Resilience in Medicine: Accepting, Acknowledging and Advancing to Your Goals

Andrea Lendaris, MD

Meeting Description:

Dr. Andrea Lendaris was diagnosed with Usher Syndrome IIA in her adolescence, on the backdrop of other emotional and financial adversities. While the Americans with Disabilities Act. was passed a few years earlier, the empowerment of her rights to equal education and employment opportunities were not realized until decades later. She succeeded in a career as a speech language pathologist, before deciding to pursue a career in medicine. During this career transition, she and her husband had their three children. Through these successes, she was faced with health challenges and traumatic experiences that went beyond her vision and hearing impairments, including six surgeries during her neurology residency. Cumulatively, these experiences affected her mental health and need for support. During this talk, Dr. Lendaris will share her journey with facing social, educational, and employment biases, and the subsequent struggles to not internalize these experiences and let them deter her from becoming a mother and a physician. She will share her story, the physical and emotional toolbox she discovered, and her advocacy strategies for herself and her patients. The talk will include an interactive discussion centered around vignettes that one may face in medical school or training.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Andrea Lendaris is a Vascular Neurologist, Assistant Professor of Neurology, and Associate Clerkship Director at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. After 10 years of practicing speech pathology in San Francisco and New York City hospitals, Dr. Lendaris was impelled to become a physician, maintaining her patient-centered approach to healthcare delivery. Diagnosed with Usher Syndrome IIA, Dr. Lendaris came to appreciate the assets of her visual and hearing impairments that enabled her to use the many tools she’d developed over the years with her patients, and physicians in training. Currently, she is working on enriching the neurology clerkship for medical students with disability education and awareness. She and her husband of nearly 20 years live in New York City with their three boys and mini goldendoodle.

Meeting Agenda:

• Intro: 10 minutes
• Presentation by Dr. Andrea Lendaris: 75 minutes, and will include the following:
  • Didactic lecture
  • Structured large group discussion using vignettes
  • Unstructured large group discussion