Q&A: Kay Drew

A Conversation with kay drew

by Brenna E. Raffe 
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​“What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious.” – Marina Keegan,
The Opposite of Loneliness
 
If starting over late in life is something you’re afraid of, look no further than Kay Drew and her inspiring story to quell your fears. After retiring from her thirty-four-year medical career as a neonatal pediatrician, Kay decided to take up writing. Though, unlike Marina Keegan suggests in her quote above, this isn’t Kay’s first love affair with writing.
 
Kay Drew has kept a journal her whole life, documenting all the things that help her make sense of life. As a kid, she moved all over; from Indiana to Rhode Island to Maryland and eventually to Massachusetts for college, where she got her BA in biology. After pursuing an MD from the UMD Medical School, and completing her residency there, she ended up here with us in DC, where she completed a neonatal/perinatal fellowship at Georgetown. Throughout this journey, Kay’s journal provided her with a space to figure things out, and to find and celebrate meaning. After her retirement in 2011, she decided to channel her love of reading and her knack for writing about her life into a hobby of writing creative non-fiction. Now, that hobby has paid off. The featured essay in Grace in Darkness, “Baptism by Fire,” is her first publication. I had the pleasure of getting to chat with Kay about her life and her story below:

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BER: How do you see your lifelong love of reading culminating in your work?
 
KD:  Reading is about exploring other worlds, experiencing life from another person’s (or persons’) perspective(s); it takes us out of ourselves, broadening and deepening our experience of life. So I try to write in a way that enables readers to do this. Plus, I believe that human connection is the most important thing in our lives, and I try to convey this in my writing.
 
BER: Before you were a writer, you were a doctor. Medicine is such a demanding field. Tell me a bit about when you knew that’s what you wanted to pursue, and what it was like once you arrived at your (first!) career.
 
KD: I’d wanted to be a doctor from the time I was a kid but suppressed it until I went to college because it wasn’t something girls did back then. Though my mother never admitted it openly, she hoped I’d go into medicine; she’d actually wanted to do it herself, but her desire had been decisively thwarted. When she was diagnosed with cancer right before my senior year in college, I finally committed to medicine, having considered other careers including medical research, writing, and teaching. Since I wanted to work with children, I went into pediatrics.
 
The experience I wrote about in “Baptism by Fire” actually influenced me to go into neonatology, so I did the training for that after residency. It was during this time that I got married. We both wanted children, and I wondered how I was going to combine having a family with such a demanding career. Fortunately, neonatology is somewhat like emergency medicine in that it is possible to work part-time, which I did for much of my career. I paid a price for this in terms of professional advancement, but I knew that doing right by my family was the most important thing, and I couldn’t have done that working 60—80 hours a week any more than I could have done it by not working as a doctor at all. I know I helped other families in the course of my work, and I am grateful for the privilege of having been able to serve in this way.
 
BER: The story being published in Grace in Darkness is non-fiction, and I know you mentioned you are working on a memoir. Do you only write non-fic? What draws you to the essay as a form?
 
KD: So far, I’ve only written nonfiction. I’m working on a memoir (now in its final stages) and I’ve written some essays, plus some poetry that hasn’t seen the light of day. The essay format appeals to me because I was always pretty good at writing book reports and term papers in school, having had the advantage of learning grammar and composition skills at the hands (so to speak) of the nuns in Catholic school. There’s something about organizing your thoughts into a paragraph and the paragraphs into a narrative, and finding the right words, that has always appealed to me. But I really like playing with words, too—hence the poetry. Having developed some familiarity with writing scenes and dialogue in the memoir (thank you, writing group!), I don’t rule out trying fiction at some point.
 
BER: What do you think the work of writing about being a doctor, during a time when not many women were doctors, does for the cause of feminism?
 
KD: One of the main reasons I’ve persisted in writing the memoir, and have realized I need to see it through to publication in some fashion, is my hope that young women will be encouraged to stand up for themselves, persist and persevere, and take the third wave of feminism to a new level—especially in this time when feminism, and women in general, are threatened on the most basic level, i.e., access to birth control and the ability to choose when/whether to have a child, which is a sine qua non for participating in public life. I realized after the fact that my female medical-school classmates and I are de facto second wave feminists: our class was <20% women. (Women now comprise ~60% of the incoming students at my medical school, a trend that’s been in evidence for at least a decade.) I’m aware, through Facebook, that women physicians who are considerably younger than I continue to face a lot of the same discrimination we faced in terms of not being taken seriously by male colleagues and others, not rising in the ranks in proportion to their numbers, and even not being paid as much as their male colleagues. So there is still much work to be done; and if telling my story can help my feminist descendants in any way, I’m happy to do it. 
 
Kay is a loving wife and mother of three who loves philosophy, yoga, meditation, and following her husband wherever his love of his 1959 Alfa Romeo sportscar takes him. The publication of Kay’s story “Baptism by Fire” is her first, and the Grace in Darkness team couldn’t be more honored or excited to be a part of her debut.