President’s Message
Katie Davenport-Kabonic, DO, FAAP, FACOFP
Summer Playlist: Change is hard.
Out of the blue last month I had an urge to listen to country music again. I haven’t 
listened to country music since college when I was living with a basketball teammate that hailed from Duke, Oklahoma and blasted Toby Keith (RIP) to get us up and moving
before early morning practices. Fun fact: Rap and classical music are my favorite genres. So, when I started listening to Morgan Wallen’s “I’m the Problem” album over and over again, my family was confused and a little concerned. Truthfully, so was I.
“Missing” was the song replaying in the back of my mind, and I had no idea why. It wasn’t until I started really listening to the lyrics and found myself tearing up – in every sense of the word – that the message sunk in. As of the first of this month, my professional path will take a different route than the one I believed I would walk forever as a “full-scope” family medicine physician. After fellowship training and thirteen years of delivering babies, I won’t be doing that anymore. For numerous reasons, my partners and I needed to make a change – many changes actually – to maintain focus on our primary responsibility of training excellent family physicians and to sustain ourselves as teachers of family medicine.
This decision was made one year ago, and I remember replaying “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” by Taylor Swift and “There There” by Mali Obomsawin & Magdalena Abrego to help give words to what I felt. Perhaps it was a bit dramatic, but this was the first major professional change I had ever experienced that was also very, very personal. There was disbelief, confusion, anger, resentment, sadness, and fear. Shockingly, there was also relief, which was quickly followed by guilt. Essentially, there was grief. There still is. And the fact that country music is making me cry tells me I haven’t quite found acceptance yet.
What I did find is other physicians who went through similar path changes. There are more than I realized. I reached out to some to hear their stories and counsel; to regain focus on our shared responsibilities as physicians, teachers, partners, parents, and human beings; to find gratitude for the experience of loss, the opportunity to keep going and forging a different path. I was reminded once more of physician resilience and adaptability. Artists in our own field, we physicians have a way of creating something meaningful with the materials we have to work with.
This past year has been filled with change for me, and as much as I would like it to stop for a while, I know it won’t. Artists – musicians and physicians alike – have taught me that while change is hard, it isn’t entirely unique to any one person or profession, it will certainly happen again, and it can bring opportunities that would otherwise not have presented. This is just life. And each change challenges us to move on with a refocus on what matters most; with who matters most. It isn’t lost on me that it is country music getting my attention now, bringing me back to a familiar place of energized teamwork, fighting and bonding together over wins and losses. I’ll add these country songs to my summer playlist alongside “On To The Next One” by JAY-Z , “Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major”, “BWV 1007” by Yo-Yo Ma, and whatever songs bring the next messages of change. I welcome your recommendations!