As a new Mayo Clinic resident, Dr. Malik Mays approaches OB-GYN with passion – Post Bulletin

ROCHESTER — When Dr. Malik Mays was in his third year of medical school at the University of Toledo in Ohio, he was ready to get through his required obstetrics and gynecology clinical rotation.

“I was very interested in general surgery, I was thinking maybe urology, maybe neurosurgery,” Mays said. “I remember starting my (OB-GYN) rotation, I was like, ‘Let me just get through it … and I’ll get into the things I really want to do.'”

But on his very first day shadowing physicians in a high-risk OB clinic, Mays discovered a new passion that led him to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, where he’s now a first-year OB-GYN resident.

“I found that I loved it,” Mays said. “I can do surgery and deliver babies on the same day? Sign me up.”

When it came time to narrow down his top choices for residency, the post-medical school training required for physicians, Mays was already familiar with Mayo Clinic. He attended Macalester College in St. Paul for his undergraduate studies, and before he started working at Mayo Clinic, Mays’ fiancée, Dureti Doto, was already working there as a clinical research coordinator.

“There was a lot of 10-hour drives back and forth from Ohio to Minnesota,” Mays said. “I would always come back to Mayo to study for my exams in medical school, and I was able to build rapport with some of the faculty here.”

His residency in Rochester began this summer, and over the next four years, Mays and the four other first-year OB-GYN residents will cycle through different sub-specialty areas within the field, which encompasses “the medical and surgical care of women’s health throughout the lifespan,” according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

“When he’s on a gynecologic surgical rotation, he’ll get there early — they always get there early,” said Dr. Vanessa Torbenson, an OB hospitalist and director of Mayo Clinic’s OB-GYN residency program. “They will round on patients, and then they will go into the operating room. And then they may be in the operating room all day, or they may see clinic patients in the afternoon.”

“I think one of the best parts about OB-GYN is there is no typical day,” Mays said.

Mays hasn’t decided what OB-GYN subspecialty he’ll pursue after residency — “Every time I think I know, I don’t know” — but he calls the labor and delivery unit “one of the best places in the hospital.”

“You can have three good days and three bad days and it’s not even 12 o’clock,” Mays said. “But in those critical moments of delivery, whether it’s Cesarean delivery or vaginal delivery, it’s just a very vulnerable space, a very vulnerable time, especially for our patients. So, they require the best, someone who has passion, who can listen to them and hear what’s going on.”

Empathizing with patients’ needs to be heard and their comfort levels with their providers are things Mays said he understands from his standpoint as a Black man. Per the Association of American Medical Colleges’ latest

Physician Specialty Data Report,

as of 2021, 10.7% of OB-GYNs working in the U.S. are Black. According to the Mayo Clinic College of Science and Medicine, Mays is one of just

a handful of Black men

matched into OB-GYN during the

national 2023 residency match.

“There are many things within the history of the medical community where Black patients feel as if we’re not heard,” Mays said. “Even as a patient myself, I get nervous when I go to the doctor at times.”

Maternal mortality — deaths occurring during pregnancy, delivery or up to 42 days after pregnancy ends —

has recently been on the rise in the U.S.,

and Black women are disproportionately more likely to die from a pregnancy-related issue than women of other races.

“I think from my experience in labor and delivery, especially in medical school, realizing that even though I don’t understand what it’s like to be a woman, but I do understand what it feels like to not be heard, to be misjudged, to be mistreated just because of what I look like,” Mays said. “I think that no matter what my patient looks like, no matter where they’re coming from, I make sure that they’re heard.”

OB-GYN is also a female-dominated medical specialty (60.5% of U.S. OB-GYNs are women), and sometimes patients have preferences for whether their OB-GYN is male or female. Mays said one of his mentors from medical school is a male OB-GYN, and he explained that providing patient-centered care is key.

“At the end of the day, it’s about patient safety, patients feeling like they’re safe with their provider,” Mays said. “It’s not about me, it’s not about how I feel. It’s about how the patients feel.”

“There’s enough experience to go around so that our residents and our fellows or trainees who are male are able to get the experience that they need,” Torbenson added. “And also our patients are able to get what they need.”

As Mays adjusts to life as a medical resident in Rochester, he said he’s been able to connect with his fellow first-year residents and other OB-GYN residents in their second and third years of the program.

“(One day), after a shift in the OB, I just went over to one of my co-interns’ house and we had dinner with their partner and one of my other co-interns and their partner, so it’s just finding time to do things like that,” Mays said. “It’s really nice for overall wellness and just also remember you have a life outside of the hospital.”

Over the past few months, Mays has also been able to explore the city a little more with Doto, he said.

“We love to go brunching — it’s a verb — so we just try as many different brunch places as we can, go into the local coffee shops,” Mays said. “I drink more coffee than I probably should, but I love it so much.

“I’m honestly living the dream that I’ve had for a very long time, being the first physician in my family,” Mays continued. “It’s really special to be here, of all places.”