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Jennifer Holt
Hello, I am Jennifer Holt. I was born in Mesa Arizona in
1968. In those days we were told to go play outside, and not to come home until
the streetlights came on. I lived on a street with mostly boys; we had dirt clod
fights, collected scorpions and black widows, and had contests to see who could
stand barefoot on the summer asphalt the longest. I aspired to be a forensics
medical examiner like Quincy. My father took a United States Military contract job as chief of investigations on Kwajalein, a missile test site in the Marshall Islands my 6th and 7th grade year. The dry dusty playground of the southwest was replaced by the steamy equatorial jungle and the remnants of the pacific campaign of World War II. I hid out in bunkers along the airstrip, snorkeled above a sunken Japanese bomber, and collected bullets lodged in the coral.
We returned to the States and I attended Moon Valley HS in Phoenix. I ran cross country, swam, was a member of the National Honor Society, and played trumpet in the marching band. I graduated in 1986. I headed north to Flagstaff to attend Northern Arizona University and study physical therapy and swim competitively. I used all my savings for tuition that 1st semester, so I lived in my VW Bug until I got a life guarding job at the University pool. In the summer I worked on a fishing boat in Alaska.
I finished my undergraduate degree at Portland State University and worked in a sports medicine clinic for the next 10 years. With the world about to end in Y2K, I heard the call to become a physician. I went back to PSU to collect some required pre med classes. I went on a 7 day vision quest in Death Valley without food or shelter to make sure I was worthy of Medicine. I was considered a non-traditional student because I was 35 when I entered Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in Vallejo California in 2003. The real non-traditional aspect of my path to medicine really was the way I overcame my severe vaso-vagal response to blood and trauma that had afflicted me all my life. I was trained by a Naturopathic Physician to control my energy. I became personally aware of how much more our patients are made of than their physical bodies.
During medical school I spent time in India working with an orthopedic surgeon, an ob gyn, and infectious disease doctors at a leprosy hospital. This is how I became interested in rural medicine.
I graduated from Touro in 2007 and started a general surgery residency in York PA. After two years surgical training I began to see that I could be more useful and happy as a family practice physician. I joined AFP in June of 2010 as a 1 3/4 year resident.
When not at the hospital or clinic, you will probably find me hiking and camping, drawing, playing the violin, or fixing something. |
