VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

quiet and the people here are very nice it just was not where I thought I would be. Albany is in a rural area that is underserved so there are people who drive two hours to come to my office.

You get so many challenged pregnancies and babies here, lives are lost in a matter of seconds.

I know that this small town needs doctors. My back. We're almost to the uterus. Baby now. Hey little person. You're not in the court. Yeah that's what it was. She had a knot, two knots. That's so we cut off his blood supply. So they're gonna so they're working with them okay. I have to make

Okay.

a decision.

We have our art ready, okay.

Could I stay here to help these people? To be honest with you. Landing in the OBGYN space was actually not where I thought I would be either. My family, anytime they introduce me, they introduce me as the doctor. My mom does the same thing. I'm like, mom, can you stop telling everybody I'm doctor, please? No, I'm just Sheena. Patients have no clue as to how the position ended up in front of them. Me being here was a big deal because my parents had issues with fertility and my mom's actually told that she would not be able to have children. But she did not take that answer. So she went to another doctor and he said, you can get pregnant. It's just not going to be easy. So they continued to try, never got pregnant. They were getting ready to adopt a little girl and then she found out she was pregnant with me. And here I am. I was kind of their little miracle baby and then my brother came along so there's two of us my father would say like you can do anything you want to do and I always knew that I wanted to be a doctor he was like go for it so I just ran after it until I got it and then when I was a college student I shadowed with a surgeon He let me scrub in. He let me put my finger in the person's neck, like to touch their carotid. I was like, yeah, this is my happy place I want to be. This is cool. But OB has no middle ground. It's happy birthday parties, great, wonderful. And then when things don't go right, it is really bad because you've either lost a baby or a mom.

Fear. We also have a question about the aspirin.

Okay, so the reason why we prescribe aspirin is to help to decrease the risk of preeclampsia, especially if you're African American, if you have any size for obesity, like if you have certain risk factors, that increases your risk of having preeclampsia.

That makes sense.

We're trying to reduce the risk. Yeah, yeah, we're trying. I have a higher incidence of dying during my childbirth experience than a person who is Caucasian. It's just statistics.

So we're just going to talk, okay? But it looks like now that you're getting into the third trimester, that maybe your blood pressure is not going to behave itself. So we're going to keep an eye on it.

We'll say that some of it is systematic bias, and we have higher incidences of other disease processes than pregnancy too, so you can't overlook them.

So what's happening in room eight is they have a patient that's in labor.

Yes.

She's seven centimeters. She started to have decelerations.

As I'm thinking about my decision to stay here or to leave, I think about doctors like Dr. Heinz. He came down here to work as a physician and he never left. And he built this community health center for the underserved. So he actually helped build a system that brought me to this area.

This is the most unusual The filming process I have ever done. It's like going to confession, man. I mean, so what does it take to get people like Dr. Favors down here helping patients middle of nowhere? Well, growing up, I wanted to be Dr. Schwinn. He was our family doc. Dr. Schwinn was always there. He saw us no matter what, no matter when. So that was my vision of what a doctor did, pretty obvious in the caste system of health care in this country where a factory worker and his five kids without much money stood. And I knew that there were communities out there, there were people like my family that needed doctors. And I said, who's the next Dr. Swint? When I got to medical school, I realized that the health care system has problems and, you know, you're part of the solution or part of the problem. So I actually decided to go to D.C. I worked as a legislative aide, you know, I need to get these articles. I got to run over to the Library of Congress. Can you take this here? We got to put a bill in. There's these sections, proofread it. You know, it's kind of like what needs to get done. We had the Health Planning Act, the HMO Act, Community Health Center program. and the National Health Service Corps. This was the big problem. How do we get doctors to remote areas? You know, medical school is expensive. So what if the federal government pays new doctors to go to underserved communities? Good idea. Without having that, there was no incentive to go to rural areas. There's also no way of knowing where the openings were. You know, how do you recruit nationally? There was not a very well-designed system to match communities in a creative way. It was so much paperwork, paper, paper, paper. He pulled down a map, you know, chart down there, big piece of paper with little dots everywhere. Here's areas that needed doctors, 1978. And then there was southwest Georgia where there was all these counties without a doctor. And I'd never heard of these counties. Well, if you really want to go in underserved community and make a difference, this is an underserved community. This is where you should be. Yeah, we move here. Albany. I say Albany, but I get corrected when I say it. Albany, but.

They say all Benny down here.

Okay.

Yeah, so no, absolutely.

So let's work on that.

And they call Dr. Hots Doc Hollywood.

Advisor Dr. Neil Schulman wrote a book about a town that basically captures a young doctor and it ended up becoming this movie Doc Hollywood based on me. Yeah, I was the real Doc Hollywood.

Your sentence will be 16 hours of community service served as resident doctor at Grady Memorial Hospital.

A lot of liberties in writing that book, but the basic bottom line was there were towns desperate to get a doctor.

Where did all these people come from?

Folks say there's a doctor on duty at the hospital. They come running. Any old doctor.

Send him in.

Was the truth? Without doctors coming to these rural and underserved areas. People are going to die, which is why I wanted to sign up for this program to do loan repayment and go somewhere where people need the most help. By the time I finished medical school, there was a website and Albany area popped up and I applied.

Albany, what was this country based on? Right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There's no pursuit of happiness if you're sick. It's part of that thing we hoped for 50 years ago. Can we really make this thing work? Can we develop a health care system that takes care of everybody?

Let's go down here and see what position she's in. Maybe we can, she says she didn't like hands and knees, but let's see if we can, because right now we're not moving towards a positive direction. If it stays high, I know they gave you the medicine earlier, I'm going to give you a little bit more medicine to bring it down, okay? They look like they were variable decelerations. If it's persistent for two hours, I'm likely going to have a discussion about C-section. I would like to give her a chance because nobody wants to have a C-section if they can avoid it.

It looks like she's pushing right here. Maybe she's been vomiting. So she was vomiting here and maybe she's vomiting again because she's hurting real bad.

I'm similar to my mom. I suffer from infertility, and when you struggle with fertility, sometimes it seems a little unfair. In my mind, I did everything the way it was supposed to be done. And then you hit this roadblock and marry like eight years and you can't have a kid. You start to say, what's wrong with me? And you start to internalize that. And you don't work, you know, and that's a hard place to be. Especially with what I do and you see a lot of things. A lot of things.

She's got good variability, but... Every time she contracts, she's getting these.

dips in her baby's heart rate. Hey, I have a patient in room eight who wants a C-section. I would say it's definitely an urgent section due to the tracing and she has no medication. She is pretty much she says she's done. So she's in room eight. All right, thank you. Here we go. OB has no middle ground. Anytime you lose a patient, it's a hard day. Somebody's family is incomplete. The pain doesn't go away. Even though you realize that you tried your best, it's still painful. My father passed away at 42 when I was 13 and my brother was six. He had a heart attack, so everything got turned upside down. Our family became incomplete. Try to do everything in your power to keep any family from going through that.

Right back. We're almost to the uterus. Let me know. Hey little person. Need to see we got right over there.

Saying down south, it says, your do so ought to match your say so, Dr. Fauvers. She's who we thought she was.

Mm-hmm.

It's nice to meet you.

We're glad to have her on the team. Things can happen. Baby could have died. But she was there. She was here.

My job is to come to work and have birthday parties all day long. And you get to take your beautiful baby home with you and you get to go home. That's always my goal. Healthy mom, healthy baby. And their lives are forever changed. Just like mine was tonight when my baby came, my life was forever changed. I had my first baby. I did idea and it worked and I'll have a little sweet pea. Her name is Oakland. She was born in good old Albany, Georgia. I gave birth at the hospital that I work at. My colleagues were there through the whole thing. I think they took more pictures to my family because they knew my journey. They were just excited to meet her as I was. We'll always have that moment. She's three months.

How old is she?

When I first moved to Albany, Georgia, I thought to myself, um, hmm, I would like to go back home. So like I become a part of this community now.

How are you? Nice to meet you.

Kenya is one of my patients and

I am.

we had an eventful delivery.

We did. It's okay.

It wasn't until I started having experiences here that I could see myself wanting to stay here to help this community. That boy.

He is such a big boy now. Can you believe it's been over a year?

I can't believe it.

You should have been at home.

So

Okay,

go ahead

so what's

make

up,

your nice? appointment.

I sure will.

I've been here almost five years. My service requirement was three years. So I finished my service requirement and I stayed. Yep. So now I live in Albany, Georgia. Albany. Because I don't want someone to have to live in New York City to be healthy. They should be able to live in Albany, Georgia to be healthy.

Home, art, happiness. You belong here, Ben Stone.

Doc Hollywood's based on me, but it's a lot of people. Because the reality is there's a lot of Doc Hollywoods. It means that you want to make a difference. You be a Doc Favors. To save a baby's life in Albany, Georgia, that's what it means to be a Doc Hollywood. If there's plenty of space, it's a big club we'd like to grow and make it bigger.

And here I am. This lady had a full schedule. She about to call me to work. she called she said oh my gosh my water broke i mean it's not the famous you you gotta go to the hospital you gotta go you can't kind of work she's i can't believe this my water water broke

it was a family thing it was almost a family in office family thing what's the baby's name

oh class