One of the Doctors (Dr. Jennifer Favre) was having her first baby and the owner/founder of the practice (Dr. Gail Schonfeld) asked me to help cover her maternity leave. Dr. Favre started working for Gail as a scribe many years ago and she loved it so much that she ended up returning to work there full time after attending medical school and completing her Pediatric residency.

I worked as a moonlighter at East End Pediatrics back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s when I had my own practice in NYC and realized that most of my Upper East Side Patient population headed out to the Hamptons during the summer and on many weekends, leaving the city a ghost town. Everyone thinks of the Hamptons as the playground of the rich and famous, but the year-round residents are often living paycheck to paycheck in an area that boasts one of the highest costs of living in the country.

As a native Spanish speaker, most of my Mondays two decades ago were spent seeing children who had been born to South American mothers who had limited English language proficiency. Many of the infants and toddlers that I saw in those days were new U.S. citizens, as they had been born at the local Southampton Hospital. Under NYS law, pregnant mothers were granted emergency Suffolk County Medicaid if they were pregnant, to help ensure a healthy pregnancy and newborn.

The families’ migration north had been facilitated by underground South American cartel-like organizations that would arrange for the newly arrived women to have already pre-applied for Suffolk County Medical Assistance, and most women arrived with a prenatal appointment already having been made on their behalf.  They were fleeing their countries because of poverty, lack of educational resources, and limited freedom to pursue careers that were self-sustaining.

My experience during my recent locum assignment 2019 was quite similar; I found myself speaking Spanish to more than 80% of the mothers and grandmothers that brought in Patients to see me.  I suspect that many of the mothers of infants and toddlers were “DREAMers” (children who had crossed the border without a visa, but have been allowed to stay in the U.S.).  These moms were fluent in English and Spanish, and they primarily spoke to their children in English.  Most of the middle-school and high-school aged children did not speak Spanish at all, but they understood me. THEIR parents’ English was fair but not fluent, and the adults appeared to prefer to speak to me in Spanish.

I spent some time with each of these families encouraging the parents to speak only Spanish at home, in order for their children to be blessed with the gift of being bilingual.

I will be featuring Dr. Schonfeld’s practice in a future issue of Physician Outlook, as I was thoroughly impressed with her continued enthusiasm for practicing Medicine. It is clear that she is not suffering from the pervasive burnout facing so many of today’s Physicians.

Dr. Marlene J. Wust-Smith, M.D., F.A.A.P.

Contributing Editor, Hispanic Outlook on Education. Founding Editor, Physician Outlook