When you ask a fourth-year medical student about navigating the twists and turns of their final year of school, they might mention residency interviews, their clinical rotations, anxious nerves about the upcoming match day and perhaps some sleepless nights along the way.
For School of Medicine Columbia students Gannett and Caroline Loftus, sleepless nights are also joined by diaper changes, feeding schedules and “tummy time”, as the couple welcomed their first child just before Christmas. It was part of an eventful month of December for them, as just a week earlier, Caroline had her military match with Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas for an OB-GYN residency.
“It was a lot of emotions all at once,” Caroline said, adding that her sister also had a baby shortly after her.
Other than getting married, we compressed most major life events into six months. We’re going to move across the country, match into a residency, have a baby, both of us graduate medical school, pin captain into the Air Force. Med school has never been easy, so we’re used to taking things one day at a time. A lot of people talk about work life balance, we talk about work life integration. Having our baby, obviously we’re going to change things, but we’re also excited to bring him along for this ride.
And what a ride it has been for the Loftus parents, who first met in their junior year of undergrad at Bob Jones University in Greenville, saying that their friendship grew into love during a shared class in, appropriately enough, organic chemistry. Caroline and Gannett were married a year and a half later and joined the School of Medicine Columbia two years after that.
Currently, they are hitting the home stretch of their med school careers, working hands-on at the Florence Regional Campus. While Caroline hopes her upcoming OB-GYN residency at Nellis can lead to a lasting career in the field, Gannett is pursuing general surgery and matched across town from Caroline on the other side of the Vegas Strip with Valley Health System in Nevada on Match Day. Both aspire to remain out west for their careers closer to home – Caroline hails from Colorado, Gannett from Wyoming – and help underserved communities they grew up around.
“Growing up, I was a Shriner’s Children’s Hospital patient and I had to drive four hours one way just to get to my appointments as a kid. I guess there was always a part of me thinking ‘I wish there was something I could do to fix this.’”
As he finishes his time at the School of Medicine, he feels better prepared to help tackle those rural healthcare disparities.
“One of the things I care about most is how we make surgical care more accessible in rural areas,” he said. “Surgery isn’t a lone wolf operation, there are so many other pieces that have to fall into place.”
He referenced his hometown in Wyoming, which recently built a hospital but didn’t have the capabilities to add on an operating room to the facility.
“Rural communities want care, but because they don’t have it, they have no idea what to do to facilitate it.”
Caroline’s medical career would also be influenced by childhood experiences. As a child, she always had a first aid kit and asked for upgraded gear as birthday gifts, but the calling became personal in high school when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her mother recovered and remains cancer-free, but the experience reshaped her understanding of medicine’s impact.
“It solidified what medicine is and can do,” she said.
Another defining moment came during a mission trip to Nepal as a teenager. Traveling along the Annapurna trail, she met a village pastor whose broken arm had never healed correctly because he lacked access to proper medical care. An American doctor was able to reset it, allowing him to work again and provide for his family.
“That was my ‘a-ha’ moment,” Caroline said. “If I was going into medicine, I wanted to be able to go anywhere in the world, even a remote mountain village, and have the training to take care of someone there.”
She later worked as a certified nursing assistant, where she discovered a deep love for patient care and while she decided nursing was not her path, the experience reinforced her desire to pursue medical school.
Now, as this chapter of their lives moves closer to an end and a new one begins, the mentality remains the same. They are building a family at the same time they are building their careers, and they see no contradiction in doing both.
“We've been blessed with opportunities to have it all right now, and that's awesome, and who knows how that could change in the future,” Caroline said. “Prioritizing our marriage and our family has been the way that we've kind of gone through life so far and it's worked out for us.”