have been together for, gosh, 10 years. And we're coming up on four years married this summer, which is wild. Time does fly.

I appreciate the designation of right-hand cutie. It's a big promo from right-hand man and it's going directly on my business card.

Yeah, non-medical as they come, I suppose, in that I briefly thought about doing med stuff when I was in high school, and then I didn't, and I've lost all medical knowledge. It all goes through Laurel now.

Laurel: So the reason I think that we wanted to talk about our journey as a medical individual with non-medical partners is in part because I am a non-binary person, often presumed to be maybe feminine. You could call that, I don't know, my girlish figure as a vibe. And then Telisha, would it be fair to say that you are in fact a woman?

Telisha: I am a woman, yes.

Laurel: Incredible. A true "Bundle of Hers" moment. And so I wanted to have this conversation both because medicine is, to be honest, hard and difficult and doesn't always intuitively create space for the people in our lives, but also because it is, I think, maybe an assumption that the people who are in relationships are oftentimes men in medical school who are in straight relationships with wives at home.

And while that is its own type of difficulty and complexity, I think that we have unique experiences as individuals who have incredible men cheering us on as we go through our medical journey.

And before we get further, I just want to iterate and perhaps reiterate that all of the opinions and narratives and expressions from this episode are the opinions and experiences of us, the individuals in the podcast, and not reflective of our various institutions.

And so before we get into the cosmic void that is medicine, I thought it could maybe be cute to talk about our love story. How did y'all meet, if you don't mind me asking, Telisha and/or Ryland?

Telisha: I'll take this one. So we actually met through mutual friends. One of his football buddies and I were acquainted. We were at several events and apparently he saw me, stalked me on social media, but was a little too afraid to ask me out. So luckily his friend was a bro and made that happen, and we've been inseparable ever since.

Laurel: I dub this officially cute.

Telisha: Thanks. That means a lot.

Laurel: Peter, would you like to give a brief overview of our love story, I guess you could call it?

Peter: I would love to, and I would like to give the audience a disclaimer of my own. I'm not making this up. It's just very high school rom-com-y. I was the new kid in school, sophomore year of high school. I just had my first day there. It was the day after my 16th birthday, and I had not a friend in the school.

I was eating lunch alone on, I want to say, my second day. On my first day, I went and did the thing where you eat in the courtyard alone. So it's less visible.

Laurel had been talking to some friends and they all knew that I was the new kid. And Laurel asked if they would mind if Laurel invited me to sit with them. So Laurel came up to me in the lunch room, invited me to sit with the theater kids, and introduced me to who would become my first real group of friends there.

And we were friends for a good few years, did kind of the will they/won't they for a while, until yeah, we finally started dating my senior year. They had already graduated. And we've been attached at the hip since that point, really just sappily inseparable.

And I'll head it to Laurel for any fact-checking and framing here. Have you been charitably characterized, my love?

Laurel: I think the biggest criticism I have with your version of events is that you are a foot taller than me. And so our hips are not necessarily at the same position in space. But besides that, it was pretty accurate.

And so I think one of the things that I find interesting is that we both met our partners previously to our involvement in medicine. And so I think I'm curious as to how those conversations looked for you both, because it can be a pretty involved career. I think even people outside of the field can understand that it is a commitment.

And I don't want to put overly weighted terms on it, but I think people sometimes view it as a calling as opposed to a career. There's the expectation you're going to work holidays and you're going to work weekends, and I think that's something that can be a difficult conversation with partners.

And so I'm curious as to what that looked like for you both since you've been also together for time eternal.

Telisha: So I went to college at a pretty conservative university, a religiously conservative university. And part of that in previous romantic relationships, even on first dates . . . I was a collegiate rugby player, which was I guess kind of intimidating for men. And then I would bring up that I was pre-med, and that usually was the point of no return.

And so what stood out to me when meeting Ryland was I mentioned those things because they were so inherent to my identity, and he was like, "Oh, yeah, that's cool." Not intimidated in the least.

And so that just started off, I think, our relationship on such an open field that I felt like I could truly be myself and share my identity, and that there was no judgment or no sensitivity around my pursuit of these things.

Ryland: Yeah, definitely. I feel like when you brought that up to me, I didn't think twice about it. It was just like, "That's cool." I think, if anything, that's awesome that I can look at you and be like, "Oh, wow, I want to aspire to pursue something like that in my life too." And especially living here in the state that we live, those expectations are definitely like, "Oh, yes . . ." Kind of like your experience at BYU.

Telisha: Well, you haven't told us what you do, right?

Ryland: Oh, yeah. I'm a barber. I cut six days a week, so if you need a haircut, come on over. I'll get you right.

Laurel: Do you get to talk about Telisha when you're cutting people's hair?

Ryland: Oh, definitely. I mean, the culture in that is a place where men come and talk about their feelings. I don't know, it's a different culture. When I do talk about Telisha, which I talk about her a lot, the first thing is usually like, "Oh, wow, you found yourself a sugar mama," and all that kind of stuff.

Telisha: Sugar mama in three . . . how much in debt?

Ryland: Oh, yeah, of course. But I think it just, again, goes to that whole, "Oh, you're not the doctor. Your wife is the doctor," or in training to be a doctor one day. And I feel like there's a lot of intimidation, and toxic masculinity is a lot there. And so for me, it doesn't bother me at all. If anything, I laugh inside or I'm just like, "I don't care."

Laurel: Telisha, I'm curious if people ever are, I guess, surprised at how supportive Ryland is. I feel like there are people who have their own assumptions about being intimidated and maybe assume that because they have those, that those are going to be universal.

Telisha: So I am . . . I applied. That's the word to say. I applied to plastic and reconstructive surgery, which is a six- to seven-year residency/fellowship journey ahead of us.

I spent three months last year . . . I went to L.A., Philadelphia, and North Carolina, and I left Ryland to complete my away rotations, which are super necessary for applying to my specialty. And he got a lot of comments from family members, friends, and people are really confused that he's okay with just picking up and leaving his career that he's built here in Salt Lake City. So I think that's been a little interesting navigating those conversations.

I will say that I definitely have felt a lot of guilt because of expectations that others have almost put on me, but trying to take that internal locus of control and realize that he has my back and that's what a good partner does.

And we have always communicated this. We always knew this was in the picture, and so trying to illustrate that as much as possible to the people we speak with. We have some non-believers that are questioning if our marriage will last. But I have full faith that we'll get through this, and we're ready to explore what's ahead.

Peter: Kind of jumping in with my experience with Laurel here, I knew what I was signing up for from the jump. Laurel was, in high school, on the path to be our valedictorian before they pulled the swerve and went and finished at an entirely different institution, where they then also finished as valedictorian, right? So I knew I was kind of hitching my wagon to a rocket ship, and that was exciting to me.

And also, I knew it was going to be not dissimilar from, I guess, how I would order some of the priorities in my own life.

So I haven't mentioned my career yet. I'm a working journalist. I thought for a long time I was going to be a lawyer. So I instead decided to pick only a moderately less reviled profession where you were paid substantially less.

But similar to medicine, I am going to work odd hours. I'm going to have kind of the sporadic inconsistency that both the news and medical care, I think, are known for. It always seemed like a good match to me because we would know what the other was going to be dealing with at kind of any given point, sort of an empathy that arises from our mutual workaholic natures.

I also would maybe throw in I don't really have a ton of experiences to compare this to, because Laurel was the first person I ever dated, which I think adds a certain high school sweetheart mushy flavor to the story every time I tell it.

Laurel: Now I feel sort of bad, because you didn't really get any other options. You started dating someone and they said, "I'm going to go into an eight-year starting degree program in the MD-PhD." And you went, "Well, I guess this is what love looks like."

Peter: To be fair, we were four or five years down the line at that point. So I was entrenched. I was there to stay.

Laurel: I do think that it's something that I feel very fortunate in my relationship, and I think it's something that I recognize in y'all's, if that's not too forward, that it's wonderful to have a partner who is excited by our goals as opposed to intimidated by them.

As someone, again, often perceived in the feminine, I will tell the story about how I, as a 17-year-old, told a primary care physician that I was going into pre-med, and he told me not to strain myself. And I went, "Huh, what an odd thing to say."

But I think there are a lot of individuals who are ready to maybe look at the obstacles to medicine as opposed to the lovely partners that we have who are looking at those obstacles and thinking it's incredible that we're able to cross all of these bridges and mountains at our sides.

I think it's interesting to bring up the concept of folks maybe being intimidated. Peter is probably too humble to mention this and also probably doesn't want to make me feel bad, but Peter left his job at CNN International, which as an international affairs journalist is really the dream gig, to move out to the very sexy city of Salt Lake City with me and be here with my very, very long program.

And so when y'all talk about the conversations happening about uprooting a career and moving to a new place, that is something that I've already inflicted on Peter, I guess.

But I think in trying to reckon with some of the big feelings that come from asking the love of my life to sort of leave his dream job for me, to say that we support each other's careers is probably putting it mildly.

But a conversation we've already had is for residencies. Peter basically gets to choose the city shortlist, and that's going to be based on cities that have career opportunities for him.

I've actually stepped back a fair amount with regards to a lot of my extracurricular involvement because I've decided that time with my partner gets to be a priority for me.

I think people sometimes are surprised that his partner is in medicine, but I think that I sometimes am surprised at how supportive he is. And so we try to meet in the middle, or hopefully we try to meet in the middle by I make him as much of a priority as I feel like he makes me a priority.

And that ebbs and flows from moment to moment and month to month and year to year with the nature of our separate obligations. But I think when other people maybe reach quick judgments, it helps to remind myself they haven't sat in on the literal spreadsheeting that we've done to try and figure out how to make our 10-year plans align.

Peter: If I could, I guess, speak to the point on my whole transition from Atlanta to Salt Lake just a little bit. I was faced with those choices of do we keep doing long distance and do I stay at this job that I really love that has great opportunities, or do I make a change for us and for the relationship that might look kind of non-traditional in the career path sense?

It's a branch of my career that became very exciting to me that I don't know I would've fully considered without the context of moving for Laurel and making the relationship as fruitful as possible.

And I don't think I would've traded that choice for anything, to be honest. I think it's a matter of having the perspective to see that there are interesting and better ways to do things than maybe you're just going to think if you're only thinking for yourself, if that makes sense.

Ryland: I think when Telisha was away for those three months and reflecting back on that, I didn't really put too much thought to it. I think that was a little hard for Telisha to . . . I don't know if you would say so, but not really putting too much thought to it.

When we had our conversations, it was a little rough at the beginning, but I think the therapy . . . We took therapy and that definitely helped out a lot to help us navigate the conversation to have so that we were on the same page.

For me, it was just like, "Oh, yeah, we can just go anywhere. Doesn't matter to me. We'll be fine." But then when we actually started talking about it, it was like,

"Oh, yeah, there are some things about this place that I actually don't like." And then things about another place that I was like, "Oh, yes, I really love that."

And so the more we took our therapy sessions, we were able to come together and try to understand each other's points and we were able to submit that rank list. I feel good about it. I honestly feel great about it.

Telisha: I mean, I feel anxious about it, but I think I'm just anxious at baseline lately.

Ryland: Of course. Yeah, same here.

Telisha: No, but I think we definitely have the privilege . . . So through our school of medicine, we have not only individual therapy, but couples therapy. So yeah, that is definitely something that we have taken full advantage of that's helped us navigate these hard decisions.

And I would say just, again, keeping the line of communication open, because it's really easy . . . I feel like as two other workaholics, all of us are working insane hours a week. It's so easy to live together, but separate. And so really trying to find those times to be intentional and present with one another has been super helpful in our journey.

Then even reflecting back, and again, therapy was a great place to do this, on other times when we were able to explore our relationship and discover what we wanted in the future.

For example, Ryland is also very humble, but did a political science internship in Washington, D.C. And so before medical school, I took several years off, but then went and we moved across the U.S. I did a nannying job. I just was trying to find some short-term job to pay the bills while we were there. And I think it was during that time our relationship flourished more so than it had previously.

And so kind of reflecting back on that moment in time of our life, I think it's helped us frame this huge hurdle ahead of us with a lot more excitement and a lot more hope for the future.

And so definitely just trying to reflect on how we can build through all of these changes, I feel like we've done a really good job at communicating and coming halfway to one another along the way.

Laurel: You bring up there's ebb and flow. I read "Unfinished Business" by Anne-Marie Slaughter. Actually, Peter and I both read it together, which is basically a book about trying to "have it all" with relationships, with people who are working, and whatnot. And it has this idea of sort of the support spouse, which is sometimes one person is going to be pursuing something and the other person is going to be there to support them through that.

And I think that's something that we've been able to explore a lot in the past few years, whether it's me learning how to cook because Peter's on the night shift despite the fact that I freaking hated cooking and I didn't want to do it, but I did, to the equivalent sacrifice of Peter giving up his dream job and moving across the country for me.

You've already touched on I think some sort of suggestions: therapy, intentional moments with each other. But I did want to ask, as we draw our conversation to a close, what recommendations might the four of us have both for the individuals within a relationship, but also what suggestions do we have for the system of medicine?

There are still considerations about how do I make a family, whether that's a couple or whether that involves children or whether that involves caring for relatives, work with the expectations placed upon us?

So I'm curious thoughts for individuals and then thoughts for the big people in charge.

Telisha: I think as a medical student, especially finding those mentors to be in my corner who . . . For example, going into plastic surgery, I have had the awesome experience of getting to know some really incredible female plastic surgeons who are just pushing the boundaries of the surgical field. And so being able to see that and also gain guidance from those individuals has been super helpful.

And then on a community level, finding individuals that are not asking you to apologize for your journey. I think I've definitely had to set very intentional boundaries for friends and family members that no longer are in my life because they weren't able to support the journey that Ryland and I have chosen to take together.

Although that has been very difficult to part ways with some individuals, I think we are both better for it. And just finding a community like this community of "Bundle of Hers" or other friend groups and communities within your medical school or the local community, it's just really important to lean into that, to have people that support what you're doing.

Ryland: Yeah, I would agree with that as well. As someone being outside of medicine and a partner of someone who is in medicine, I think for me it's being honest with each other, being open and willing to anything that will come our way.

I think that's the number one advice that I have, at least for me. For anyone who is a partner with someone in medicine or is someone in medicine, I think that's really helped us with our relationship moving forward.

Peter: I have found that there is a lot of freedom to figure things out once you accept that there needs to be a baseline level of flexibility.

I think when you look at the eight-year program with the MD-PhD, you feel like you have no time to lose, but once you kind of open yourself up to, "I have these constraints on my situation, but let's find where I can be flexible. Let's find where I can look for little ways to make work and life more fulfilling and balanced," those little changes and tweaks you're going to make are going to make all the difference.

I really vibed with what Telisha said earlier about this situation putting us in positions to be more intentional with our relationship. I think by having to be more intentional and think about these things more, it does lead me to be more present and active in day-to-day life and spending time with Laurel feeling fulfilled.

Laurel: Yeah, I think that moving long distance to Salt Lake City to start medical school, it meant the world to me that you were welcomed into some of the communities that I was a part of.

I think one of my favorite memories is Peter got to be an ultrasound model for one of our classes where he was visiting from long distance and we had limited time together. So everyone in my group agreed that he could come and take his shirt off upon first meeting people, and he was told he has a very easy-to-find liver and he's kind of been living on that high ever since.

Telisha: Amazing.

Peter: It's my fun fact every time now. Medical students tell me I have a very easy-to-find liver, whatever that means.

Laurel: I think that the fact that we're a priority in each other's lives, the people and communities that recognized . . . Even just letting him come to dinners for the MD-PhD program and people asking me how he was doing, in a career path that can feel, pun sort of intended, very sterile, I think that that recognition of my heart, if you will, that lives in another person means a lot.

And honestly, I think it makes me a better scientist because he takes care of me and I'm a rested better version of myself who's coming up with more creative solutions.

It makes me a better physician because when he's welcomed into my schedule, it means that I have more care for myself and I'm able to give that back to the communities that I care a lot about.

I do a lot of trans health, both clinical work as well as research, and that's something that if I didn't have the stamina to do that work, especially in the current political climate, it would be so exhausting I don't know if I'd be able to do it.

But I just think that if you try and cut any person into pieces, it's not going to work out. And I think a healthcare system that embraces our entirety is one that's going to resonate with our patients and allow us to continue giving quality care. And that's honestly all I want to do with my life.

Telisha: And if I can just add to that, Laurel, you just reminded me that along the interview trail, I actually was quite impressed that a lot of residency programs are recognizing the importance of involving partners as well as family planning, no matter what that looks like for each individual.

One of the programs I was at, one of the older residents and the program director had a baby shower at the same time, and it was the most adorable thing ever.

But really, seeing that programs are not only willing but very supportive of people pursuing their personal relationships in residency gives me a glimmer of hope.

We all know that the medical system is absolutely broken to its very rotten core. And so just to have those silver linings along the journey gives me hope that we as the future of medicine are going to change things, and we're going to make it a place and a space for everyone not only to provide care, but to receive care.

Laurel: I really love that, and I think that silver linings and hope for the future kind of really embodies I think what I hope for the four of us as wonderful people. I hope I can include myself in that. But also the "Bundle of Hers" community to bring forward that kind of change.

And so speaking of "Bundle of Hers," I want to thank the audience for listening. We love audience participation and feedback, and so if you want to subscribe or rate our podcast, review the podcast, these are all things that make us incredibly excited.

You can also interact with us on Instagram, @bundleofhers. You can also reach the "Bundle of Hers" website and hear from the many wonderful people who are on their various medical journeys who may or may not have non-medical partners, but are surely going through some of the same questions of, "Oh, God, where will I move? Where will I end up? What do I do in my free time?"

There's only so much of it, and I think that we're lucky that we get to have those conversations with our partners. So it ain't bad to be in love. I'll leave it at that.