Why I Teach: Dr. Christy Lawson
Why I Teach: Dr. Christy Lawson
In this inspiring episode of Why I Teach, Dr. Christy Lawson, a trauma, critical care, and acute care surgeon at ETSU’s Quillen College of Medicine, reflects on her journey from a rural community in Georgia to the operating room and classroom. Blending stories of family, mentorship, and personal growth, Dr. Lawson reveals how formative experiences—from learning through storytelling with her grandfather to assisting in surgery during a mission trip in Honduras—ignited her passion for medicine and teaching. She discusses the emotional complexities of surgical training, the power of individualized mentorship, and the importance of nurturing students as whole people.
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Transcript
Transcript
Dr. Christy Lawson
Just knowing people is one of the most important parts of teaching. When you know them as an individual, you can help them tap into the things that renew them.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
Hi, I'm Kimberly McCorkle, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at East Tennessee State University. From the moment I arrived on this campus, I have been inspired by our faculty, their passion for what they do, their belief in the power of higher education, and the way they are transforming the lives of their students. This podcast is dedicated to them, our incredible faculty at ETSU. Hear their stories as they tell us "Why I Teach."
In this episode, we will talk with Dr. Christy Lawson. Dr. Lawson is a trauma, critical care, and acute care surgeon and professor of surgery at ETSU Quillen College of Medicine. She was born in Ringgold, Georgia, and grew up learning the values of faith, integrity, hard work, drive, passion, and service to others from her family. Her mother went back to nursing school when she was in high school, and she remembers doing her homework during night school anatomy classes. This influence, a few key teachers, and a strategically placed surgical mission project in Honduras inspired her to work hard and open the horizon of medical school.
Dr. Lawson obtained her college degree at Berry College, and then attended the Medical College of Georgia before landing in surgical residency at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She trained there for residency and fellowship, and spent the first several years of her surgical practice there prior to moving to Johnson City and finding her home at ETSU in 2018.
She was recently part of the ETSU Great Lecture Series, which is a celebration of our amazing faculty who have recently been promoted to full professor. Her lecture was inspirational, and I really look forward to my conversation with her today. Enjoy the show!
Dr. Lawson, welcome to the show. I start my podcast with the same question for every guest. Take me back to your first day of teaching at ETSU as a faculty member. Looking back on that day, what's one piece of advice that you would have given yourself?
Dr. Christy Lawson
That first day was so different than anything that I'd really experienced before. And I was nervous because I'd never really left the place that I trained. And I think I would have told myself to just be myself and to not compare, because I think that was the hardest part for me, was coming in, not knowing what to expect and sort of comparing it to what I had done in the past. The students are different. The environment was different. The patients were different. The people that I worked with were different. And so I think that would have probably been what I would have told myself. Just take a breath. Don't compare and be yourself.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
Yeah. Great advice. Let's start with your story. You grew up in Ringgold, Georgia, with a powerful example of service in your family. Can you share how those early experiences shaped your decision to pursue medicine and ultimately teaching?
Dr. Christy Lawson
Actually, teaching came first before medicine. I grew up in a very rural farm community. My grandfather had cattle. I was sent to dig post holes for punishment. So that's kind of how I grew up. My grandfather was my first teacher. I remember walking with him through the farm and he was a great oral storyteller. And I don't think I identified storytelling as teaching then, but it was a way that he kind of would talk through things with us. He would teach us how to do things. He would teach us the names of livestock, how to take care of them, the names of the trees that we saw. And over the course of years, just walking with my grandfather through the farm and doing hard work with him, I learned that storytelling was teaching in that I love knowledge.
And so honestly, that was really where it started for me. In high school, I had some fantastic teachers who were really able to see my potential, because while I loved knowledge, I didn't love school, and they saw that I was sort of floundering, and that I would read paperbacks under my desk. And I had a chemistry teacher in particular, who was just excellent at seeing the potential in individual students and pulling it out of the individual. And it wasn't this cookie cutter, "This is what you have to learn." And that really hit home for me -- that individualized learning. And so from that point forward, I just wanted to learn.
And so I went to school pursuing zoology. I love being outside and I love my love of trees and flowers and plants and animals and living things came from my grandfather, and found myself in science classes. And then my mom wanted me to have a career that actually had an income, because I was going to do grant writing and research on Steller sea lions. And she said, "You know, how about you go with me to Honduras and learn some things about surgery or medicine?" And so I went with them on a surgical trip, and I was a first assist in surgery in San Pedro Sula, with a surgeon who actually graduated from Quillen and did his residency here at ETSU. And then I was hooked. I was like, "I can do this forever. This is really what I could do with my life." And that's kind of how I found my way into medicine -- sort of like an afterthought.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
That's great. How old were you when you went to Honduras?
Dr. Christy Lawson
I was 19. So I was a junior in college, and one of my roommates had been working on med school applications, and it wasn't until after that trip that I thought maybe I could do this. And fortunately, all the prereqs that science had given me positioned me well for med school. All I had to do is take physics.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
Oh, that's all?
Dr. Christy Lawson
That's all. It almost killed the career dreams, right?
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
Thank you. You were recently featured in the ETSU Great Lecture Series where you talked about the power of mentorship. Will you share with us some of those powerful mentorship moments you've experienced throughout your career, either as the mentor or the mentee?
Dr. Christy Lawson
There are just so many of these. This is really what compels me the most about teaching is the relationships that you get to develop, both with the people who teach you, as well as the people that you teach.
My greatest surgical mentor was my program director and chairman when I was a resident, Mitch Goldman. And he was one of those teachers, too, that could see you as an individual and know what it took to motivate you. And I know I had a trouble with confidence. And so he had this unique way of sort of sitting back in the background and letting me do things, and then would insert himself when he knew that I needed help. But he always watched, and he was always there. And so just having that support in the background, knowing that he believed in me, that mattered to me so much, and that really helped me build the confidence that I needed to be a good surgeon.
I remember on a Saturday he was busy, he was doing paperwork, I was running around seeing patients, and I didn't know the answer to a question. And rather than reprimand me, like so many of my other faculty did, he called me to his office and I thought, "Well, this is it. I'm about to get fired." And I go up there and he sat me down and he opened a textbook, and he shared with me his knowledge of what I had gotten wrong, and he taught me how to think about it in a different way. And I will never forget that day. It was Saturday at like 2:00 in the afternoon. And at first, I was thinking about how busy I was and how much I had left to do. But him taking that 15 minutes out of his day to teach me was really impactful.
And then one of my students – this was probably my favorite mentee moment -- she was a resident, and she came in, very young. She was younger than everybody else, so it was a little bit like a fish out of water. And so we sort of bonded over that. And she became a really good friend over the course of her training; went into trauma and critical care; left UT and went to UT Southwestern, where she did fellowship; and then one of my current residents, who's about to graduate, did an elective with her in practice. And I have this picture of me and her -- her name is Sneha Bhat -- I have a picture of us operating doing an abdominal wall reconstruction together. And then 10 years later, she sends me a picture of her doing the same operation with my current resident. So for me, that was just a really neat, full-circle moment.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
Yeah. Well, speaking of that, I thought one of the most powerful parts of you the day you were delivering the lecture was having some of your mentors in the room.
Dr. Christy Lawson
Yeah. For me as well. It was really neat to see that they came to hear me speak. And that, to me, means a lot about our relationship.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
Yeah, that was nice. I also appreciated your perspective on work-life balance. As a surgeon and an educator, you have both a demanding and a rewarding career. What advice do you have for our students or resident physicians who are just beginning their careers in medicine?
Dr. Christy Lawson
This is really hard and was very challenging for me. Medical careers can be all-consuming. It's almost what we're taught to feel about them. It's a calling. It's not just a career. This is part of your identity. It's very easy and insidious to find your identity in your career. All of us struggle with that.
And so, I think my advice to them would be, remember what your priorities are. Yes, your priority is to learn how to take great care of patients, how to be an excellent physician, and to learn the vast amount of information that you have to do, have to learn, to be able to do that well. But also, if you set your priorities and your intentions when you start and you make sure that you stay true to who you are and what is the most valuable thing to you, that will help.
And balance is a myth. Some days it's always going to be tilted one way or the other. So, there are days where I don't see my kids because I'm on call for 24 hours. They know that I love them. I kiss them before I leave, and then I tell them I'll see them the next day after school. They know Mom works hard and takes care of patients, and they're always, they always know that I'll be back. And then the next day when I'm off and I'm post-call and I may be tired, but I'm all there. So wherever I am, I have to be all there. And so when I'm with my kids, they have to know that they're the most important thing to me in that moment. And I think keeping that intention, whether I'm at work or whether I'm at home, that I'm 100% where I am, I think that's helped me.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
Yeah, that's great advice. Thank you. When you're teaching students or resident physicians, what do you most hope they take away from your example or your lessons?
Dr. Christy Lawson
Honestly, I hope they take hope away from it. Our world is hard. What we do is hard. The environment around us is difficult to navigate sometimes. There's always emotions and fears or concerns or what ifs swirling around, and that interplays with us in all areas of our life. And so if you can have hope, not only that what you're doing for your patients brings hope to them, how you're teaching the students around you brings hope for their future, how you live your life gives you hope for that it's going to be better, that you're going to be able to make an impact, that you're going to be able to make a difference -- I think if they can take that away, then I've done the calling that I've been called to do, and I think that's the most important thing.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
Are there any "Aha!" moments you've seen in your students that have really stuck with you?
Dr. Christy Lawson
I love this question. There's so many "Aha!" moments when you teach. especially when you're doing new skills acquisition. But for me, watching the process work for residents is amazing. They come in, new doctors, they've been doctors for five minutes, and they're learning all of this new information -- how to take care of patients, how to see them, who to operate on, who not operate on, the science of surgery, the bureaucracy of medicine, how to navigate a system. And then they go to the operating room, and at first it's just they're so excited to be there, but they have no idea what they're doing. And then watching that process unfold over five years and then getting to operate with a chief, like they're a partner, where you just operate in companionable silence. It's very rare that I have to move their hands or help them see something in a different way. They can just do it on their own. And watching that excitement turn into pride and a sense of accomplishment and ownership -- that, to me is the neatest part about training surgeons.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
It's great. How do you prepare students to navigate the challenges of medicine and surgery?
Dr. Christy Lawson
There are several things that go into this. The first is like we just talked about -- the "Aha!" moment, watching someone develop the necessary skills and competence to be able to work in this high-stakes area. So one of it is just making sure they have the foundation, the knowledge base, the technical skills -- all of those things become muscle memory. Having that foundational background is really, really important, because invariably, we are all going to do something, whether it's by active omission or active commission, to hurt someone. And that is really, really difficult to deal with emotionally. We are all humans, and we are frail, and we make mistakes. So having that foundation, that background knowledge, is critical and why it's so important to be a good teacher of both surgical science and medicine in general.
But beyond that, helping them figure out how to deal with that inevitability, how to handle stress, how to navigate the complex emotions of mistakes and medicine, of the stress of the job, of the changes that we all have to face and navigate, even the frustrations that a system that doesn't know the knowledge that you know, that tells you how to practice medicine -- all of that is very stressful.
And so figuring out what it is about each student that they can tap into that helps with stress relief is super important, and that goes along with mentorship. Just knowing people is one of the most important parts of teaching. When you know them as an individual, you can help them tap into the things that renew them. For me, it's prayer, meditation, my family, and exercise. For somebody else, it might look completely different. And so being able to kind of help them figure that out for themselves, to give them the tools to deal with this long term will help not only them in the immediate time while they're my students, but also keep them in their careers for forever. Because you don't want a burnout. Burnout's a very, very high risk for our career.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
As you know, the Quillen College of Medicine was recently recognized as second in the nation for medical schools, with the most graduates practicing in underserved areas. In what ways do you see Quillen preparing our students to make an impact in this area?
Dr. Christy Lawson
This is the Quillen identity. This is who we are. And I love that about ETSU and Quillen College of Medicine. You find that vein of wanting to serve the underserved in pretty much any group of people that teach or work at Quillen, that or ETSU that you talk to you -- that vein of wanting to serve sort of bonds us together and brings us together as a family, and so that becomes our identity. When you see things like Remote Area Medical, when you see volunteer projects like during the Helene disaster, the global impact that we're able to have through the surgical fellowships and the work that Dr. Wood and Dr. Feltis are doing with the international medical work, you watch how that really changes the way people treat patients. The knowledge that people come from austere areas, that they have limited access to care, learning how to navigate fear of health care -- there's a lot of distrust, especially in Appalachia, about organized health care, really organized anything -- and so seeing how our residents really lean into that, and a lot of our residents and students come here because of that identity as well. They have a strong desire to serve underserved. And so, Quillen has done a fantastic job of identifying that as who they are, and that that's a core belief, and seeing that translated into real time and how it really impacts and interplays in patient care has been really amazing.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
Yeah. Finally, what impact do you hope you've made on your students?
Dr. Christy Lawson
This is difficult for me to answer because I just want to have made some impact to make them the best version of who they are. I think in the history of surgical training, we've tried very hard to make people fit a certain mold. And you come in and you sort of sublimate or subjugate who you are so that you can fit a certain type. And surgeons have a type, right? Where there's a typecast, there's a generalization of the angry surgeon or the surgeon that's a workaholic, or the surgeon that that eats, breathes and sleeps the operating room and doesn't care about anything outside it. And that's not true. Inherently, we are deeply passionate people, very driven. We do care about all aspects of patient care. We tend to be stressed. And so I think that comes forward with that, that mentality of anger or short-tempered.
And so what I hope to impact the most is creating whole people, because I think when we are the best versions of who we are designed to be and we're humans, then we're better at our job. No matter what job we do, when we remember who we are, and we're able to really plug back into what feeds our soul or what is most important to us, and we're able to prioritize and not just be our jobs, we're better at our jobs. And that's what I hope. I hope to be able to make that kind of impact on my students, and also on the surgical field as a whole.
Provost Dr. Kimberly D. McCorkle
Doctor Lawson, thank you so much for joining us on "Why I Teach." It's truly been an honor to hear more about your journey and the incredible impact you're making here at ETSU.
Thanks for listening to "Why I Teach." For more information about Dr. Lawson, the Quillen College of Medicine, or this podcast series, visit the ETSU Provost website at etsu.edu/provost. You can follow me on social media @ETSUProvost. And if you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to like and subscribe to "Why I Teach" wherever you listen to podcasts.
East Tennessee State University was founded in 1911 with a singular mission: to improve the quality of life for people in the region and beyond. Through its world-class health sciences programs and interprofessional approach to health care education, ETSU is a highly respected leader in rural health research and practices. The university also boasts nationally ranked programs in the arts, technology, computing, and media studies. ETSU serves approximately 14,000 students each year and is ranked among the top 10 percent of colleges in the nation for students graduating with the least amount of debt.
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