THE ROAD LESS TRAVELLED….THE DR. PAT CRAWLEY STORY
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Pat Crawley MD sat down to visit with Newsbeat on December 9th, 2014 and recapped her amazing journey from mathematics’ PhD candidate to becoming a physician. She joined Cardiovascular Consultants of Kansas in September, 2014 as an interventional cardiologist.
Dr. Crawley was born in Morehead, Minnesota and moved to Derby, Kansas at the beginning of her freshman year of high school. After high school, she didn’t immediately enroll in college but later matriculated though and graduated from Wichita State University with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, followed up by a master’s degree in mathematics. While commencing her PhD program at Wichita State, she decided that math was no longer her passion and she further realized that “All my life, actually since age five, I really wanted to be a doctor like Marcus Welby MD (a compassionate family practice physician on national TV).”
In order to obtain experience in the field of medicine, Dr. Crawley took emergency medical courses in Winfield, Kansas, became a licensed EMT and entered the Wichita State University, Physician Assistant’s program in 1995 and graduated in 1997. During her last clinical rotation in the Physician Assistant’s program she rotated with Dr. Richard A. Steckley, practicing cardiologist in Wichita, and joined Cardiovascular Consultants of Kansas upon graduation. Between 1997 and 2003 the burning desire to become a physician only increased and in the fall of 2003, Physician Assistant Crawley became a first year medical student at the University of Kansas, School of Medicine, Kansas City. Upon graduation from medical school, Dr. Crawley pursued her graduate training in internal medicine at the University of Kansas, School of Medicine in Wichita. During her medical school years and during her internal medicine training, Dr. Crawley continued to work with Cardiovascular Consultants of Kansas each and every weekend and frequently on Thursday evenings. At the time, Dr. Greg Duick commented, “I don’t know how she does it!”
After her internal medicine residency, she pursued a three year cardiology fellowship program at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Tennessee followed by a one year interventional cardiovascular fellowship at State University of New York (SUNY) in Brooklyn, New York. “I am glad to be done and back with my old group…which I really never left,” said Dr. Crawley. Her colleagues, nurses and friends are also glad that she chose to return to Wichita.
Her special areas of expertise include consultative cardiology, women’s health and interventional cardiology.