Always with a medical future in sight, George Huang figured he would be a pediatrician just like his father. When the world of surgery called, others questioned if he would be happy with the lifestyle. Later, in the midst of a successful academic medical career as a surgeon, outside voices again questioned his desire to go another direction. Find out how realizing what will make you truly happy sometimes requires quieting the other voices.
Always with a medical future in sight, George Huang figured he would be a pediatrician just like his father. But when he got to med school and saw what surgery looked like, he changed his plans even as his father worried about the kind of work life balance that he might have in the surgical world. He ultimately found his niche performing surgeries on urologic cancers and progressed in a successful academic medical career.
Not necessarily due to the speciality, but the rather the environment in which he practiced, he did start to question whether the balance was right in his life. At just the right time, he learned about a place that might suit him better. But again, outside voices questioned his desire to go in the new direction.
In this episode, find out from George how realizing what will make you truly happy sometimes requires quieting the voices around you…on Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest
George Huang is a urologist at Kaiser Permanente at Redwood City Medical Center, a physician and surgeon who treats diseases and conditions of the genito-urinary system. He sub-specializes in the treatment of genito-urinary cancers and treasures the patient-doctor relationship he now has in his community practice. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife and two daughters.
For another story about listening to others and finding your way in medicine, listen to our episode with Woojin Kim.
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
George Huang: You would kind of come home tired, you know, exhausted sometimes, and you know, get some rest. And the next day you kind of repeat the same thing and you kind of say to yourself, wow, this is it. Right? This is it. And you kind of also want to, you know, look ahead and say, well, what do I envision for myself a few years down the road? What do I want for myself a few years down the road?
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Always with a medical future in sight, George Huang figured he would be a pediatrician just like his father. When the world of surgery called, others questioned if he would be happy with the lifestyle. Later, in the midst of a successful academic medical career as a surgeon, outside voices again questioned his desire to go another direction. Find out how realizing what will make you truly happy sometimes requires quieting the other voices...on today's Roads Taken with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today I'm here with George Huang and we are going to talk about roads that kind of lead directly where you think they will, and sometimes that still gives you pause and has questions. So George, thank you so much for being here.
GH: Thank you for having me, Leslie. This is a pleasure.
LJR: Great. So I start this the same way with each of my guests and I ask the same 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 he would become?
GH: So I will admit, I've listened to some of your podcasts, so I was expecting this, so I wrote some things down. So I would say coming into Dartmouth, I was, I would say that was a relatively sheltered, somewhat simple in the sense I didn't have a lot of life experiences. I was a pretty good student and I was eager to learn the new things and kind of see the world outside of my small town in New Jersey and South Jersey.
LJR: South Jersey is not the bustling. I can see Manhattan from my window, so why making the choice to go to not so bustling Hanover?
GH: Great question. So actually, you know, when we were in high school, I remember we didn't even need to really make a lot of effort looking at colleges. We started getting brochures in the mail, and of course, I guess you had to score a certain score on the standardized test. And then before you knew it, you got brochures. And I'd heard of Dartmouth. I knew that it was a really good school. So the first time I really heard of it and kind of found out a lot, a little bit more about it was actually the summer before my senior year. It was my junior year in high school. So I was selected to go to kind of the ultimate Geek Camp if you could imagine that. It was something called Governor School in the sciences for the state of New Jersey. You know, each high school can nominate a student that they wanted to go to this camp, and it was essentially kind of 50 or a hundred of the of what they thought were kind of very good students in science and that you kind of spent the summer together taking college courses and doing projects together. And it was a really good experience. And there you know, you have counselors and one of the counselors actually went to Dartmouth. I remember she was just a little bit, you know, different than the other counselors. The other counselors were generally very kind of buttoned up or people who we expect to be very good at the sciences and kind of were kind of your classic, you know, science majors. But this person she was just very outgoing, athletic, and just overall just really great person to kind of hang out with.
And she always wore this old faded Dartmouth sweatshirt. And that was kind of the first time I said, oh, Dartmouth. You know, shortly thereafter I realized, I found out my cousin was actually gonna go to Dartmouth and I said to myself, wow, I guess this is quite a happy coincidence. So that kind of put Dartmouth on a radar for me. And I must say, when I saw the brochure, it was really beautiful. So I just kind of applied to it and I was lucky. I didn't apply to Dartmouth early, but I found out very early that I got in. And that kind of just started me to explore it more. And I think when I visited the campus I was just really, I said to myself I didn't need to look any further. This, this is the place for me.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. So once you got there, you were in the mindset of exploring different things and that probably meant as a different disciplines and geeking out on other kinds of things. So where did your heart take you both when you first got there, and then how did that path lead you through the four years?
GH: Sure. So, you know, I mentioned, you know, I was gonna explore new things, but you know, ultimately I always kind of knew that eventually at the end of graduation I would be applying to medical school. I had come from a family of doctors and that was kind of what was expected of me. And to be honest with you, living such a, you know, relatively uninteresting life up to that point in South Jersey, I really didn't think of any other career choices. But I was interested in kind of, I guess, national politics. I thought that maybe you know, by being involved in government or public service, you could do some good. So I actually started out being a double major in government and chemistry and that actually led me to do the White House internship actually during the, I think it was, it's not the sophomore summer, it was a junior year after that. So that was kind of like my kind of exploring new things a little bit outside of the sciences and in general also just it was nice to be able to just, you know, learn new things that are completely not within the realm of what you would typically consider to be a pre-med curriculum. I remember some of my favorite classes were like English classes. I enjoyed my psych introductory psychology class, even though that to me was actually quite, quite hard because it involved a lot of statistics. You know, I, I must say, I didn't really go about this in a very organized fashion, but I just kind of did anything that came to mind and anything that kind of fit the schedule, so to speak.
LJR: Yeah.
GH: Now, after I went, did my White House internship, I kind of realized that government service was probably not what I had thought it was going to be. I shortly realized that wow, there was a lot of people working very, very hard just to get a little bit of recognition and people kind of, you know, fought over, you know, who was gonna be invited to meetings and things like that. And the people actually getting to make the decisions actually were not the kind of the civil servants. They were just really people who had done. Extremely well in life. And then they were kind of uber wealthy and then kind of got appointed to the most important positions. And I said to myself, ah, you know this might not be…the idealistic part of me might, you know, said to myself, wow, maybe this is not meant for me, at least at this point. So I, you know, went back and, and just decided that I was gonna just apply to medical school.
LJR: Yeah. And did you, you did that right away and landed someplace?
GH: Yes. So I applied, that was always the plan. You kind of went straight through and you just kind of applied to medical school. And after Dartmouth, I went on and enrolled in medical school at the University of Pittsburgh, which is not that far away, about five hours drive from my house in South Jersey. But it was real, you know, I was happy to get in. It was a good school and I was eager to get started.
LJR: Yeah, so we've talked to a lot of doctors on this program, and so I think we've gotten the taste of how you're still able to reach out and try different things throughout the course of the pathway there. So when was it that you first decided: I think I have an inkling as to the kind of medicine I wanna practice?
GH: Very good question. So my father was a pediatrician. And I had gone into medical school, school thinking that I, I'll just be a pediatrician. Not just be a pediatrician. But I thought that, that that's what I was interested in. I looked up to him, you know? But I think I…During my interview at the University of Pittsburgh, and one of the things that they did for us during our tours was that they would say, well, you guys have always heard that the University of Pittsburgh was where liver transplant got started. You know, now we're going to take you into the operating theater. Actually, it was, it was not in actually into the or, but then they had an observation, kind of a window on top of the operating room and kind of say, You know, they would just take us there and say, know right below you, it's actually a liver transplant taking place. And you kinda said to myself, wow, that's pretty cool. And I kinda enjoyed that. And so that was probably the first time I thought that maybe I would be interested in something else other than pediatrics. And so then you go about the first couple years from medical school, which I will say I kind of struggled a little bit. I…Biology…I had done fairly well in Dartmouth, but you know, believe it or not, I always struggled a little bit in biology and so I, I had to work kind of hard and, you know, for a while I didn't know whether I was gonna have good enough grades to actually, to be a, be a surgeon, to be honest with you. But, you know, I was lucky and, and I guess I always kind of always did standardized tests well and. You know, at the end of the second year, we always have, we had to take a really important standardized test, something called the step one boards, and did well, well enough on that that I was still in the running to do something in the surgical specialties.
And so third year is when we started to kind of explore the different types of subspecialties and kind of solidified my feelings towards maybe something in the surgical subspecialties is what I wanted to do. I will say, when I told my dad this, he called me like think every day for a week and…for a month actually and said, no, are you sure this is what you wanna do? The lifestyle of the surgeon is not the best and I think it was referring to a general surgeon and, and that is def definitely true. When I you know, I could see the general surgeons, they worked exceedingly long hours and by general surgeons, I mean in surgeons who actually dealt with intestines intestinal surgery. So I could see where it was coming from, but as luck would have it, I actually had the good fortune of rotating through a surgical specialty called urology, which is surgical specialty that took care of the urinary tract. And you know, I was lucky in the sense that oftentimes when you're rotating through rotations in med school, you just get ignored because the surgeons are too busy doing their own thing. But there was someone in the department that was actually at Dartmouth alumni too, and he kind of just took me under his wing and kind of just. Show me that extra bit of attention and in fact, you know, got me interested and if one thing led to another and I decided that, well this is a great specialty. The lifestyle, at least at that time was considered to be a little bit better than that of a general surgeon. It was a surgical specialty that had a lot of different type of procedures. Interesting. Both big and small. And I thought that, oh, this is a good fit. And so, you know, before we knew it, you know, I was off to residency at NYU for my residency training.
LJR: Excellent. So we've kind of also heard about how residencies go and fellowships and all those things, but getting into urology as that kind of life balance that it seemed like your father was so worried about for you.
GH: Correct.
LJR: I don't, I don't know. The specialty is it such that there are urological
GH: Emergencies?
LJR: Emergencies, yeah.
GH: Yeah, so there, there certainly are, and I guess I'm living that every day a little bit. So they say you know, oftentimes what people say about these surgical specialties is, is, I mean, for cardiac surgery you actually only have minutes for general surgery, you have for emergency settings, that you have hours. And for things in our field, you generally have about a few hours, so not quite an hour into two. So you have a little bit of leeway. So, you know, you never quite know exactly what to make of, whether the lifestyle is better in one sense or another. [LJR: Yeah.] At least I went into it thinking that the lifestyle was gonna be a little bit better. Things change over time and specialties change over time. And now I don't know that I'm in a field that is less intense. Were with better hours than all the other surgical specialties per se, but that was kind of what led me down this road. Actually.
LJR: Right, right. And so after your training, where was it that you went to say, this is where my, my medical life is gonna be?
GH: So our training is ha was kind of long. It was six years in total. We did a couple of years of basic general surgery training and, after that, another four years of our subspecialty training. So it was six years. And you know, after my training I realized that actually I might, I didn't really necessarily want to do, you know, everyday bread and butter, what we call general urology. Just because in the university setting you got to see kind of the interesting cases and things that kind of required a little bit more skill. But you know, as a community urologist, you end up seeing a lot of office stuff, and I won't go into the details about the specific conditions, we see—But I will just say it was, I couldn't imagine every day dealing with that
LJR: Day after day.
GH: Yeah. And, and so I said, well, what interested me? So, you know, there was, I, I kind of thought that, well, you know, bigger operations, cancer operations interested in me because I feel always felt like taking care of cancer patients no matter what. You always kind of. We're willing to give them that extra care, extra time, and kind of just willing to go to that extra effort, whereas other conditions you know, sometimes at least my personality is such that I, I don't always have the best tempera—well, I don't always have the great patience for little things. And, and so I just figured, well, I might want to do something where I really deeply cared about the things and the people that I was treating and, and of all the types of urological cancers, which I will say is actually. I think quite a few of are the cancers that we take care of actually are in the top 10 of cancers of the of the body. So it is something that is quite, quite common. So between all those things, I chose to specialize in bladder cancer and that took me to the University of Southern California, which was kinda at that time the center for bladder cancer surgery and bladder cancer care.
LJR: Got it. And is that the work that you continue to do now, George?
GH: Yeah. So you know that those two years were quite intense to some extent. I still sometimes wake up and, and kind and still dream about it and, and sometimes there's still a little bit of stress associated with that because, you know, it was quite an intense experience. Particularly because when I went into it, went into the fellowship, I probably didn't have as much experience with the types of surgeries that I was wanting to specialize in as actually probably some of the residents. So residents are doctors that are still in training and fellows are people who have finished their residency training. So essentially people with fewer years of experience than I was, but actually have much more, vastly, much more experience in the OR doing those types of advanced cases. So here you are as an outside person going into a facility and kind of have to try to earn the respect of
LJR: Playing catch up.
GH: Yeah. The people under you. That was quite an intense experience. But luckily I had someone that kind of took me under his arm. And then I really ultimately had a great, great experience. But there was a little bit of a curve ball though. So in the months that I was literally a month or two before I was about to finish fellowship, my mentor passed away very suddenly from a completely unexpected illness. It was a soft tissue in infection that actually progressed literally within a couple days. And, before we knew it, this kind of what, what we thought to be a very healthy 46 year old person actually passed. So this is kind of how I finished my fellowship, having just lost my mentor and kind of my biggest advocate. And so, Luckily, I, my intention was to stay in academic medicine because you've gone through all this training and all this extra, you kind of thought that you had this extra expertise, and so academia was kind of the, what was expected of you and, and kind of what people kind of by default went into. And I would say the job search is not always the easiest is not all centers have a need for what you really are offering at any particular time or you know at any particular year. So you can't be particularly choosy about your location. And so I remember interviewing at a few places and one of the places that actually showed an interest to me was actually the University of Pittsburgh, which were where I did my medical school.
LJR: Yeah.
GH: And so I kind of you know, I circled made a 360 and kind of went back to Pittsburgh for kind of my first job out of fellowship. And so at the age of I wanna say maybe 32, I was a, you know, I started my career as an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh
LJR: With no one to call. Your mentor...right
GH: Yep. You kind of had to you know, learn to have thick skin. And I kind of learned to kind…it's just not having a big older brother to kind of be in your corner. Yeah. It's a little bit I will say probably made things a little bit tougher.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. And you'd shared with me a little bit earlier that about five or so years later, you kind of hit this doldrum again, a dip of wondering where you were headed, what was the precipitating factor for that?
GH: You know, I think there was a lot of things mine could say that maybe that was the first midlife crisis after I had turned 35. And that was a time when, you know, kind of look around you. Most of our classmates or friends they were already kind of getting married, starting families.
I was kind of still a single person living in Pittsburgh. And more importantly, on a day-to-day basis, it was a, it was busy work, not busy work in a bad way. But it was busy, but you would kind of come home tired, you know, exhausted sometimes, and you know, get some rest. And the next day you kind of repeat the same thing and you kind of say to yourself, wow, this is kind of, this is it, right? This is it. And you kind of also want to, you know, look ahead and say, well, what do I envision for myself a few years down the road? What do I want for myself a few years down the road? And I realized at that point that if you really wanted to move on to the next level, you really needed to love it. You really needed to have a passion for not minding, you know, waking up early to write papers and kind of staying late and just enjoying going to meetings and things. And that was when I started to kind of question, you know, whether I really had that drive within me to kind of keep on going forward in academia. So it was kind of in the back of my head. I didn't really think about it much, but fortunately, you know, talking about the personal life, I was fortunate enough to meet who become my wife Sandia, at around that time. And it was a total you know, unexpected type of meeting. We were both back visiting our parents in Taiwan and turned out that one of my parents' neighbors, who was also a patient of my dad's at one point, worked with my wife's mother and kind of made this introduction for us. And you know, before you know it, You know, two years later we were married.
LJR: But your wife had been living in the states.
GH: In Los Angeles.
LJR: And so maybe that's why they knew.
GH: Yeah. But so it was a long distance relationship. It was, you know, my goodness. Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, right? Yeah. But she made the you know, one of the boldest things that I saw anybody do, she said, well, if we're gonna make it work, you're getting older. I'm getting older too. I'll just, what do you think about me moving to Pittsburgh? I said, well, are you sure you wanna move to Los school? From Los Angeles to Pittsburgh and kind of start their career over. She said, well, if not, if you don't do this, this, this won't work ever. You know that. And, and then I said, I guess I, I know what you mean. And so, you know, we, she rolled the dice and luckily worked out for both of both of us. And two years later, we were married and, you know, around that time also talk about kind of fortuitous things that happened. You know, one of the things that my colleagues and I did at the University of Pittsburgh was that annually we would hold a board review meeting for the oral boards. And at that time, that was actually one of the only two, or if, if. It may have also only been the only one board review course that was held in the country. And so this was an oral board course that we held in Phoenix. And during one of the mock exam session, one of the, the, the examine mock examinees kind of impressed me quite a bit. And I, so I chatted with them after the mock exam and said, oh, where are you from? You know, you look like you were well-prepared for this. You have no, you have no problems. And he mentioned that, well, he worked for Kaiser Permanente Hospital in the Bay Area. And you know, I, my ears perked up immediately. I said, well, Bay Area, that's a nice area. And I think my wife would be eager to go back to California. And so, you know, one thing led to another, and before you knew it, I actually you know, came out to the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center here in Redwood City for an interview. And you know, a couple months later, You know, we signed the contract and I came out here.
LJR: So that's interesting. That seems like almost reverse mentorship that you see this younger person [GH: Yeah.] who has been given good training and you say, ah, the place that this person came from values the same things I care about. [GH: Yeah.] And found your entree that way. I rarely hear that, but I think that's an interesting way of approaching things.
GH: Yeah, and I, I'm not the most social person, but I was very happy that I actually made the effort to chitchat with this guy after. And so, my God, what if I hadn't made small talk with this guy after that on that particular day. Right. So…
LJR: Yeah. Very cool.
GH: Yeah. But it is you know, it was a big change when I told my colleagues at, you know, the University of Pittsburgh, my, my partners, you know, the look on their face was like, but disbelief like, what George? Are you sure you know this is a one way street? This is like a one way decision, right? Once you leave, it's really hard to come back to academic medicine. And they kind of just looked at me and kind of, you know, with the look like, did you really think this through? [LJR: Mmm.] And you know, even now sometimes I, I do have those thoughts too, because they're aspects about what I used to do that really is very interesting, right? And every day is a new challenge, and you get to see the new trainees every year. It's a group, new group of people, and it's quite an honor and actually quite a privilege to be actually, to have a hand in, in kind of molding the next generation, so to speak. Now, in this job, it's not the same. I mean, it's just you know, it, it's a regular community urology job. And luckily I've been able to kind of you know continue to do the major. Oncology operations because we do have a pretty robust referral group, network of doctors who kind of refer to myself. And so I'm able to still do the types of operations that I was trained to do, but it is a big, big change.
LJR: Yeah. But that confluence of life changes with your wife. And getting back to where she was familiar with and then kind of just making that break from something that hadn't been making you fully happy in all aspects. [GH: Right. Right.] Was probably, it took you out of that downward trajectory, right?
GH: That's right. That's right. It just kind of felt like you were, for lack of a better word, stuck. LJR: Yeah. Yeah.
GH: And it kind of felt good to kind of start afresh, so to speak.
LJR: Yeah. So how long have you been in the Bay Area?
GH: Actually, we're coming up on 10 years now.
LJR: Wow. Yeah.
GH: Yeah, yeah.
LJR: So it's worked out.
GH: Yeah. Yeah. It's worked out well. And then of course, after we came here, our you know, two daughters were born in short succession. So I have a, you know, I have a nine year old and a seven year old that and they keep our lives really, really busy and we're about to turn 50 too now, I guess. And, and, you know, energy level nowadays is not as, you know, it's not what he used to be.
LJR: We'll get our second win soon. Don't worry. Don’t worry.
GH: That's I hope so. I hope so.
LJR: So, so George, usually I ask people to look back at themselves mm-hmm. And say what they think the younger version would think of this version. We can do that if you want. But I'm actually curious, is your father still with us?
GH: He is. He is.
LJR: What do you think he now thinks of your trajectory when earlier he questioned kind of the life balance for you?
GH: You know, I think he ultimately to, like most parents, I think they're happy if they're, they're happy to see their kids being happy. [LJR: Yeah.] So I think once I told him that, no, I am sorry. I don't know that I can be a primary care doctor and I don't think I can be a pediatrician or internal medicine doctor. He respected that and I think he's, you know, happy to see. Me being in a profession that I think fits me more so to speak. So…
LJR: Yeah, my guess is your younger self would say the same thing.
GH: Yes, I think so. I think so. And I, I think that experience really tells us that you have to really do what you really want to do. Doing something that you may not necessarily want to do, but other people want you to do: that's probably not the best way to kind of go through life.
LJR: Yeah, well, it sounds like you have forged your path, knowing generally the right direction from the start, but taking your own steps and we're just thrilled that you could share this much so far with us and wish you the best for the next chapter.
GH: Thank you. Thank you.
LJR: That was George Huang, a urologist at Kaiser Permanente at Redwood City Medical Center, a physician and surgeon who treats diseases and conditions of the genito-urinary system. He sub-specializes in the treatment of genito-urinary cancers and treasures the patient-doctor relationship he now has in his community practice. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife and two daughters.
We treasure the relationship we have with our listeners and would love to hear from you more. Please leave us a review or drop us a line at roadstakenshow@gmail.com or through the contact us link at RoadsTakenShow.com. We'd love to hear what makes you keep tuning in with my guests and me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, on Roads Taken.