BySofia Sokolove in 40 Acres, May | June 2020 on May 1, 2020 at 12:51 pm |

Eight years ago, Travis County residents had a decision to make: did they want a medical school badly enough they were willing to pay higher property taxes to fund it? Brooke Wagner did. An East Austin resident since 2007, Wagner was an ardent supporter of Central Health Proposition 1the 2012 tax increase that, if approved, would generate the final chunk of revenue needed to give the city an improved health care system based around a teaching hospital. Please vote for Prop 1, she asked family, friends, neighbors, and anyone else who would listen. We need a medical school here. And I want to go there.

That last part was more of a daydream. Wagner hadnt been in a classroom in nearly two decades, and the youngest of her three children, her daughter, Elaia, was barely two years old. It was just one of those things you say, Wagner says when we meet for coffee in February. Kind of like, I want to be in the Super Bowl.

But sometimes we speak things into existence. On Nov. 6, 2012, in a historic move, 54 percent of Austin residents agreed with Wagner, voting to raise their own taxes for a medical school. This summer, Dell Med will graduate its inaugural class and Wagner, 43, will be one of 49 new Longhorn MDs.

Wagner grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, before heading off at 18 to Wofford College, a tiny liberal arts school in South Carolina. While double majoring in biology and Spanish, she realized she wasnt so sure about pursuing medicine. As we go through school, she says, we keep becoming the people that were going to be. Undergrad made Wagner want to know herself better, and that felt like a challenge within the confines of academia. She was exhausted by grades, and tired of performing for other people. Also, she was in love. The summer before her senior year, Wagner married her high school sweetheart, Taylor.

By 21 and 19, respectively, Brooke and Taylor had their first son, Corin. A year later, they moved to Austin for Taylors job at a tech startup. They had a second son, Ari, in 2002. When she found Corin reading Civil War history books at the age of four, she decided to home-school her kids.

That began the next 20 years of what she calls her weird path of doing very alternativethings. She taught herself how to build houses and bought houses to flip. She built a shipping container pool. When she moved to East Austin, she put her Spanish to use as an advocate for her non-English speaking neighbors, placing and translating calls to hospitals and insurance companies on their behalf, and volunteered as a medical interpreter in an official capacity on mission trips to Guatemala and Mexico. In 2011, she and Taylor followed through on a promise they made to each other on one of their first dates and adopted a child, taking the boys on a week-long trip to Ethiopia to pick up their new sister Elaia.

Throughout it all, though, Wagner says she kept her childhood dream of becoming a physician. After a moment of clarity on a 2014 trip with her mother and Elaia to Connecticut, she called Taylor and told him she was thinking about applying to Dell Med. Well, yeah, he responded.

Wagner used to think it was her attention to detail that would make her a great doctor. Now she thinks about medicine differently. I guess you check some boxes, she says, but really youre dealing with people, and people are infinitely interesting. The challenges that they face are infinitely variable, and the privilege of being allowed into someones world as a physician is incredible. There isnt a box to check on that.

It is a perspective she wouldnt have come to without years of real-world experience. And it is one that aligns with Dell Med, whose overarching mission since its conception has been about rethinking and transforming health care to be more holistic, with a unique focus on its surrounding community.

Wagner still remembers the gigantic syllabi and textbooks friends in other medical schools would lug around, trying to commit all of it to memory. In her four years at Dell Med, Wagner and her classmates have never been handed a textbook. Instead, she says, they are sent off to do their own research on the topics they are learning, devouring journals and news articles, and gathering real-world experience. They delve into the human side before exploring how economic realities might influence whatever condition it is they are studying, then explore sociological circumstances, and so on.

On the day we meet, Wagner comes straight from the Travis County Courthouse. She has spent a lot of time there lately, in addition to time at crisis respite centers and the Travis County and Williamson County jails. Wagner is taking the month to learn everything she can about integral carethe mental health component to community careto gain a big picture idea of the circumstances her future patients might be coming from, or where she can send them if they need help. Her work can be deflating, but she remains optimistic. Everything Ive learned about the system just goes into the hopper of things I understand, she says. Into my toolbox.

On March 20, Match Day, Wagner matched to the only place she applied: the Internal Medicine residency at Dell Med. She will spend the next three years working in the hospital and at the VA as an internist under the supervision of the internal medicine faculty, and hopes to use the research component of her residency to work on innovating at-home care for veterans served at the VA. And when shes finished? Id love to walk out my door and practice medicine in East Austin, she says. For the last two years, Wagners mentor has been Travis Countys Medical Societys 2019 Physician of the Year Guadalupe Zamora, whose practice is five blocks from Wagners house. Her dream is to have her own practice like Zamora.

She wants to co-manage health with patients, instead of prescribing them what she thinks they need without asking plenty of questions. She wants patients to have her cell phone number, and to feel comfortable calling her to ask if they need to go to the emergency room. She vows to keep going to her usual H-E-B, even if her patients stop her in the aisles to ask questions. I think its OK for my life to bleed all together, she says. Im not saying I want to work all the time. But Im going to be a human who is a doctor. Not a doctor for a group of people I would never see in any other context.

Above all, Wagner just wants to be a great physician. She doesnt want her patients to think of her as being smart in a vacuumshe wants them to think she can do a good job taking care of them. People need a partner in their doctor, Wagner says. One of my main jobs is to say, You can be stressed, and were going to work on this together.

Photograph by Summer Miles

The rest is here:
This Austinite Voted Dell Med into ExistenceNow She's One of the School's First Graduates - The Alcalde