I Just Wasn’t Comfortable

Laurie Donohue, MD, a longstanding colleague of mine, died October 24, 2024. We were a year apart in family medicine residency, both practicing at Brown Square Health Center, an FQHC (Federally Qualified Health Center) in Rochester, New York. We worked together for years, maintaining adjacent clinical practices. For several years we shared an office and often bounced clinical situations off each other, or shared challenges and support. Both of us had dedicated patient panels, and we seldom saw each other’s patients. I loved working with Laurie; her calm and steady presence balanced me in so many ways.

We were professionally close, and we also knew each other’s families. When I married my husband Jeff, Laurie came to our wedding. And I knew Maureen, Laurie’s partner of many years, whom she had married after same sex marriage was legalized in New York.

In addition to our shared practices, we both served on the family medicine residency leadership team in our academic health center. In the mid-2000’s, Laurie and I began training our residents to practice “Mindfulness in Medicine.” The curriculum used Appreciative Inquiry, which took the form of a topical paired sharing exercise based on the workshop topic.

During one residency training session, when the residents were engaged in paired sharing, Laurie and I started doing some sharing of our own. She told me about a patient of mine who she’d recently seen after the patient transferred care to her. She’d asked the patient, “Is there something that made you switch to me instead of continuing to see Dr. Fogarty?”

The patient looked uncomfortable, squirming, and finally responded, “Well . . . . I just wasn’t comfortable seeing a lesbian doctor.”

I’ll always remember our shared belly laugh!

Colleen T. Fogarty
Rochester, New York