In my own words

How did I end up at Mercy Radiology and with Dignity Health as Director of Women's Imaging? We are all an accumulation of our life opportunities, choices and experiences. In high school I spent a summer in rural Honduras in central America walking between village schools teaching dental care and handing out toothbrushes, which I suspect the children later used to clean their shoes. I spent my high school weekends washing dishes in a nursing home occasionally coming across  lost pairs of dentures. My college summers were spent working as a nurse's aide in a nursing home, and school year weekends in the local community hospital.  My college freshman chemistry teaching assistant was smart, premed and had a cute girlfriend, and I thought, I want to be like him. Originally I wanted to be a family doctor and do a little of everything. In medical school though I met an OB/GYN who inspired me to learn how to deliver babies.   A couple thousand delivered babies and many gynecologic surgeries later, I started getting restless, or maybe I was just tired and sleep deprived. I loved the relationships with patients and their families, but wanted a new challenge. Diagnostic imaging and radiology had changed so much since my medical school years. It seemed like all healthcare providers and patients depending on some type of imaging for their care. In my radiology training imaging to find breast cancer seemed like it was my destiny. In the mid 1980's when screening mammography first become common my mom's doctor ordered one for her. The radiologist in Seattle found early cancer in both her breasts. She recently celebrated her 80th birthday and myself and my family are grateful to her ordering doctor and the radiologist. I feel fortunate my opportunities, choices and experiences have landed me in Sacramento with Mercy Radiology. I hope to spend the rest of my career helping women and their families survive breast cancer.

I want to help women find their breast cancers as early as possible when they are curable, and will require the least aggressive surgery, chemotherapy or radiation. Although medical imaging can help find early breast cancer and save women's lives, it also can have unintended harms, with anxiety and costs of additional imaging. My current efforts are to provide women with accurate results as quickly as possible and if any further evaluation needed to perform it promptly.  At our women's center in Carmichael we offer same day results and often are able to proceed directly to extra imaging if needed in the small number of women with abnormal screening exams. My goal is to provide education, the latest proven technology with accurate interpretations in an office environment where women and their families are treated kindly.