Marilyn B. Sandford, MD

I was born and raised in the beautiful state of Minnesota. When time came to go to college, I didn’t want to leave. I settled on a small liberal arts college nearby, Carleton College. While I was there, I think I considered just about every possible career. My mother encouraged creativity and wanted me to be an author. My father just wanted to make sure that I applied myself and worked hard. My brothers had their opinions too… Medicine always struck me as a potential career, as I came from a family filled with doctors. My brother Paul and his wife were both in their medical residencies, exhausted from the long hours of call. Paul wanted to “save me” from that lifestyle, so he devised a plan: If I spent one night on call with either him or his wife Chris, he was 100% certain I would write off my idea of a medical career. A few weeks later I found myself in a hospital in Michigan following my sister-in-law around. That night, I saw: my first baby being born, my sister-in-law putting a chest tube into a patient’s chest to relieve a pneumothorax, another patient having a heart attack and the subsequent care, and a plethora of phone calls about fevers and nausea. Riveting! By morning, I knew that I wanted to be a doctor.