Energized at Work: Episode 6 with Dr. Caitlin Sutton, Maternal Fetal Anesthesiology

Success in Medicine

How do you build a career on the cutting edge of medicine? For Dr. Caitlin Sutton, Division Chief of Maternal-Fetal Anesthesiology at Texas Children's Hospital, it involves pursuing your professional passions-- even when you receive unsolicited negative feedback from colleagues. Our conversation was a good reminder for me that working on the cutting edge of medicine means that very few people have done what you have done. And that means that others may not be able to envision it--and may even discourage your chosen career path.
Texas Children's Hospital is one of the pioneers in fetal surgeries (in which surgery is performed on a fetus while in utero), and Dr. Sutton administers anesthesia during these procedures for both the fetus and the mother. She is one of a very small group of anesthesiologists across the country who can do so, having completed fellowships in both obstetric anesthesiology and pediatric anesthesiology. For medical students, Dr. Sutton provides a great overview of what it is like to work as an anesthesiologist. Her passion for her work comes through when she talks about how fulfilling it is to make patients feel safe and comfortable during life-defining moments.There are also some great career insights in this episode. As she says, “it takes a village to pursue any medical career." Although she faced negative feedback about her career choices early on, now she can’t imagine a better job for herself, and she advises students to go for what they want. Dr. Sutton is also a clinical ethicist, a field that we touch upon here and that we plan to delve into more deeply in a later episode.Dr. Caitlin Sutton, Division Chief of Maternal-Fetal Anesthesiology at Texas Children's Hospital