The best-laid plans of mice, men and medical students often go awry, as evidenced by the career path of M.K. Jenny Tibbs, MD, medical director of radiation oncology at Saint Francis Hospital.
Tibbs grew up in Memphis, the daughter of a mother who taught math and science and a father who was a general surgeon in the Mississippi Delta. As a teenager, Tibbs worked with her father and even scrubbed into surgery with him, and she could see that he loved what he did.
“He’s passed now,” she said, “and he always said when he got to heaven he didn’t have to come out of the OR … he could stay in the OR.”
Coming out of Hutchison School as valedictorian and National Merit Scholar, Tibbs attended Princeton and then Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, having decided to follow in her father’s footsteps. But the determination to be a surgeon was never rock solid, and an interest in radiation oncology slowly took hold.
First, she was influenced by what had happened earlier after her grandfather was diagnosed with a cancerous lymph node in his neck.
“I was in college at the time and he underwent radiation, and it was pretty grueling,” she said. “It’s a very difficult form of radiation, but he was completely cured. And so I think I had it in the back of my mind that this is an interesting field. It’s a good field – it saved my grandfather.”
When she was in medical school, Tibbs took a year off to go to New Zealand, where she encountered a number of people who were radiation oncologists or children of radiation oncologists.
“And so I thought, ‘Well, God and the universe are telling me something, and I need to take a look at this field.’”
The switch to radiation oncology was all but complete, and she moved on to Harvard Medical School and became chief resident at Massachusetts General Hospital. While she was in Boston, a mutual friend who also was in training was doing a rotation at Boston Children’s Hospital. There she met a young doctor, Thomas Merchant, who was doing his residency at Sloan-Kettering but also spending time on a fellowship at Boston Children’s.
The friend set up Tibbs and Merchant on a blind date, and they clicked. Merchant eventually moved on to Memphis, where he is now chair of the Radiation Oncology Department at St. Jude’s. During his first year in Memphis, he and Tibbs were married, and within a short time Tibbs accepted a job offer at Saint Francis.
“Once I left Memphis and explored a bit of the East Coast and had an opportunity to travel more,” she said, “I started to really appreciate the things that are here in Memphis. I can’t really say if I would have moved back if I hadn’t been engaged to Tom because there were offers in other places.
“But I can say that when I was offered a position at Saint Francis and Tom’s position was at St. Jude, and my mother was here, and then at that time my brother was moving back, literally all the puzzle pieces fell into place. I realized I could never orchestrate that myself, and this is what I’m supposed to do.”
Now, after nearly two decades at Saint Francis, Tibbs is delighted with the way things turned out, particularly with her specialty.
“I like so many things about it,” she said. “It’s a team effort, and we have a fantastic team here, a very seasoned team in terms of physics and therapy. Our field combines medicine, a little bit of surgery, some psychiatry, so it’s got a lot of aspects to it that you can wrap into one to try to take the best care of a patient.”
She enjoys helping patients at what she describes as a meaningful time in their lives, developing a patient-oncologist relationship that she says is “fairly intense, at least early on.”
When technological advances help improve patients’ outcomes, that’s all the better.
“One of the things I also like about radiation is that when new technology comes along, oftentimes we’re able to take advantage of it,” she said. “We have a CyberKnife at Saint Francis that is a dedicated linear accelerator that delivers stereotactic treatments. It’s very focused treatment with precise imaging.”
The imaging allows the doctors to track tumors as they move.
“We can track them very precisely and target them with a very high dose of radiation,” she said. “We’ve had it about 3½ years, and I still get excited when I get to treat patients with it because it’s so effective. I think we’ve treated between 500 and 600 patients over the last 3½ years with that particular machine.”
Tibbs, who has a special interest in prostate cancer and sarcoma, made it a point to express gratitude to the Hope Lodge, affording patients who come in from Arkansas, Mississippi and other parts of Tennessee a place to stay while they get treatment.
At home, the conversation between wife and husband sometimes turns to radiation oncology, but maybe not as much as one might expect.
“We will definitely bounce cases off of each other,” Tibbs said. “However, the kinds of tumors that children get and the kinds of tumors that adults get are very different and the treatments that they get are also a bit different. … But sometimes during the day I’ll get a call from him or I’ll call him. So if I have a nuanced question, he will provide a good sounding board for me.”
Tibbs and Merchant like to travel and expose their three daughters to other cultures, and they enjoy activities such as hiking, skiing and kayaking.
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