PROFESSIONAL ACCOMPLISHMENTS
Dr. Iazsmin Bauer Ventura is an Assistant Professor in the Section of Rheumatology whose clinical focus is on inflammatory myopathies and autoimmune related interstitial lung diseases. As part of UChicago Medicine’s multidisciplinary interstitial lung disease team, Dr. Ventura works with other specialty experts to diagnose, treat and manage interstitial lung diseases. Dr. Bauer Ventura is an expert in inflammatory myopathies (also called myositis), including dermatomyositis, antisynthetase syndrome, immune mediated necrotizing myopathies, inclusion body myositis, overlap myositis syndromes and polymyositis. She is the director of the Myositis Program at UChicago Medicine and a collaborator in numerous projects with well recognized international leaders in the field. In addition to her clinical practice, Dr. Ventura serves in several international research groups that aim to advance knowledge in the fields of interstitial lung diseases and myositis. She is also a dedicated clinical educator, teaching and advising medical students, residents and fellows, providing guidance as they move through their medical career.
WORK_LIFE BALANCE
I had been in a boat for a few days diving in the gelid waters of the Galapagos islands with my husband; when the fatidic question arrived, the one all couples in their 30’s without children get in a regular basis: “Are you thinking of having kids?”. This trip was indeed our last adventurous one before Miguel was born. Our dear baby boy came on April 25th ,2023 after a 10 month long marathon of mental and physical preparation: I made plans for my patients during my absence, meditated and exercised daily, read a big pile of books on natural delivery, breastfeeding, early human development….
Nothing could have really prepared me for the intensity of the waves that followed his birth. The joy of having a baby to call yours and seeing him smile, grow, look back at me with the most naïve eyes is something incomparable to any other experience. Alongside it, the grief that hits me every time I leave home and hear him cry from the elevator is real and it hurts, raw every single time. The cruelty of coming back to work after only 12 weeks of his birth made me cry for our sisters in this country who cannot even have 4 weeks of maternity leave; the exhaustion of playing catch with work before he wakes up and after he is asleep makes me wonder if I should quit Medicine altogether. I became more porous, angry when I heard that President Biden would not attend the COP28 Climate Conference, devastated at the images of children being killed in the Middle East. Even for a good swimmer, these last 7 months have been an exercise in staying afloat
in the crispiest sea I have been in.
At the moment, my balance act can be summarized as the occasional awareness that below the waves there is the sea, calm and untouched by the busy surface, the one in which there is just my breath and the vast blue that makes everything mesmerizingly small. In between these lapses of reality, I long every day to see the smile of my sweet little boy after rushing from a busy day in the hospital carrying a few bottles of pumped breastmilk under my arms. I dream of the day he will be swimming with me, hopefully embraced rather than swallowed by the waves that will inevitably come.