FROM DANCER TO DOCTOR TO DOULA
In the winter of 2003, I wrote the following essay:“Why Medicine or Emergence on the Wings of a Whisper”
Soaring yet suspended, a point of balance on the edge of her hip, launched high into the air and then caught like a tossed baton, defying gravity for a moment before being snatched from her free fall only to be hoisted once again like a five pointed star. This was Lisa’s moment. Lisa , a willowy child, a brave child , a blind child, performed her dance, “Sightless bird” with Erik, a tall boy with the strength of a majestic oak tree, equally brave and legally blind. That afternoon, I stood nervously in the wings, awaiting my own turn to perform, my heart fluttering against my ribs as I watched Lisa and Erik do what no one thought possible.
My other dancers gathered around, sensing my excitement, and we all breathed with Lisa and Erik as they captured the hearts of that White House audience. It was May of 1990 and my dancers, all from inner city Washington, D.C., and I were performing for a luncheon hosted by Mrs. Barbara Bush. These young people, all of whom had some type of disability, had become performing artists. It was while choreographing Lisa and Erik’s performance that my dream of becoming a doctor crystallized.
An important step along this path occurred in 1985 when my fellowship application to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, “Emergence on the Wings of a Whisper”, was selected. My project was to explore working with the blind and visually impaired in dance. It was through this fellowship that I met my muses, Lisa and Erik. The culminating event of the fellowship was a night of performance and presentation for eight teaching fellows from around the United States. My dancers would be the finale. “Emergence on the Wings of a Whisper” began with both the audience and the stage shrouded in complete darkness for about one minute, the drummers playing the overture. Finding their way in such darkness was no problem for my dancers. I wanted the sighted audience to feel uncomfortable, not be able to see their programs, not be able to depend on sight, if only for a moment. I did not want gratuitous pity for the “little blind children”. I did not want their art thought of as dance therapy. When the lights came up there they were in full motion, moving as easily and as gracefully as sighted dancers do in the light. The audience gasped followed by intense applause, the dance ended to a thunderous standing ovation, many people cheering and crying simultaneously.
I stayed on in Washington D.C. and founded my company and dance school Pennvisions. That first group of inner city blind and visually impaired children became The New Visions Dance Theater. Jean Kennedy Smith, founder of Very Special Arts, who happened to be in the audience the night of The New Visions Dance Theater’s Kennedy Center debut, asked me to become an international teacher trainer for a dance program for visually impaired students in cooperation with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. Soon I was working with the blind and visually impaired, as well as with children with Down’s syndrome, severe learning disabilities, and disabilities as a result of head trauma.
In a chapter of their book, Everyone Can Win, Anne and George Allen cited my New Visions Dance Theater work. In 1990, I wrote my master’s thesis: Emergence on the Wings of a Whisper: Dance As a Performing Art for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Through their work with Pennvisions, children accomplished things and healed in ways that not even their doctors thought possible.
Another aspect of my life that has pushed me towards medicine is my work with pregnant women. I am a certified labor support specialist (a doula) and childbirth educator working at Jersey Shore Medical Center and at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital. At St. Luke’s-Roosevelt, I developed a childbirth preparation program for teenagers, and planned and implemented a conference for pregnant teens and their partners. My labor support work allows me to assist women in labor and to work side by side with health care providers. In 1999, I received the McNair Summer Fellowship Award from City College, New York for my research project studying the initiation and maintenance of breast feeding among teenagers who are new mothers.
I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Dance Education from New York University and as cited previously, a Masters Degree in the Humanities also from New York University for my work in dance performance with persons who are blind and visually impaired. My thesis entitled: Emergence on the Wings of a Whisper: Dance as a Performance Art for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
I continue to be involved in my local community through my church, where I direct a praise and liturgical dance ensemble. My love of dance, the arts, and music have followed me to school where I performed in UMDNJ-SOM’s 9th annual talent show and taught African and Caribbean dance to students as part of the African-American History month celebration.
Ten years from now, I see myself as a D.O.-MPH and a medical professor, with a practice based on: Educating patients to have a commitment to well being and personal responsibility in maintenance to health care by providing treatment that encourages life style changes that encourage whole brain activities like yoga, music, meditation, well balanced nutrition, and participation in a community of faith of the person’s choosing. I believe that a patient’s cultural identity and values need to be given the highest priority within the context of safe and effective medicine.
I will draw from the most advanced research available in the areas of social networks, gender health, health of the aged, ethnicity and health, social aspects of disability, and social factors in pain. I will work closely with colleagues who are researching and disseminating information on social and behavioral factors that affect health and health care. My own research and writing will be on the socio-cultural aspects of breast feeding, childbirth, and child rearing. I will apply the resulting social and behavioral science principles to the care and treatment of my patients.
I see myself designing culturally sensitive health care systems for community based hospitals as well as designing individual programs of care to help patients manage long term and/or chronic diseases within their family and community.
On a final note, I was three years old when my mother, a registered nurse, enrolled my in my first ballet class. Visiting her at work, I can remember loving the whispery, crisp sound of the doctors’ and nurses’ uniforms as they briskly moved form place to place. My journey toward medical school began here, when at age 3, I decided that I would both be a dancer and a doctor. Now that I am a medical student I know that for me nothing could possibly be as compelling, as intellectually challenging, and as deeply satisfying as a life in service to healing, through the sciences, the arts, and medicine as becoming Dr. Carol Penn.