I was fortunate to spend nine extraordinary days exploring TANZANIA . This became an immersive encounter with the natural world unlike anything I had experienced before. Our route carried us through Tarangire National Park, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and Crater, and the vast Serengeti , with each landscape offering a distinct character and rhythm. TARANGIRE is renowned for its large elephant herds, ancient baobab trees, and the life-giving Tarangire River, which attracts wildlife when the surrounding land becomes dry. NGORONGORO offered a completely different setting: a vast volcanic caldera whose grasslands, wetlands, and forests support a remarkable concentration of animals. The wider conservation area is also unusual because wildlife shares the landscape with MAASAI pastoralists . In Tarangire, the river corridor becomes a natural gathering place during the dry season. Elephants browse beneath the baobabs, while zebra, wildebeest, buffalo, and...
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 that bei...