We were fortunate to spend nine extraordinary days exploring Tanzania—an immersive encounter with the natural world unlike anything I had experienced before. Among our remarkable wildlife sightings was a rare encounter between a leopard and a cheetah—an extraordinary moment that left us speechless. We also witnessed unforgettable scenes that revealed the daily struggle for survival in the wild: • A lioness bringing down a zebra, dragging it away, and covering the remains to deter scavengers • A hyena drowning a Thomson’s gazelle, and crocodiles feeding on a wildebeest The defining moment of the trip was watching thousands of wildebeest surging across the Mara River during the Great Migration. To see one of nature’s most spectacular events unfolded before us was truly breathtaking. We got to see it two times. Although we saw countless animals in their natural habitat, it was the lions—the true kings of the savanna—that inspired the most awe: equal measures of wonder, resp...
When people ask what it is like to be a woman in interventional electrophysiology, I tell them the truth: for most of my career, I was the only one at the table. Not the only woman in the EP lab; nurses, techs, and coordinators have always been the backbone of every EP lab I have worked in, but the only woman standing in lead, with the catheters in her hands. That has changed. It has not changed enough. Cardiology remains one of the least gender-balanced fields in medicine, and the procedural subspecialties EP, interventional, structural are the narrowest part of that funnel. We are not short on talented women entering medical school. We lose them somewhere between the classroom and the lab. I have thought a lot about where that loss happens, and I no longer believe it is mostly about ability or even about ambition. It is about permission, the quiet, cumulative sense of whether a room expects you to be in it. The room does not hand you authority ... Early on, I learned th...