Why I love ID:
I love academic medicine; working jointly with an interdisciplinary team of experts to sort out the most complex clinical cases excites me. There is no place in the region that fulfills each of the aspects of that statement better than Nebraska Medicine.
While more and more of the practice of medicine necessarily moves to the long-term management of chronic disease states, infectious disease is one area where we are routinely able to cure a patient’s medical condition and appreciate the satisfaction that can bring for them. Also, the pathogen-host-antimicrobial interaction is fascinating and unique in medicine from a pharmacotherapy perspective. Drug therapy can be complicated enough in other areas without the host and its associated resistance mechanisms further complicating things, which makes being an ID pharmacist very intellectually rewarding. Finally, microbes are some of the most diverse, important, and fascinating entities on our planet. There’s always so much more to appreciate and learn (or re-learn!).
I also love:
I’ve always loved music, but developed an particular appreciation for opera in high school, which I was able to foster while living in Chicago and Baltimore/D.C. during my university years. I then lived away from a city without access to live performances for about a decade and had two small children. Now having moved here and with children that are a bit older (7 and 4), my wife and I have been excited to attend Opera Omaha and share more aspects of our love for music with them.