Monica “Nikki” Schwartzman, MD, actually grew up thinking that as a physician she would do anything but rheumatology, what her father, Sergio Schwartzman, MD, had done his entire professional life. She was interested in renal disease while in medical school, but quickly learned the importance of the immune system in many diseases that affect the kidney. Once she made that connection and recognized that the driving force of rheumatology is autoimmunity, rheumatology was her new aspiration.
Nikki, who will begin her rheumatology fellowship this coming July, can already picture working with her father, who is an associate attending physician at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York.
“My dad and I have a very good relationship,” Nikki says. “I think we’d actually work really well together. That pulls from our obviously very long relationship, also from a professional perspective. We’ve done a number of research projects together in the past, and I have spent some days with him in his office. It’s something we’ve done before, and it’s worked really well.”
Sergio isn’t predicting an uptick in phone calls to talk about questions his daughter can’t answer. “I expected in medical school and residency that I would get those phone calls,” he says. “Do you know how many times I got those phone calls? Not once. Literally, not once she did call me about a patient or an exam question.”
Nikki says the way residency at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital was structured, she sought answers from attendings first. But when a novel patient cropped up, one that she thought was interesting, she’d call dad just to talk about that patient.
“There’s a really interesting case that you want to share with someone and you want to talk about, and that’s something that we have done,” she says, “Just the things we see in the hospital and the things we see on the floor. They’re really incredible and really exciting, and it’s fun to be able to talk to someone who is in medicine and understands that.
Given her research during medical school and residency, Nikki has already developed a focused interest in glomerulonephritis, something her father has never worked on.
He is already looking forward to using her as a resource in that realm. “I see this as a two-way street, not a one-way street,” he says.
Richard Quinn is a freelance writer in New Jersey.
