What lead me to SCRC

I’ve had kind of an interesting few months to say the least. I moved from NYC where I had practiced for a number of years a little less than 10 years ago. My oldest daughter (my first IVF baby) was a little less than one years old and just learning to walk. We were living in an apartment in midtown Manhattan which we were quickly outgrowing. So, we were excited to move to LA where my husband had family and where we found a house in a beautiful community nestled between the mountains and the beach. It’s a neighborhood where my daughter would have tons of beautiful outdoor space all year long to roam and play. In the pacific palisades. We chose the right place to live because it ended up being truly a dream life. Hiking, beach, bike riding all year long. Professionally, I got the chance to build my connections with referring doctors and amazing patients who I helped over the years. They ended up sending countless of their friends and colleagues to me. I built strong connections and friendships with colleagues. I cracked into a world where really I didn’t know a soul and made a name for myself out here. I went on to have 2 more kids (both also IVF babies) and continued to grow and nurture my family in a beautiful community and neighborhood. My practice also continued to grow nearby.

About 3 years ago I was recruited from my original LA practice to join a good friend and colleague of mine to help grow a quickly growing practice in Westwood to help develop the third-party program there and be a leader in the practice. I loved working with third party and the surrogacy agency there and also continued to see IVF patients and work with my amazing colleagues. About 2 years after being there I guess I got noticed for my leadership qualities and my good reputation and success stories with patients, so I got recruited to become medical director and lead REI physician for a different fertility practice in Santa Monica. The medical director had a retired about a year prior to my joining so I had filled a needed gap. I started there in September 2024. With a great team there we started to rebuild the practice in only a few short months. But on January 7, 2025 everything changed. 

One windy Tuesday morning I left for work but never came back home.  Thank goodness everyone in my family was safe and left before the fire reached our home but our home and our entire neighborhood was destroyed overnight. The trauma of losing all of our close friends and school and home and our lives is just mind boggling and my family and I are still trying to process it. Sometimes even over 100 days later it still doesn’t seem real. About 2 days after my house burned down, I was informed that the medical practice in Santa Monica was going to close down due to the impact of the fires. Within a span of about 3 days, I found out that my home, neighborhood, community and former life was gone AND also my medical practice was closing down. I have to say those were some pretty dark days. 

They say that you have to lose everything to really live. And I would say that there was an element of that that was true for me. I lost all of the physical stuff. Lost the home, lost the artwork, the clothing, the letters, the photos (I never got around to digitizing), the hand made mother’s day gifts, kid’s art projects. But, really in the end, it’s all just stuff. What all of those things represented was the love and the connections that I had and have with my husband, my kids and the people in that community. All the rest is just paper, wood and plastic. 

The hiatus in my medical practice I would say was maybe even more difficult to deal with than losing the house and the neighborhood.  I’ve always seen the work that I do in helping others build families as something that centered me. It did and does bring me true joy and gratification. But when I had to take a professional hiatus because of my office closing, I kind of lost my center at a time in my life where I really could have used that guiding center as a source of strength. It really was a hard time for me. I had even (although fleetingly) even considered leaving medicine altogether because I was disillusioned and burnt by the business side of medicine. But it was ok. I told myself that I just have to get through this rough spot. Help the clinic close, help the remaining patients who needed follow up and then take my time to find the right place to continue seeing patients, building families and doing what I love more than anything; being an REI doctor.  

You know, I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason. It can’t possibly. There’s just way too much obvious suffering in the world. Babies don’t suffer because of any greater reason. Genocide and Holocausts and innocent people suffering can not be the intentional work of any higher power that has people’s best interests in mind. It just can’t be. The world is random. It has random good and random bad. And that is just how my honest, intelligent and scientific mind operates. But I do think that when something “bad” happens at the moment it may seem bad but if you just wait it out, down the road it may turn into the biggest blessing you could have ever hoped for. Same goes for something good though as well. At the moment, what may seem good may down the road end up not being so good. Hard to tell in the moment. And I would say this recent experience is an example of just that. 

At the time when I had to look for a new practice location just immediately after losing my home and my world was upside down, I didn’t fathom that anything good was actually happening. But now that I have some perspective I don’t think I could have asked for a bigger blessing. After all of this happened, I reached out to some friends and colleagues in the LA fertility world which led me to SCRC. Funny story: I had met with SCRC when I first moved to LA about 10 years ago because I wanted to join THE most premiere fertility clinic in LA with the best reputation and the best success rates. I even dragged my baby and husband out to LA twice from NYC to meet with the SCRC people. They don’t know that I came out here twice just to meet with them. But I guess now they do 😊. Anway, at that time they had just hired their 6^th REI physician and they were just trying to get her busy so they didn’t really have room to hire another one just yet. But also, I think I was kind of an unknown. I was from NYC. So, I definitely had no connections and following out here to build up their practice. So I didn’t get an offer from SCRC to join their practice then. But after about 10 years of being out here and earning my own amazing reputation amongst colleagues and patients, I’ve proven myself so to speak. And lucky for me, SCRC happened to have an empty office for me. So here I am in one of the best clinics in LA in Beverly Hills. Where I could now continue to do what I love to do more than anything. Build amazing families for amazing people. With the best lab, best success rates and best staff at my fingertips.