I am a board-certified gynecologic oncologist and come from a family of strong, caring, resilient women – from my mother who didn’t know much English but immigrated with my sister and myself to southern California for our better future, to my aunt Jennifer who started with a college degree and a passion, and built a chain of computer stores, to my aunt Judy whose passion for dance and the arts we thought had taken a backseat to my uncle’s career in the oil refineries in Oklahoma but, in fact, was able to flourish as a tai chi instructor and introduced tai chi to a brand new population. They serve as my foundation and, as a gynecologic oncologist, I often see the same strength, resilience and drive in my patients, whether it’s the elderly patient who is fighting ovarian cancer and at the same time tending to her partner’s dementia, or the young mother scheduling her surgery around the time of her kid’s school breaks, or the mid-life executive managing to keep it all together. I believe that my patients want to do the best for themselves and their loved ones and that my role should be a guide in offering (or making available the knowledge for referral) and short-listing the treatments available to them.
As a surgeon, I am committed to performing the least invasive and most appropriate procedure for my patients. That may be a complex surgery, a surgery through small incisions, or sometimes no surgery at all. I want to help make things less complicated for my patients, and that is one of the main reasons I joined Bay Area Gynecology Oncology. We bring the surgical expertise to the hospitals close to where our patients live, to gynecologists with whom our patients are familiar, rather than traveling to the sterile, cold ivory towers of large medical centers. There are approximately 500 gynecologic oncologists in the United States (compared to 14,000 medical oncologists and 5,000 radiation oncologists) and so, throughout my training in large and small cities throughout the Midwest and East Coast, I have seen patients who travel for hours to the get to these large medical centers, the stress and the hardship on the patients and their families, which intangibly and sometimes tangibly affected their treatment and outcomes. I did not believe that is the right thing to do and not what I would want for someone in my family or yours.
I immigrated from Taiwan at age 8 and grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles and – wanting to experience all that life and the weather has to offer – attended Northwestern University in Chicago for college and medical school in their honors program. Brr! From Chicago to New York I went for residency training at Cornell University’s medical campus on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Four intense, wonderful, humbling and inspiring years (with a month of elective rotation at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center) later, I went to Pittsburgh for gynecologic oncology fellowship at Magee Womens Hospital, which is the epitome of the medical ivory tower in a region that includes central Pennsylvania, western New York, West Virginia, and eastern Ohio. For a training program, it was fantastic and the number of lives I touched was tremendous. Searching for a job, however, I knew I wanted to be where the patients are and not the other way around. I know my patients have enough on their plates and want to provide state-of-the-art care to them in their comfort zone to maximize chances of success.
Bay Area Gynecology Oncology is comprised of licensed gynecologists and oncologists offering surgical services, clinical trials, and survivorship services throughout San Jose, Fremont, Santa Cruz, Los Gatos, Mountain View, Salinas, Carmel, and surrounding CA communities.
Undergraduate: Northwestern University
Medical School: Northwestern University
Residency: New York- Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center
Galloway Rotating Residency: Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Fellowship: Magee – Women’s Hospital of University of Pittsburgh Medical School
Languages: English, Mandarin Chinese
Interests: Minimally invasive surgery, quality outcomes research
[email protected]
555 Knowles Drive, Suite 203
Los Gatos, California 95032
BayAreaGO.com
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