2024 is the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center’s 50th anniversary of National Cancer Institute designation, thus we are planning a year full of events to honor our past, communicate our present, and envision our future. Cancer Luminaries is our podcast to learn more about the lives and careers of our Alumni Stars Lecture Series’ invited guests.
Host Camilla Frost-Brewer has a conversation with Alumni Star Angela Bradbury, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Abramson Cancer Center. Dr. Bradbury is a medical oncologist with specialized training in clinical cancer genetics, cancer prevention and medical ethics. Her research focuses on integrating genetic medicine into the clinic to reduce the burden of cancer and improve the health of individuals and families. In 2012, she started the Penn Telegenetics Program based on research evaluating remote phone and real-time services for cancer genetic counseling and testing. In this episode, she explains how technology has enable greater access to genetic counseling for people in the community. She also repeats the career advice that keeps her grounded, including the importance of saying “no” to avoid overextending yourself.
Transcript
[00:00:01.530] – Camilla Frost-Brewer
Hello, listeners. This is Camilla, your host for Cancer Luminaries podcast. Today, we are joined by Dr. Angela Bradbury. Thank you so much for joining us.
[00:00:13.050] – Dr. Angela Bradbury
Thanks for having me.
[00:00:14.820] – Camilla Frost-Brewer
Awesome. So I’m going to get us started and just ask you to introduce yourself to our listeners. And if you feel comfortable, can you maybe share with us what made you want to become a cancer researcher?
[00:00:26.450] – Dr. Angela Bradbury
Absolutely. So my name is Angela Bradbury, and I’m a medical oncologist and medical ethicist by training. I do spend the majority of my time in research as a physician scientist. And that’s a great question. So what got me started on research, even as a young child, I was very interested in science and interested in research. I think there was probably a seed planted really early. But then really, my interest in research came out of my time at the University of Chicago. I came here for my internship and residency, and the culture at the University of Chicago was just so research-based, a place of inquiry. I’ve always said that those were very formative years for me, and I was surrounded by really impressive researchers, and I was connected with mentors very early who both had really important and impactful research careers. And so it just seemed like the natural place to go and be. So as I’ve spent more time in academic medicine, I realized that those foundations are not present for everybody, and that mentorship is really a really important part of developing who you become. And so I don’t know if I would have gone down the same path had I not had those influences and opportunities early on.
But I absolutely I do love it. When you have a family and you’re working hard and you’re juggling a lot, I think for a lot of people, work can really be a grind. But I absolutely wake up every day loving to open a new set of data or ask a new question or write a new grant. So I feel very blessed to be where I am.
[00:02:17.310] – Camilla Frost-Brewer
That’s amazing. We will go deeper into some of the things that you just shared with us. Writing a grant, the fact that you love doing that, I love that for you. I could use some of that energy. But congratulations on being invited to be an alumni star for the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center’s 50th Anniversary Seminar Series. I know you mentioned that you came here for your internship and I just want to hear a little bit more about when you were at UChicago. What did you do here? What was your internship in? Who were some of those mentors, maybe?
[00:02:56.370] – Dr. Angela Bradbury
Absolutely. So I came here from the Medical University of South Carolina, and I’m not from South Carolina originally. I grew up the child of an army nurse and a Navy pilot and captain, so I spent a lot of time moving around. But I was in South Carolina and loved it. It’s a beautiful place. And everyone there thought I was absolutely crazy for wanting to go to Chicago for my additional medical training. But it absolutely felt like the right place for me. My father was actually born and had been raised in Chicago, and my mom is from Wisconsin. So in many ways, it was going back to my family roots. I came as an intern in internal medicine and pediatrics, which is a combination residency. At the time, we only had four residents each year in the combined program. But I determined pretty early on or had actually even come in with an interest in oncology, and there was no pathway to combine, not an easy pathway to combine them in fellowship. So pretty early on, I decided I probably needed to choose one or the other. And medicine just went out for a variety of reasons. So I completed my residency at the University of Chicago and then stayed on for my oncology fellowship.
And it was really when I started my medical oncology fellowship that I connected with my mentors, Chris Daugherty from medical ethics, and then Funmi Olopade in cancer genetics. And as I said before, they really inspired me to ask questions and stay in research. So as a child of military parents, we never stayed anywhere longer than 2-3 years. So even in college, in my third year, I started looking around like, I got to get out of here. So University of Chicago or Chicago as a city was a place where I stayed for the longest in my life. And so for me, it really does feel like a sense of home because I was here for so many years and stayed because I loved it.
[00:05:04.620] – Camilla Frost-Brewer
I know you mentioned your job title, but can you share with us where you are now after leaving Chicago and what you do? What is your daily life look like as a researcher, a physician, medical oncologist, mentor to others?
[00:05:21.730] – Dr. Angela Bradbury
Sure. So I’m an associate professor in the Department of Medicine in the section of Heme/Onc. I also have a secondary appointment in medical ethics and health policy. And my research focuses on clinical delivery of genetic medicine and ethical legal social issues associated with genetic medicine. There’s no shortage of questions or issues to study. I do spend most of time in research. I see patients one-half day a week. At this point, that’s evolved over time as I’ve had more research responsibilities and funding obligations. My clinical time has gone down. But in clinic, I do still see some breast oncology patients, but most of the patients that I see are patients with genetic predisposition to cancer or other family history or other predisposition to cancer. Interestingly, my research has gotten much broader. So while I began my work studying the impact of having a BRCA1 or 2 mutation or other genetic mutations, and really over many, many years I have been studying alternative delivery models for genetic medicine. We have expanded the work incredibly. So the methods that we developed to be able to develop new innovative models for delivery of genetic services in cancer are very broadly applicable to other settings for genetic testing.
So over a many year period with a lot of NIH support and then support from some other groups, we developed the Penn Telegenetics program. So our program now offers genetic testing and counseling across the U.S., any state in the U.S. Patients can come to us just finding us through “Find a Counselor.” They don’t need to be affiliated with any particular place. So we have a patient referral pathway. And as I said, the methods that we use are pretty broadly applicable. So over the years, we have become involved in genetic testing and counseling patients who are providing educational supports and digital tools for APOE testing, which is associated with Alzheimer’s disease and increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease. Our studies now are returning actionable genetic research results outside of cancer, including cardiovascular disease and other medical genetic conditions. So the methods are very broadly applicable. And a lot of the clinical work that’s done within our program and my research lab are from genetic counselors, and they’re broadly trained. So they’re, during their training, exposed to a lot of different areas of genetic medicine. And while they may specialize, when they get into their first jobs, they easily can counter train and shift back.
So some of our counselors are doing APOE genetic disclosures, others are doing cancer. We have one who’s cross training in cardiovascular now. And so it’s just really exciting work, and it’s nice to see it expanding beyond cancer.
[00:08:19.870] – Camilla Frost-Brewer
Yeah, I feel like I was in a meeting recently that somebody said studying genetics, genomics is the next… I mean, it’s already happening, but one of the forefronts of cancer-related research and care. Can you talk a little bit about where you started and where you are now in studying genetics?
[00:08:38.130] – Dr. Angela Bradbury
Yeah. And so I’m really on the delivery side. When I started and I was in the clinic with Funmi, we would do two visits with patients. So the first visit was, what is genetic testing? What are the risks, benefits, decisions that you can make around genetic testing? What are the costs? And if they decide to do the testing, then they come back in for a face-to-face visit because we felt that this was weighty information or information that could be distressing. But as testing became more routine and had greater evidence for medical benefit, it became clear that that was going to be just too burdensome for patients. Then we started looking at, well, can we share results by phone? Can we do video conference? And this was way before COVID. So we started doing video conference. Our main reason for using video conference was we knew that there were community practices that didn’t have access to genetic testing, and these patients were unlikely to drive all the way to Penn to come in. So we collaborated with some NIH funding. We collaborated with several community practices in the region. So in Maryland, in Delaware. So outside of Pennsylvania.
There are some in Western Pennsylvania to see if we could deliver real-time video conference consultation in their clinic. And I have to say it gives me chills because I think it was really the birth of the Penn Telegenetics program. And they were the most grateful patients because it was such an advantage. I mean, they felt so just grateful that we were coming to them. And we weren’t doing this in the home at that time. We were actually doing it in the clinic. But they said, I got Penn Medicine Care here in my medical home and didn’t have to drive two or two and a half hours to get it. And so it was very rewarding work. And I think everything we’ve done in telegenetics has been equally rewarding. One of the current studies we have, which recruits across the U.S., we do social media ads to find patients who are candidates for genetic testing but just have not had access to services. Patients enrolled to date, over half of them are in rural settings. In this study, we have a standard-of-care arm where we deliver genetic counseling and testing with the counselor in the home by video conference or phone.
Patient gets to choose. But then the three other arms are replacing one of those visits, if the patient wants, with a digital platform where they go through the same information but don’t have to actually schedule that visit. And then the final arm is completely digital.
But it’s a real change of practice, not just for the patient, but for the counselor. So in any of those arms, if a patient is assigned to a digital arm, but they want to speak to a counselor, they can. They can get started on the digital piece and say, This doesn’t make sense to me. I want to speak with a person. So it’s really more of a triage method. But it’s also very different for the counselors because they’re following patients virtually, and patients are making decisions online, and sometimes they may not talk with them. So we’re studying the outcomes of that and trying to understand if we could use these very patient-centered, these were all user-tested, developed with patient input, if we could use these tools as an alternative to having to have every patient meet with a counselor for two visits. So it’s really changed quite a bit, and we’re doing very similar work with APOE testing, which has become, has really now with amyloid targeted therapies, become routine and clinical practice just over the last 12 months with some urgency to testing because of the implications for informing treatment and side effects with these new medications and therapies.
It’s changed a lot, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. We did a recent study. We just had results published at ASCO in childhood cancer survivors. Again, this was one of our nationally recruiting studies. We had to randomize people to either receive telegenetics or usual care. Again, 50% of them were in rural zip codes. They were across the U.S. Most of them were in primary care settings after going through their childhood cancer diagnosis, and then as a survivor, returning back to their local community and with their primary care doctors. While we increased the uptake of genetic testing and counseling with providing telehealth in the home, we still had remarkably low numbers of people who made it all the way through the process. We’re learning a lot from these patients about what the barriers are. So genetics is super exciting. And at academic centers, it’s happening routinely. But out in community practices and under represented populations, there are clearly many, many more barriers that we need to address. So there’s no shortage of questions to ask. And my team is really passionate about making sure that those numbers improve and that we make sure that people across the U.S. are able to get access to genetics because it really has so much potential to improve health.
[00:13:29.200] – Camilla Frost-Brewer
I am so curious. I’m going off script. Can you share with us a little bit about some of the barriers that those communities have shared with you about doing genetic testing, about telegenetics? Yeah, I’m just really curious.
[00:13:42.360] – Dr. Angela Bradbury
Yeah. So some of the really prevalent themes that we are hearing in these patients that, again, are more in community practices are concerns about cost. One of the greatest predictors or one of the many predictors of whether they get to that first visit or that second visit, if they’re in the telegenetic in a genetics arm or even in a usual care arm is their attitude towards genetic testing. Those that have really favorable attitudes are more likely to come forward. And those who have more concerns about genetics are obviously less likely to come forward. And the measures are really patient-centric. And one of the measures or one of the items is “genetic testing will cost me too much.” And the cost has actually come down. And for many people, the cost is not that much. Most patients can testing either at no cost, $50, $100. At the absolute most, it’s $250, but we still hear from patients that they think it’s thousands of dollars. Sometimes they’re hearing that from their doctors. And on the flip side, $250 or $100 may still be a lot for some patients. So about 30% of patients in this particular study called ENGAGE were also on high-deductible plans.
So I think it really highlights that cost is a major issue. The other one was time. A lot of people said, “I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this.” But life is busy. We started the study right in the middle of the pandemic. But even after the pandemic or as we were coming out of the pandemic, we still have a lot of patients who said, “I intended to do this. I really did. But I just didn’t get around to it.” So that is another barrier. And then I think there still are some barriers in clinician and physician education. So some of these patients, and this is more of a minority barrier, but some of are just super connected with their primary care doctors, which is exactly what we want. But if they haven’t gotten a real robust endorsement from their doctor, or sometimes they’ve even told us, “My doctor told me it would cost too much money.” “My doctor told me it wouldn’t help me.” “My doctor said, you might be discriminated against.” If they hear that from their trusted advisor, they may not come forward. So we have a lot of work to do with patients, maybe also with physicians.
And part of that’s going to be education. Part of it might be providing more reminders and nudges and reminding them of the value of testing. And then also raising the question or putting a lens on the cost and correcting misperceptions about costs, but also trying to really advocate for genetic testing to be more affordable for patients across the U.S.
[00:16:18.850] – Camilla Frost-Brewer
That last piece is so crucial. So I know you’ve talked about the importance of the mentors and the research that you participated in and conducted at UChicago. But can you share with us maybe how UChicago influenced your future career, your career trajectory?
[00:16:34.900] – Dr. Angela Bradbury
Yeah. As I mentioned, the culture was definitely a culture of scientific inquiry. Research was a priority. We were surrounded by people conducting research. It certainly was not the only path. I mean, I had co-fellows who, for a variety of reasons, decided to focus more on pure clinical care. But most of us were in a community, and most of us elected to pursue academic medicine. So that really just provided a foundation. It’s also a lot of skill building, though. When you’re in an internship, residency, fellowship, you’re learning how to be a doctor, and then you’re learning how to be an oncologist, but also learning how to be a medical ethicist. And then to also have to learn how to be a scientist and to write grants is just a lot. And it would have been impossible without guidance and mentorship. Just absolutely would not have happened. But I had that great guidance, and it just was what you did. You’re going to write a grant. This is how you’re going to do it. Okay. And some of it, I think, was that I loved it. I loved asking questions. I liked thinking about how I was going to answer that question.
I liked the challenge, and it is a challenge. But I also was given those foundations. We were talking about it last night at dinner that we heard frequently from our mentors and other faculty, “You have to write 10 grants to get one.” And so that was our mindset like, “Oh, well, that one didn’t work. Repackage it, send it back in.” And so we definitely learned it was about the long game. And if the grant didn’t get funded, you want to make sure you got feedback. Look at that feedback, decide what parts of it are helpful, and then reincorporate it into the next one. As a fellow, they would have outside faculty come and give advice to fellows—career advice. And I will say, again, this was part of the University of Chicago, right? This is what they did. They brought in outside faculty. So we could get a perspective of what it’s like in other institutions. But there was one in particular Funmi had brought in. He is a Breast Trialist, and he gave the best advice, which I think I repeat over and over and over again. So he said there are three tenets to success in academic medicine.
So the first one is luck. You just have to get lucky. So that’s why you have to write 10 grants to get one because you just don’t know who’s sitting on the other side. Or how do you get promoted, or how do you get that next position, that leadership you want. Some of it’s going to be luck, and who’s at the table with you at that time and what they’re looking for. The next was persistence and not giving up. And again, that’s a skill that gets built. I don’t know that anyone can be persistent. If they’re told, You’re doing okay, just keep on doing. And then the last one was, “Don’t take anything personally.” So if you get a scathing grant review, maybe they were having a bad day.
Don’t take it personally. Pick yourself back up and just keep on going. If you don’t get that position, you got beat out by someone else, I don’t know, don’t take it personally. There might have been something else at play that you didn’t even know about. And I think that those three things I remember all the time, and they keep me grounded.
[00:19:45.200] – Camilla Frost-Brewer
That is so funny. Do you remember who—?
Dr. Angela Bradbury
Gabe Hortobagyi.
Camilla Frost-Brewer
Okay, excellent. We, hopefully in the description, we’ll be able to link.
[00:19:54.940] – Dr. Angela Bradbury
Yes.
[00:19:55.300] – Camilla Frost-Brewer
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But other guests on this podcast, other alumni stars, have actually shared quite similar ideas around there was this culture at UChicago that this is just what you did. This academic medicine was what you did. You came here to train, partially to learn about that. And that persistence and resilience, just part of the game, and it’s a muscle, and you have to learn to flex it. So I love what you said, that anybody can be persistent. We just have that muscle. We have to work it. And they shared that mentors were crucial for their development, understanding what they wanted to study, what they were interested in, what drove them, but also that they were really great models. Yes. Okay, you have five studies running. You’re writing 12 grants. You are also in the lab. You’re also seeing patients on clinic. It can be done. So I think that speaks volumes to what UChicago can provide for trainees.
[00:20:49.470] – Dr. Angela Bradbury
And it absolutely was a culture. It was just what you did. And I think the other nice thing about that was you really had to get out of your comfort zone. You had to be willing to try new things. And it wasn’t just in oncology. So my husband also trained at the University of Chicago, and he was pulmonary critical care. And he’s in operations and hospital leadership now. So he left research. But when he was at Chicago, he was doing research as well. And I reflect back to the days I was writing my grants, and he was doing an animal model of intubation and different strategies for ventilators. So he would go in and had rats on ventilators. And then one of his rats would get sick, and he’d be like, “I can’t come home. The rat is not doing well.” And I just was like, “What are we doing?” But that’s what it was. It was innovative. We were trying new things. If you had asked him when he was in medical school if he would be doing experiments with rats on ventilators and sepsis, he would have been like, “No, what are you talking about?”
But the opportunities abound, and you just walk through the doors that open. And it was just a really magical foundation.
[00:22:04.060] – Camilla Frost-Brewer
Speaking of magical foundation, magical experiences at UChicago, are there any key moments or particular things that you learned while here that you have carried with you throughout your career? Maybe does it show up in your current position?
[00:22:20.240] – Dr. Angela Bradbury
Well, I think the three tenets definitely I persist with. I talked about mentorship. I was blessed to not just have one mentor, but two mentors. And they brought different skills, supports, and experiences. And then because I had two, I needed to have a third person to break a tie. So I had Rich Schilsky, who was my advisor. When I left Chicago, I started to— I realized that not everybody had that great support, foundation, and guidance. And so I definitely have been trying to bring that into my lab by having students. I have had— I’m just now starting to have postdocs. I’ve now had a K-awardee who was successful and now has moved on to a tenure position at University of Utah. And so it’s really exciting. But part of the mentorship is not just the science. I mean, before I came here, I was on the phone with her talking about negotiating some really tough career things. And those are the other parts of mentorship, that personal support, guidance, helping you think through challenging career aspects and negotiations. Those things are all really important, too. We were at dinner last night, and Funmi was talking about when I called her because I was thinking about changing institutions, and I was really conflicted about it.
I had been out of University of Chicago for at least five years. I think I called both her and Chris and had individual conversations that I may have even talked to Rich, too. I felt like I needed their insight, just get their experience and wisdom to make sure that I was making the right decision. So I try to continue that. I have students in my lab. We fell off during COVID, but this summer, I have four students. And I remember one of the things that I learned was when you’re a student and then you’re applying to medical school, and then you’re applying to residency. And it’s a rat race. It’s competitive. I would often feel like I needed to know what that whole path looked and what I keep telling the students is, you don’t need to know what the next step looks like. You just need to be curious. And when doors open, if it seems like, Oh, that’s interesting, walk through the door. Because if you’re set on a certain path, who knows if that’s going to work out? But there’s so many fun and exciting things to do in medicine that if you can be flexible and just see what opportunities present themselves in front of you and walk through those doors, you’ll have more opportunities to be more successful.
And then if you find yourself in a place where you’re like, this just doesn’t really fit, there’s ample opportunity to switch because a lot of it’s skills that you build that can be translated or transported across different settings, whether it’s a research career, a clinical career, a leadership operations career. My husband started in research and then moved totally away from research to hospital operations. And that was later.
[00:25:20.380] – Camilla Frost-Brewer
Yeah. I really like this coupling of flexing the muscle of persistence and being comfortable in the pivot. And that pivoting is actually sometimes where the most exciting research questions come from, where you find your perfect fit, or what really excites you to go to work every day. I think that if you ever write an autobiography, that’s going to be the title. Mark it down now.
[00:25:44.750] – Dr. Angela Bradbury
Persistence and pivoting. Exactly.
[00:25:46.740] – Camilla Frost-Brewer
The two P’s of medicine. I really love that you brought into this conversation that, yes, the training that I received here, the medical education, was so critical to your career, but it’s really those relationships and the lasting impressions and the trust you have in the medical professionals and researchers around you that you’ve tried to bring forward with you that’s really imprinted on your mind to train the next generation. So this is a light question. That is sarcasm. Where do you hope to see cancer research, care, discoveries, advancements, et cetera, go in the next 50 years?
[00:26:30.080] – Dr. Angela Bradbury
Most of all, and I think this comes out of the mission of the telegenetics program. Most of all, I want to make sure that great advances that we’re making in academic centers are making it out across the U.S. And I think that technology will be able to help us do that. It’s not going to solve it. I mean, there are institutional and structural issues that are challenges. But I do think, at least for me, that’s one of the most rewarding parts of what we’ve been doing in Penn Telegenetics. We do have patients who give us testimonies. We had one who said, “I’ve been trying to get genetic testing for years. And then I saw your Facebook ad and signed up, and I’m so grateful.” And we were talking about North Carolina. She was down in North Carolina and had felt that she had been trying to do this and navigate it. And then we were able to do it all in her home. And part of the model that we’ve developed is our counselors, when they write their chart notes, it’s the same care as if you came to Penn. So we’re providing the exact same care.
And then they will write their chart notes, and then they send them to the patient’s local doctor. So we’re really trying to do that handoff. We still have a lot of work to be done there. But that’s what I want to see, is that everything… We have these meccas of academic centers. They’re important places for innovation to happen. You have to have all those minds together and the science together to do it. It needs to start there, but we need to figure out how we get it out of there. It’s really interesting because the majority of the patients that come through our program never set foot at Penn. We have about 60 patients a month who come in on one study alone, and over 30 or 40 of them are from these social media campaigns. And we put them up, and we have to bring them down really quickly. I think there was one day we put a new ad up. When we try different messages, we just put a cost ad up. “Did you know that genetic testing actually does not cost as much as you think?” It was addressing that misperception, and it blew up.
And we had to pull it. We pulled them down within 48 hours because we get 60 patients who are interested across the U.S. So it’s super exciting work.
[00:28:51.210] – Camilla Frost-Brewer
48 hours, one ad.
[00:28:52.950] – Dr. Angela Bradbury
Yeah. So we’re excited to see when the results come out, we don’t know if we will have non-inferiority. If we’ll be able to say that these web arms are reasonable and they’re no worse than having an individual conversation with a counselor. It may be that that’s the case for only a subset of patients. But once we have the results of that study, then the harder work is going to start because then we have to figure out how to make it. We have to get it out there for everybody. And that’s a whole nother aspect of science and inquiry and data collection.
[00:29:27.690] – Camilla Frost-Brewer
I do appreciate that academic medicine and research is so critical for advancement. But who are we advancing for? And it’s really the rest of us. I say that because I’m not a researcher, but it’s for the rest of us, right? So how are we translating those discoveries, those advancements, that technology to the general public, quote unquote?
[00:29:47.890] – Dr. Angela Bradbury
Yeah.
[00:29:48.600] – Camilla Frost-Brewer
So my final question is actually lighter, but as you’ve been very successful in your professional career and reflecting on the path you’ve taken up to this point, is there anything that you’d like to share or any advice you’d like to give for young investigators on ways to balance their professional career and personal life?
[00:30:09.660] – Dr. Angela Bradbury
It’s a great question. I think it’s a challenge, but you have to be creative. I think you also have to give a fair amount of grace and be able to let some things go, probably on both ends. I think the pandemic was particularly challenging for everybody for every phase of life. It didn’t matter if you were someone who had, and I’m speaking in academic medicine, I had a colleague who has young children. His wife was also working, and they would have to take shifts because the daycares were closed. I had school-age children, which was a different experience in mental health, and those types of things were more important. I have a youngest with special needs, and so schooling for him was a disaster. My husband was an intensivist who did bed operations as well. So he was either in the ICU with COVID or figuring out how to make sure we had enough beds for it. So it was a hard time. I think that built a lot of… That was a lot of building for everybody. But I do think even before COVID, there were times where juggling two careers and children, I had to let some meetings go.
I had to let some opportunities go. I had to say, I can’t do that. And I had to be comfortable watching some people doing things and knowing that I was slowing down. But I always thought as slowing down in the short term. I was still doing some of it. I just wasn’t doing the traveling and networking the same as perhaps others who were not in the same phase of life. But I also saw some of my more senior faculty or people several years ahead of me being able to enter back in. And so I thought of it as like, this is a transient time where I’m going to need to split myself a little bit different, and I will be able to get back to that in the future. And so I think you could feel really torn. You could try to do too much. You could be angry. But if you can take those moments and just say, this is not forever. This is just for right now, and I’m going to do the best I can and get through as many things. The other good advice, which actually came from another faculty member, Lainie Ross in Peds, she said—and she’s so right—You have to be able to say no to things.
And so if you went into her office, she’s from University of Chicago. She was my clinic preceptor in my first peds clinic, my intern year. Amazing. So much energy. But in her office, she had sticky notes pasted all over. “No.” “I would really like to help, but…” It was all the different ways to say no. And I think that I heard that again when I was at Fox Chase and I was doing a career advisement meeting. And again, it was, think about how to say no. I would like to help, but… And I think that’s really important.
[00:33:22.220] – Camilla Frost-Brewer
I would agree. I need to meet Dr. Ross because also in my office, I have a whiteboard, and on it, it says, remember to say no sometimes. And then I also have tons of things pasted around my office, and one of them is fun phrases for women and girls to practice. Number one is no. So I fully understand. And you have to remind yourself, sometimes it’s a no.
[00:33:47.300] – Dr. Angela Bradbury
Yeah. And I love Dr. Angstrom at Fox Chase. He was the one who said, I would like to help, but… But… And that was a really nice way to say no, because no always felt so uncomfortable. But that was that really helped reframe no in a way that shows that it is something you’re interested in, but you have to be careful about not overextending yourself. And that becomes so much more important when you have family to care for it, whether that’s young ones. We’re entering the phase where we’ve got parents who need care. And so that goes on forever and ever.
[00:34:24.750] – Camilla Frost-Brewer
Dr. Bradbury, thank you so much for joining me today and for sharing your story with our listeners.
[00:34:31.600] – Dr. Angela Bradbury
Well, thank you for having me. It was great to talk.
[00:34:34.160] – Camilla Frost-Brewer
Have a good one, everyone.
