“It’s important to me to be a rural physician and give back to the people who supported me.”

My medical education started long before I applied to the UW School of Medicine.

My father, Blaine Ruby, MD, graduated from the Wyoming WWAMI program in 1998. I grew up going with him to visit his surgical patients, and I remember how they appreciated the careful attention he gave them. He was able to be there for people in a really vulnerable place.

I’ve wanted to be in medicine for as long as I can remember, but I wasn’t always sure what path I would take. Before deciding to apply to medical school, I worked as a medical scribe, patient care technician (PCT) and a medical assistant, all patient-facing jobs. I also worked in neuroscience research for a time.

While assisting with procedures as a PCT and a medical assistant, I learned I wanted to have a personal impact on patients. I got to help someone who had come in sick or injured feel better, whether I was holding a patient’s head during a laser eye surgery, helping with earwax removal or draining a tonsil abscess. Even packing a bloody nose with Afrin-soaked cotton was rewarding!

As a research tech, I studied autism and dementia in mouse models, mapping out neural circuits and visualizing how the neurons interacted. It was interesting, but for me, it was too far removed from patient care. Research is certainly impactful, but I wanted to be able to see the impact I was making.

Becoming a better doctor through being a patient

I’ve also been on the other side of medicine.

My eldest daughter, Everly, was born early, at 37 weeks. She’s doing great now, but the first year of her life was difficult. She was growth-restricted and weighed less than five pounds. Shortly after birth, she was found to have a pneumothorax, or collapsed lung. She had to spend time in the NICU — and, since this was early in the COVID-19 pandemic, visiting hours were very limited. My wife and I were in a very vulnerable place, and we had to place a lot of trust in our doctors and nurses.

Everly was discharged with a giant oxygen tank because she needed supplemental oxygen for three months. Then, at six months, we learned she was extremely farsighted and would need multiple eye surgeries. Hearing that news when my daughter was less than a year old — that was hard.

Now, thinking about my future as a doctor, it’s helpful that I’ve been in a position of getting unexpected news. Particularly because I plan to specialize in radiation oncology.
 

“I’m a medical student with two kids, and a third on the way. Scholarships have been a blessing — they’ve allowed me to take out fewer loans and still be able to support my family.”

Bringing specialty care to rural areas

My clinical rotations have been really rewarding. The internal medicine rotation helped things click for me — I started seeing how all the different body systems I’d learned about in medical school integrated into the whole person.

Internal medicine provided the foundation for everything I’ll do in the future. That rotation made me feel like a doctor, not just a student. It was also during my internal medicine rotation that I gained first-hand experience navigating end-of-life discussions in the context of terminal cancer. I look forward to walking alongside patients through their cancer journeys in my chosen specialty: radiation oncology.

I like that much of radiation oncology has a curative intent. You can use radiation to cure lung cancer, prostate cancer, leukemia and more. After administering radiation treatment, you can watch as the cancer shrinks over time!

The palliative care aspect of radiation oncology, which focuses on relieving suffering, also drew me to the field. We can zap a spot where a tumor is causing pain and relieve the patient’s suffering.

Patients come to the radiation oncologist in a vulnerable position. I look forward to offering them assurance and hope — just as I saw my father do for his patients. Radiation oncology directly improves patients’ lives, whether you’re curing their cancer or making the end of their life more comfortable.

My goal has always been to go back to Wyoming to practice. It’s important to me to be a rural physician and give back to the people who supported me.

The nearest place for people from my hometown of Buffalo, WY, to get radiation oncology care is Sheridan, 30 minutes north. They have a facility but don’t have an on-site radiation oncologist; it’s staffed by physicians from Billings, MT, which is over two hours away. That means that continuity of care is more challenging.

It was Everly’s pediatrician who really drove home to me the importance of continuity of care. We had the same pediatrician, Dr. Olipra, until we moved away when Everly was four. She knew Everly from the day she was born, she had all the context of Everly’s medical history and we could trust she was going to do the right thing for our daughter.

There’s a need for primary care doctors in rural areas, but there’s also a need for specialty care. For example, I have a close family member in Buffalo, WY, who has long COVID. It took her a long time to receive care because there aren’t long COVID providers close to her. When she finally did get care, it was in Denver, which is a six-hour drive away. Having a specialty physician nearby would make a huge difference, for her and so many others.

Scholarships help non-traditional students, like me

I’m a medical student with two kids, and a third on the way. Scholarships have been a blessing — they’ve allowed me to take out fewer loans and still be able to support my family.

Unlike many of my peers — who often stayed at housing provided at WWAMI sites across the region during clinical rotations — I completed most of my rotations in Billings. My family and I moved there so I could be close to them while rotating clinics. That meant moving expenses and extra rent costs, since I needed a place with enough space for my family. Scholarships really helped with those costs.

Thanks to the support I receive from the Anna C. Dunlap Fund, the John and Florence Cooper Endowed Scholarship in Medicine and the UW Medicine Endowed Scholarship Fund, I’ve been able to focus less on finances and more on developing my clinical skills, my patient care and my character. And I want to pay that forward by contributing to scholarships myself in the future and by mentoring other medical students.

I’m extremely grateful for the generosity of scholarship donors. They’re supporting someone who wants to expand access to medical care for rural populations, someone who values making a meaningful impact on patients’ lives. And they’re not just supporting me — they’re helping every patient I’ll care for in the future.

As told to Alex Israel