A Family Legacy at UC San Francisco

Last September, a group of alumni gathered for a mini reunion in the Kalmanovitz Library on the UC San Francisco campus. It was unusual in that the alumni spanned all four UC San Francisco schools. It was extraordinary in that all of the alumni were from one extended family.

Carolyn Lee (née Chan), who received her nursing degree from the School of Nursing in 1978 and went on to complete her master’s in the adult nurse practitioner program in 1998, recently reflected on her family’s unusual commitment to the health care profession.

It began with Lee’s father, Gaing W. Chan, a physician in Sacramento who got his medical degree from UC San Francisco School of Medicine in 1952.

“My dad was always really proud of his profession and the education he got at UCSF,” she says. “When he talked to the younger ones in the family, he’d ask them what they were interested in, and if they didn’t know, he’d say, ‘You know, medicine and nursing are good professions.’”

Despite that early gentle nudging, Lee wasn’t thinking about health care or nursing when she went to UC Berkeley for her undergraduate studies. She got a degree in biology, intending to become a teacher, but two things coalesced to change her mind: the mass layoffs of public school teachers that occurred in the early 1970s in California, and a lecture Lee attended given by one of the instructors who was starting the Advanced Practice Public Health Nursing program at UC San Francisco School of Nursing. “She talked about how much of nursing involved patient teaching, going into homes and clinics in the community, and that inspired me to look into it,” says Lee.

A Peripatetic Nursing Career

Carolyn Lee with Dean David Vlahov A challenging and varied career followed. A few years in the intensive care unit at Mercy General Hospital in Sacramento was educational and exciting, but when an opportunity to switch to outpatient surgery (and more daytime hours) arose, she took it, working largely in the operating and recovery rooms. After more than a decade, Lee decided to pursue a nurse practitioner certificate. “I wanted to do more in surgery and have more interaction with patients,” she says. She went back to the School with the support of her husband, dentist and fellow UC San Francisco alum Gordon Lee, who took on more of the responsibility for parenting their two young sons while Lee lived part of the week in San Francisco with her cousin Gayle and her husband, William Chan (an alumnus of UC San Francisco School of Dentistry), and commuted home midweek. “I did a lot of my clinical rotations along the Interstate 80 corridor between San Francisco and Sacramento,” she says.

When she finished her master’s in 1998, Mercy General Hospital was putting together a team to expand their hospitalist program, which had started a year or two earlier, and Lee was hired to oversee the subacute care units. “They wanted to increase efficiency and were looking at ways to better utilize the physicians and get the patients discharged home sooner.” Lee did “a little bit of everything,” from bedside care to helping the nursing staff cope with the changes.

After five years, she was ready for a change, and took a course at UCLA in first-assisting in the operating room. “I found I liked to do things with my hands,” she says.

After spending three years working in the operating room at Kaiser Sacramento, Lee did some additional training with local orthopedic and plastic surgeons, and eventually struck out on her own, working for surgeons’ practices on call, maintaining her own privileges as an independent allied health professional at the hospital and maintaining her own billing and insurance. A few years later, looking for steadier work, Lee was hired by UC Davis Medical Center as a nurse practitioner for their plastic and reconstructive surgery department, where she works today, rounding on patients in hospital, seeing patients in clinic and running the preoperative clinic. She also assists the medical residents with recruiting patients for their research studies and helps them with the internal review board process.

Is Health Care in the Genes?

Lee was part of a generation in her family that seemed to veer toward health care and UCSF. Her brother, Martin, got his DDS from the School of Dentistry, and an extended group of cousins and second cousins on both her mother’s and her father’s sides of the family are UCSF graduates from the schools of medicine, nursing and pharmacy. “I hadn’t realized,” Lee says of the recent reunion, “how we were all interconnected and how much UCSF has been a major part of both families, both sides.”

Perhaps most importantly, Lee met her husband at a School of Dentistry fraternity party that her cousin (also a nursing student) convinced Lee to attend. Because they were students in challenging academic programs, their courtship naturally included a lot of studying. “He gave me a ride to the library in the evenings,” Lee says.

And the health care legacy continues with Lee’s sons, one of whom is in an osteopathic medical program, while the other has decided to change careers from engineering to dentistry and is currently applying to dental schools.

“It’s probably because they’ve been surrounded by it,” Lee says. “It’s a good profession, and you’re giving back to people.”