The best career advice I ever received was two words long.
My hospital organized an art show, and after some hesitation, I submitted my realistic pencil portraits — the kind that don't let you get away with just a glance. I texted photos of the drawings — hanging in the hospital hallway among other art pieces — to a friend, a cardiologist I admire enormously. He is the sort of person who makes you reconsider what a doctor can be: brilliant and accomplished in medicine, but also a phenomenal photographer, a poet, and a cyclist. A full human being who happens to practice cardiology.
His reply came in the middle of a clinic day, between patients, I imagined. "Good job. Stay relevant."
Two words that have followed me ever since.
I have been a hospitalist for 25 years. I work alongside people half my age, and I more than keep up. But I would be lying if I said the question never visits me in moments alone: Is it still possible for a woman in medicine, at my age, to remain relevant? Not merely employed or competent. Relevant. Curious, sharp, still adding something.
"Stay relevant" answered that question by reframing it. I had been hearing the word as a warning: keep up or be left behind. But coming from him, a man who refused to be only one thing, it meant something more generous. It was a reminder to stay curious and engaged with the world. Don't let the years, or the relentless census, sand you down into someone going through the motions.
In a way, I had been training for that advice my whole career. As a foreign graduate, I have always had to prove myself, re-earn my footing, and learn a system that was not built for me. Relevance was never something I could take for granted; it had to be earned, day after day, from the very beginning. Maybe that is why his two words landed so squarely — I had been living that instinct for years, but in fear: proving myself out of necessity, not out of any confidence that I'd earned the right to. His words didn't just describe what I was already doing. They gave it a name and gave me permission to claim it instead of just surviving it.
Curiosity is the part of me that has never aged. Diagnosis is what drew me to medicine in the first place, and it still does: the "why" beneath the symptom, the cause hiding behind the complaint. I learned to look for it as a child, watching my father.
He was an ophthalmologist in Argentina, and the diagnostician whom other doctors turned to when they were afraid. They would send him their most complicated patients, the ones at real risk of losing their sight, the cases most surgeons preferred not to touch.
My father would study the patient, calm and pensive, taking his time, until he found the cause and treated it. Many patients regained sight they'd been told was already lost. Many of them could never repay him, and so they gave back: year after year, they returned to show gratitude, the fisherman bringing his catch, the poultry man bringing what he raised. The fruit of their work lay in thanks for their sight. This was how I came to understand medicine: Medicine as attention, as patience, as the refusal to look away.
That instinct runs so deep it has spilled past the bedside. I tend to look for what's wrong, to search for the flaw, the hidden cause. It hasn't always served me well outside the hospital; the diagnostic gaze doesn't switch off, and it has steered me wrong in matters of the heart more than once. But in medicine, it is everything. Understanding human nature, its responses, and contradictions, is what has kept me interested in people for 25 years.
It is also, I've come to realize, what my drawing is. To draw something realistically, you cannot glance at it. You have to study it until you understand how it is made: where the light falls, what the shadow hides, why the form holds together. It is my father's wordless study, rendered in pencil. The same attention and refusal to settle for the surface level. My cardiologist friend understood that the artist and the physician in me are not two people. They are the same person practicing the same skill in different languages.
So "stay relevant" is not, for me, about chasing the newest tool, though I do that too. It is about refusing to let that hunger die. Still wanting the "why," still looking for the cause, still seeing the patient instead of merely glancing at them.
There is one more way I try to honor those two words: to leave every place a little better than I found it, most of all, my service at the end of each week. The number of patients we are asked to see keeps rising, and the pressure to move faster is constant. Within that, I refuse to leave behind mediocrity. Relevance, in the end, is not a status you achieve and keep. It is a daily refusal to coast, to become dull, and to disappear into the throughput.
Twenty-five years in, I am still curious. Still hunting down the why. Still drawing, still studying until the world comes into focus, the way my father looked at the patients no one else would take. A cardiologist-poet told me to stay relevant, and I understood it as permission as much as instruction: permission to be more than one thing, to keep growing, and to refuse to be finished.
Good job, he said. Stay relevant.
I intend to.
