I was a newspaper journalist for 40 years in Chicago, Washington, D.C. and Detroit, Michigan – my hometown – the last 22 years spent as a medical writer. I was one of 22 senior staffers offered buyouts in 2012 and retired several years before I had planned.
My encore is writing women’s health books in an engaging, informative way. The social issue I want to tackle is the gender gap in medicine and how that affects women’s health care, particularly in male-dominated fields like surgery and cardiology.
I had never written a book, so I spent time researching how to get published, finding an agent and on contractual issues. I bring passion, in particular, to the topic of breast cancer, a subject I’ve written about for two decades.
I became convinced of the need for a book, written in a comforting but informative way, when a friend told me that, two years after a double mastectomy, she was still going to the plastic surgeon for work to correct the problems she encountered. Many women don’t know that a federal law guarantees them reconstruction coverage after a mastectomy. No one ever told them.
My book is entitled Eyes Wide Open: Women’s Stories about Breast Reconstruction. I hope Eyes Wide Open also becomes the name of a nonprofit or company that writes helpful books on women’s health topics and that brings voices of women to national medical meetings dominated by men. I hope to live to see the day when women no longer say, “I didn’t know that,” about important topics like cancer and heart disease.
Today, I have knowledge, patience and insight about issues that I never had as a younger person and hope there is a way for me and other older workers to contribute. My advice to other encore seekers is to follow what you love most in life to a new opportunity to help others.