Five years, four specialties, and over a thousand patients who taught me what medicine is really about.
Besh yil, to'rt mutaxassislik va mingdan ortiq bemor — meni tibbiyot nima ekanligini o'rgatdi.
Three months after graduating from Sophie Davis, I started my first job at Northwell Health in the neurology department on Long Island. I was 25, had a brand-new license, and was responsible for patients with epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, movement disorders, and conditions I'd only read about in textbooks. The learning curve was vertical.
Neurology taught me diagnostic precision. Every patient was a puzzle — the subtle asymmetry in a gait, the pattern of a headache, the timing of a seizure. I learned to trust the physical exam before the imaging. I ran Botox injection clinics, coordinated EMG and nerve conduction studies, and at one point took full responsibility for the outpatient neurosurgery clinic when a colleague went on extended leave.
While working neurology, I also started at Brighton Medical Care in Brooklyn — a small primary care practice serving Russian- and Uzbek-speaking immigrant families. This is where my clinical identity really took shape. I managed a panel of over 300 patients with hypertension, diabetes, hyperlipidemia, and the kind of chronic disease burden that comes from delayed access to care.
These were my people — literally. I spoke their language. I understood why they were afraid of certain medications, why they didn't trust the system, why they showed up only when things were bad. I became the provider I wished my family had when we first arrived.
In 2022 I moved to Dallas and started working in child and adolescent psychiatry. This was the hardest clinical environment I'd been in — not because of the science, but because of the stakes. Managing ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, anxiety, and depression in children requires a patience and emotional awareness that no rotation can fully prepare you for. I learned to listen differently. To sit with silence.
Around the same time, I started working with Mindbloom — a telehealth platform providing ketamine-assisted treatment for treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, and PTSD. This was the frontier of psychiatry: novel psychedelic-assisted therapy delivered remotely. I managed patient screening, dosing protocols, integration sessions, and longitudinal follow-up. The patients who came to Mindbloom had often tried everything else. Many improved in ways that conventional treatment hadn't achieved. It changed how I think about treatment-resistant illness.
By the time I left clinical PA practice to enter medical school in 2023, I had worked across neurology, primary care, child psychiatry, telehealth psychiatry, and public health assessments. I had managed well over a thousand patients. I had precepted 50+ PA and NP students.
But the most important thing those five years gave me wasn't clinical skill — it was clinical judgment. The ability to know when something is off before you can name it. The instinct to slow down when everyone else is speeding up. The understanding that the best diagnosis is often the one the patient already told you, if you were listening carefully enough.
Sophie Devisni tugatganimdan uch oy o'tib, Long-Aylendda Northwell Healthda nevrologiya bo'limida ish boshladim. 25 yoshda edim, yangi litsenziyam bor edi va epilepsiya, skleroz multiplex va boshqa kasalliklar bilan og'rigan bemorlar uchun javobgar edim.
Nevrologiya menga diagnostik aniqlikni o'rgatdi. Har bir bemor jumboq edi — yurishning nozik assimetriyasi, bosh og'rig'ining tartibi, tutqanoqning vaqti.
Brighton Medical Careda rus va o'zbek tilida so'zlashadigan muhojir oilalarga xizmat qildim. 300 dan ortiq bemorni boshqardim. Bu mening klinik identitetim shakllangan joy edi.
Shu bilan birga Mindbloomda ishladim — ketamin yordamida depressiya, xavotir va PTSD davolovchi teletibbiyot platformasi. Bu psixiatriyaning chegarasi edi.