Growing up in Kansas, Amy McLean Sprole knew two things: she wanted to go into medicine and she wanted to spread her wings outside the midwest. She achieved both, with a twist. Find out how, when looking for where you belong, sometimes there really is no place like home.
Guest Amy McLean Sprole grew up in Kansas and knew two things when she was graduating high school: She wanted to go into medicine and she wanted to spread her wings outside the midwest. She immediatly dove into the pre-med track and was so focused that she was able to do all of those requirements and still make time for international study abroad opportunities, including an art history experience in Italy. She thinks that out-of-the-ordinary adventure made her stand out in med school applications and may have been a reason for her acceptance to Cornell.
She entered into med school thinking that she would pursue surgery without being able to articulate why, except that it seemed the hardest thing to do, a pattern she realizes she had had throughout life. She had to consciously set out to choose instead what she liked. She found plastic surgery and fell in love.After 10 years of training in New York, she found just the right mix of surgery and enterpreneurship that she'd been looking for, but it sprang up where she least expected it.
In this epsiode, find out from Amy how, when looking for where you belong, sometimes there really is no place like home…on Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
Amy McLean Sprole is a board certified plastic surgeon, trained in both aesthetic and reconstructive plastic surgery. Having returned to her native Wichita, she is now one of the only female plastic surgeons in the area. In addition to her clinical work, she is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, Wichita. You can find out more about her practice at pscwichita.com.
For another story about an unexpected homecoming, listen to our episode with Jenny Land MacKenzie.
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Amy Sprole: There's an intimidation factor that people from this part of the country think that all those people think that they're better than all of us. And it's silly, but it's very prevalent. And growing up with that, I felt a need to get away from this smallness and show that I was every bit as good or qualified or whatever the right word is to do those big city things.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Growing up in Kansas, Amy McLean Sproule knew two things: she wanted to go into medicine and she wanted to spread her wings outside the midwest. She achieved both, with a twist. Find out how, when looking for where you belong, sometimes there really is no place like home.
Today I'm here with Amy McLean Sprole and we are gonna talk about what home really means and when you realize where it is and how you get back there. So Amy, thanks so much for being here.
AS: Happy to be here. Thank you.
LJR: So we're gonna start the same way I always do. I ask our classmates two questions and they are these: When we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
AS: Hmm. Those are big questions.
LJR: Yeah.
AS: When I was at Dartmouth, who was I? I was a very focused pre-med student. Really from the very beginning. I was one of the ones that started freshman fall down that path and I was one of the ones that stuck with it cuz I knew from the time I started at school, that's what I wanted to do and I really didn't look at anything else.
I did a lot of things around campus as well. I was on the golf team for one semester more just to see what that was all about. I was not particularly good and I don't think I would be remembered much that way, but it was a fun, fun experience.
LJR: Also part of the pre-med track, I think. Yeah.
AS: Yeah. Just trying things out.
I went on two very formative FSPs [Foreign Study Programs]. I went to Kenya for the environmental studies program. And I loved that. Just that was very, very formative to me. And I went to Florence for the art history, FSP and those two, back-to-back trimesters were just some of the most profound experiences I had at Dartmouth, even though they were off campus. They were very, very formative to me.
LJR: Wow. So you were doing pre-med, so you were…what was your major?
AS: I was biology modified with environmental studies and [LJR: Oh, okay.] the modification really had everything to do with the fact that I wanted to go on that Kenya FSP. [LJR: Right.] And I had to take so many pre-reqs and then the classes there that it worked out that I had already created the modified major without really even trying.
LJR: Excellent. Yeah, I was thinking it's really hard for those pre-med to kind of do these other things and to do two. So also the art history would've had some pre-reqs as well.
AS: Yes, and art history was just a love that I had carrying over from high school and I chose Italian as my language requirement. And then I thought, well, that kind of transitions nicely into the art history FSP. And so I didn't minor or do anything officially with art history. I just, it was a love that I had. And it turned out, it really actually set me apart from the typical med school applicants. I think that made me maybe a little more unusual and more interesting in the application process. So I didn't really set out for that to be the purpose of it, but it, it worked out well that way.
LJR: We will get to the med school part, but you knew early. So what was the impetus for that in your formative years that you knew you were going to be in medicine? Did you have that in your family or was there something else?
AS: I, in high school I knew, oddly enough. I was very driven, very focused, as most of us probably were in high school. And I had it in my mind that I either wanted to go to med school or I wanted to go into international business. And I quickly realized that international business was really just because I was really interested in international travel and I quickly realized international business meant I'd see the inside of a lot of cool airports, but wouldn't really get to experience the cultures and do the kind of travel that I was interested in. And my grandfather was an internist, but he didn't practice during my lifetime. I think I just looked up to him a lot, respected him a lot. My dad was a private practice dentist and I saw that he was able to both run a small business with his practice, but also take care of people and contribute in what seemed like a very positive, positive way for people. So I think I was intrigued at this idea of giving my life towards something that was helpful to people, good to people, but also with the opportunity to be a little bit innovative and have a small business that intersected with that cuz both were interests of mine. [LJR: Yeah.] So I think those things led me to thinking that I wanna be a doctor because there's so much you can do with that.
And so then, I also had it in my mind, I wanted to be a surgeon and I have no idea why other than I perceived that that was the hardest thing you could do in medicine. And I thought, you know, just let's shoot for the stars and see how that goes.
LJR: So, that's so funny. I was going to say, you probably didn't pursue surgery then, because that wouldn't translate to that idea of private practice and being able to run the business as well as other disciplines would be or I would imagine so. Ooh, this is intriguing. I don't even know where this comes. So, all right, so let's start with med school. So med school happened right directly after.
AS: Yes, I was, I'm just, I'm a very focused person, and so I started college with that laser focus that I'm pre-med, this is what I'm gonna do. I got into med school, went direct to Cornell. And at Cornell was when, you know, I had gotten into med school on this idea that I wanna be a surgeon, but I don't really know why I wanna be a surgeon. I can't really articulate much more. I spent a summer in a thoracic surgery operating room kind of trying to figure out what it was about surgery that intrigued me.
I started med school thinking I wanted to be a heart surgeon because I perceived that that was the hardest thing you could do, and so why not try that? And I quickly realized that it was probably time for me to stop doing things just because they were hard to see if I could, because that as an end goal is not very fulfilling. But I had myself, I guess, convinced enough times that I am capable of doing hard things, but now I need to find something that I like doing also. And so I, as I went through the med school rotations, I found that you, there's procedural medicine and then there's more relationship medicine. And procedural medicine is surgery and those kind of things. And I was so much more drawn to those. I liked the fixing thing. You know, there's a problem, you decisively fix it, you move on. And I liked that about surgery. It's faster paced and it's also just a very tangible contribution. So I knew I was drawn to that. So then I started rotating through different surgical specialties and I found actually heart surgery, while interesting, is there's really only two surgeries. There's valves and there's vessels, and that was not nearly enough variety to keep me interested over a lifetime. And so around the time that I was in those years, plastic surgery reality TV was becoming a thing. Extreme Makeover was one of the early shows. The Swan was one of the early shows. I didn't watch them much, but my family did and they talked about it a lot. And so I started to think, well, you know, there's all this talk about these shows. I'm gonna just see what plastic surgery is like. You know, I just, I'm thorough. I needed to look at all the options.
So at the end of all my subspecialty rotations, I decided to try out plastic surgery for a week, and I fell in love. It was the first time I had not…you know, in surgery there's a lot of times long operations and you find yourself as the med student looking at the clock and wondering how much longer you're gonna be holding this retractor. In plastic surgery, I didn't ever look at the clock. I just wanted for more and more and more. I loved it. And so that one week turned into three weeks, and then I was sure at the end of those three weeks that that's what I wanted to do. And so then I sought out two additional one-month sub-internships at programs that I thought I might want to go to for residency.
I ended up doing about two and a half months of plastics in med school and realized that's a great intersection. There's so much creativity in plastic, so much problem solving, quality of life surgery. Because that was another thing I realized is heart surgery is life and death surgery and there's probably as many deaths as are our lives saved in that. And it's not always a high quality of life. And I had been also drawn to orthopedic surgery, for example, because it was a quality of life surgery and plastics is very much a quality of life surgery. And so plastics seemed to allow me the opportunity to do quality of life surgery. And it's also not very commonly middle of the night emergency, short notice kind of surgery. It's planned. It's scheduled. And I, that was very appealing. And then the, my artistic side, not that I'm particularly, you know, I don't have a painting hobby or anything like that, but I'm very interested in the arts. I have an eye for that kind of thing. And plastics allowed for that, I guess, creative perspective and unique interpretation of things for each individual patient. So that's really how I kind of stumbled into plastics as just a perfect fit for me. I love it.
LJR: Yeah. Like thinking back to that art history experience that made you stand out in medicine, kind of coming full circle to that and very much. They probably wouldn't have said, oh, here's our plastic surgeon, let's put her in. But it's, that's great. So. At that point where geographically had all of these experiences taken you? I know that's kind of the plight of the medical professional and training.
AS: Well, I was in New York City for all four years of med school. [LJR: Mm-hmm.] And then, in those four years, I had looked, I had it in my mind, you know, I had the four years of Dartmouth and that was great. Really. So I guess circling back to the coming back home, being from Wichita, Kansas, I knew at the end of high school that I wanted to get very far away from here to spread my wings away from my family, away from my friends, and just really try something totally different. And Dartmouth was, I love the experience at Dartmouth, but it was still a small town. Three stop lights didn't seem all that challenging as far as a totally different environment. So then I dove into New York City and that was a totally different environment. I had it in my mind that maybe I would spend my residency years in California just because I wanted another totally different geographic experience.
But I quickly learned that in small subspecialty fields such as the one I wanted to go into, most programs had a tendency to take their own people because those people had had a chance to get to know the department. [LJR: Mm-hmm.] And so they were known. Oftentimes research was done in the home institution. And so the two places I went out in California to do my sub internships, they already had most of their spots, if not all of their spots, promised a way to internal candidates. Which made sense. And so I became that internal candidate to my home school. And so I ended up staying on at New York Hospital for my residency for six more years in New York City.
LJR: Woo. Okay.
AS: So never planned on being a 10 year New Yorker, but I was in New York for 10 years.
LJR: That's right. Wow. And so when did you start feeling like, okay, maybe a couple fewer stoplights would be the place you needed to end up?
AS: Well, so funny thing about that, at the end of training, I really hadn't thought at all about where I wanted to go, and I never had my heart set on going back home. In fact, when I left after high school, I really thought I'd never come back. I wasn't going to look back. And at that point I was building my life in the Northeast. I had gotten married in med school and I had my first two children in residency, and my in-laws were fairly close by, and so it seemed somewhere in that area was going to be the right place for us. But my husband had gone to business school and he'd gone in New York City and was working there, but I knew I didn't want to practice in New York. I knew that I wanted grass and trees and open spaces and that was going to be just a much better place to raise kids. Cause I started to have kids at the end of residency and as I got to the end of residency, I quickly found that all these wonderful teachers that I had, they're wonderful and helpful in your education. But they don't want you to be their next competitor, so they really don't go out on a limb to help you find a job locally or even regionally.
So that began my search coast to coast. And so I looked at places in the northeast, you know. I looked out in Connecticut. I looked in Florida. I looked all the way out in California at a few places. I looked in Wisconsin and Indiana. And we were trying to find a city big enough for both of our careers because we both felt that we thought we would end up in a bigger city or suburban of a bigger city because we thought we needed that for our two very different fields.
And then one weekend I was home with…I was pregnant with my second, and my first was…I was going to leave with my family to babysit while we went to a wedding up in Wisconsin where I had another interview to go to. And when I was passing through, one of my family members suggested, why don't you just talk to one of our local plastic surgeons here and see maybe they've got a connection, you know, maybe down in Texas or up in Chicago, somewhere in the Midwestern band of the country that isn't so saturated with plastic surgeons. Maybe they can help facilitate an opportunity. So with some reluctance, that's what I did. And it just so happened the practice that I went to, it was a two surgeon practice that had at one time been four and they were shrunk down to two and had really been actively looking for someone for a few years. But knowing that the Midwest is a difficult place to recruit to sometimes they weren't really, I guess, all that aggressive in their search. They were kind of just waiting for someone to, I guess, like me to come along and I did. And at that point I was seven months pregnant. I was just at the end of my residency, I didn't have a job. And here I stumble across this place that is within a mile of my home where I grew up. And here they are. And the other thing about it is, as I was going through the interview process, I was figuring out what kind of a practice opportunity do I want? And I knew private practice had always been appealing. And I guess as a sidebar, plastics is one of the few fields in medicine that still has a very robust private practice opportunity. Most things are employed, opportunities working for large hospital systems, right? But plastics still has majority private practitioners. And I had looked at all different kinds of practices across the country and I found in plastics, it's pretty common to have not only your office based practice, but you also can have the opportunity to own your own ambulatory surgery center and your own med spa potentially. And I just, I loved the—I didn't even really at that point understand the economics of that, but what I understood was how wonderful and to be able to work with exactly the people you want to work with and they get to know you. And it can be efficient and it can be more fun. It's, there's none of the things that people grumble about in the big hospitals where I had trained: the inefficiency, the always someone new problems. And so it had become really appealing to me to find a private practice and to develop those things within it. And this practice in Wichita that I was talking to, that is exactly what they had. And it was, it was just so perfect. They had the onsite surgery center, they had the office, they had the med spa, but the med spa was very much in its infancy. That was okay to me. But I, after looking coast to coast and finding that the opportunity that really stood out to me the very most was right where I came from. I was as surprised as anybody that that was at the top of my list. That's where I wanted to go. And so we made a fairly quick decision because I was approaching the point where I couldn't even travel anymore in this pregnancy.
So I accepted the position and then my husband flew in and had a kind of a rapid fire set of interviews for Koch Industries. He got the job and I got the job, and so we made a quick decision to move. So one month after my second son was born, we moved to Wichita, and then one month after that I started my practice there . And I'm, it's now, it's been my first and only job and I'm in my 17th year of practice now.
I have gone on to have two more children and we have just expanded our ambulatory surgery center. The aesthetic med spa that was in its infancy now has five practitioners. We have two locations and I'm the sole owner of the practice now because the two people I joined have since retired. So it's just been kind of a wild ride. Everything I ever wanted it to be. And I just, I marvel myself at how everything I was looking for professionally was right where I started.
LJR: Yeah. So though you could never have done it without leaving, correct?
AS: Yeah, absolutely. One could look at my trajectory and my professional path and say, well, why did you, you didn't need a Dartmouth education to come back to Wichita, Kansas and be a surgeon. You could have done that with local schools, but I think my path to Dartmouth and onto Cornell and the time away in those different cities, it built in me a, I guess a confidence that I didn't have when I left.
A lot of people from this part of the country have kind an inferiority complex, I guess, to those big city people. And there's an intimidation factor that people from this part of the country think that all those people think that they're better than all of us. And it's silly, but it's very prevalent. And growing up with that, I felt a need to get away from this smallness and show that I was every bit as good or qualified or whatever the right word is to do those big city things. And so I, over those years, built a confidence that yes, I can do all those things and now I'm going to circling back to what is it that I really like? Not just because it's hard, but what do I enjoy?
And it turns out I actually really enjoyed my life growing up here. I like the size. It's a 400,000-person city where there's plenty of room to spread out. It's easy to have land and lots of grass and trees and open spaces, and there's a friendliness and a welcoming environment that I really enjoy and I had taken for granted. I thought all of those things existed everywhere. And my time away helped me realize that they really don't.
LJR: Yeah. I hate to use the expression, but there's no place like home, right?
AS: You're exactly right. Exactly.
LJR: Well, Amy, I think it's wonderful and it makes me wanna come and visit, and it sounds like…I wonder now, your oldest must be ready to make this whole decision about leaving the nest and…
AS: Yes, already did. He's in Boston at Northeastern.
LJR: Okay. And was some of that, could you see shades of the “I'm just gonna get outta here” like you had or was it more pointed about where he was headed?
AS: I think the escapism was a part of it. I think for him a big part of the escapism, unfortunately, was that our divorce coincided with his whole high school career, which I know had to suck for him. And so I think he felt a need to just get away and, but I think his whole growing up years, he knew that mom and dad had been educated away and that we both thought that getting away was a really good and healthy thing. And so he never considered going to local state schools. He didn't apply. He always had his eye on something far away. And so I think it was kind of a combination of escapism. And he has some of some family in the Northeast where that's where my in-laws have been. So he still has that kind of almost close to home feeling with that.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it must be kind of fun to be like, okay, I know that there's a possibility he might come home.
AS: Yeah, I mean, I was a long shot and knowing from my own experience, there's a never say never effect for that for sure.
LJR: Right, right, right, right. I love it. So that's a new beginning for him. And you mentioned the divorce, so does that put you in a phase of new beginnings too?
AS: We divorced in 2018 and that ended up being another reason why it was really nice to be near home, right?
LJR: Right.
So, you know, it is, that's one of those formative things that happens that you don't see coming. And I was definitely blindsided by that, you know, so now we have four kids that we're trying to raise here, and that's been a big complicating, setback to life. But you know, I guess it's just one of those things you don't see coming and you figure it out. And I feel like I've landed on my feet and all as well. But you know, when you asked who I was at Dartmouth, I think an awful lot of people would remember me because the person that was my husband was in the class of ’95. We were together from my sophomore year onward, and so I think most would remember us together in that context, and I guess I figured out a way to not really necessarily go back to that, but…
LJR: Yeah. Well, you've certainly grown into your own person now, even as the path you took took you right back where you started. Your values are the same. The knowing you can do hard things and yet concentrating on the things you want and that are right…still seems like the same Amy and feels as though you're just where you need to be right now. So all our best to you and thanks so much for sharing with us.
AS: Well, it has been fantastic and it's a pleasure to be here. So thank you.
LJR: That was Amy McLean Sprole who is a board certified plastic surgeon, trained in both aesthetic and reconstructive plastic surgery. Having returned to her native Wichita, she is now one of the only female plastic surgeons in the area. In addition to her clinical work, she is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, Wichita. You can find out more about her practice at pscwichita.com.
And to find out more about our show and the other guests who have joined us, visit RoadsTakenShow.com. You can access show notes and transcripts and see great then and now photos. You can also find the show wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to follow or subscribe so you don’t miss any new episodes with my upcoming guests and me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, on Roads Taken.