Kay White Drew is a retired physician and lifelong writer. Her essays, poems, and short stories are found in several journals including Hektoen International, The Intima, Bay to Ocean Journal, and Loch Raven Review, where one of her essays was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022. Her new book “Stress Test” is a love letter to women in medicine and the feminist causes of the 1970s and the present day. (Amazon/Mindbuck Media Book Publicity, 2024)
“Stress Test” – The story covers a five-year ordeal, from the first day of medical school through the last day of pediatric internship. Unveiling the cadaver in the anatomy lab while her mother lay dying on an oncology ward; the excitement of making difficult diagnoses and the terror and tragedy of disastrous mistakes; the joy of connecting with patients and the heartbreak of losing them—it’s all here. Women made up less than a fifth of the author’s medical school class and as a white woman in the largely Black urban environment of West Baltimore, barely a decade after the Civil Rights movement and long before Black Lives Matter, she bore witness throughout her training to the human cost of racism.
The author navigated personal struggles as well: her mother’s death; several ill-starred romantic relationships, including an interracial love affair with a professor; a roommate’s suicide; and her own suicidality, depression, and experiences in therapy.
“Stress Test” joins a growing body of work by women physicians. This memoir takes place at a time when women were still years away from comprising half—or more—of medical school students, and when the second wave of feminism was surging; but many of the fears, griefs, and struggles that women in medicine face today are the same ones the author grappled with decades earlier.
SA Examiner 