Dr. Wanakee Carr’s journey to becoming a doctor 

As told to Macey Shofroth | Photo by Duane Tinkey | Illustration by Kate Meyer

Dr. Wanakee Carr was born and raised in Des Moines. Now, she serves her community as the only Black female practicing OB/GYN doctor in Central Iowa. 

Carr attended the University of Iowa for both her undergraduate degree and medical school. She completed her residency at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City. 

She practiced for 3 1/2 years in the Quad Cities before moving back to Des Moines to join the Iowa Clinic OB/GYN team in 2022. Carr has dedicated her life to providing compassionate care to her patients, and that’s evidenced by the number of women who try to get in to see her. But her road to becoming a doctor was complicated by a loved one’s illness at home. 

Carr spoke with Fearless about navigating grief while pursuing her dreams and what it means to provide care for women in some of the most vulnerable times of their lives. 

The following story has been formatted to be entirely in her words, and has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

When I was in college and medical school, my mother was quite ill. 

She had a rare autoimmune disorder called primary sclerosis cholangitis. So starting my senior year of high school, she was pretty ill. She was in the worst of it when I was in medical school. It was really hard watching my mom deteriorate while I was in school at the same time, trying to complete my studies but also feeling guilty that I wasn’t home in Des Moines helping care for her. I was dealing with being the oldest child and trying to deal with all of the emotions that come with having a family member who is very ill.

My mother got put on the transplant list, thankfully, due to her liver doctor who was a great advocate for her. She wasn’t meeting all these criteria, but it was very clear that this is what she needed to survive. This was during my second year of medical school, which is a very heavy, rigorous, course-intensive time in your medical education. It was just too much to be having that happen at home as well as being in school full time, where you’re supposed to be head-in-the-books. You’re studying from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep. 

So I had to make a difficult decision for my mental health. I had to decide: Am I going to continue school full time and potentially not do well in my studies because my mental health isn’t great? Or would I take a little bit of time to focus on my mental health and make sure that I can achieve my goals?

I felt like, at the time, and I imagine they still are, the University of Iowa was really good about making sure that their medical students’ mental health was good. So if you sought out resources, they were willing to help you to make sure you could get through your coursework, but also that your mental health was cared for. They have counselors that are on site that double as academic advisers. So if you went in there, you didn’t feel judged, and your peers didn’t necessarily know why you were going in there. Was it to check out a book? Was it to have academic counseling or mental health counseling? 

With their support, I decided I wanted to drop down to part time during my second year, knowing that sometimes when you’re applying for residencies, that could be looked on poorly because they don’t know the situation. So that was a huge leap of faith for me and just trying to think about if this was what was best for me and my family at this time. But I still wanted to make sure that I was achieving my goal of becoming a physician. I took that time, dropped some classes, but also worked while dealing with this in school and trying to make sure I was financially secure. It was also a very financially strenuous time in my family as well. 

At the end of that semester, when I went back to school full time, my mom got a liver transplant. She passed kind of fairly suddenly during finals week of medical school. So then I had to come home and do funeral stuff over the holiday. Then I had to come back early during Christmas break to complete all of my finals. I had to buckle down, focus and unfortunately compartmentalize my mother’s passing to get schoolwork done. I knew that this was important for me and that’s what she would have wanted.

Some people would have just quit and said, “Well, it is what it is.” But I felt like my mother going through what she did also gave me the courage to be like, “You have to complete this, and you have to do this, and you need to buckle down to pass this coursework so that you can move on.” To me, that’s being fearless. It was one of the harder things in my life, the combination of it all. It just piled on. 

My close friend group knew what was going on. But some people just thought, “Oh, you’re failing coursework.” Even when I interviewed for residencies, you could tell people didn’t read my personal statement because they didn’t know why and they thought I failed or was going to fail a course and that’s why I dropped, not because my mother was going through a prolonged health journey. 

I had classmates who’d say, “Oh, you probably just got in here from a quota.” But I would have other friends who were hearing these conversations, who had more privilege in that situation, say, “No, she did it. She had better scores than me” or “She did this” or “She had these publications. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Unfortunately, there is a perception, especially growing over these last 15 years, that just because someone is a minority that they got there just based on their race or sexual orientation. Nobody is getting positions that they do not deserve. Half the time, for us who are in marginalized communities, we had to work twice as hard to actually have more credentials to achieve the same thing that someone else has in a different circumstance.

I knew that I wanted to be a physician from the time of elementary school. That was something that I had always aspired to be. My mom was one of my number one cheerleaders. I knew she would have wanted me to continue on this course to be where I am today. 

My parents told me I needed to keep doing what I was doing with my studies. But I always felt like I should be the one here. I’ll be 40 next year and my youngest brother is now 26, so he was quite young living in the home at the time. My two sisters were in undergrad. Thankfully we have a great support system here in Des Moines, our extended family and church community, and it was very much a community effort to help my family. But I definitely had that pull. Even today, my brother tells me, “You don’t have to be nobody’s mom.” But that’s the role that I am in, and I accept that and I’m OK with it. Oldest sisters have that maternal instinct.

I thought going into med school that I wanted to do orthopedics. I love sports and sports medicine. Then quickly I realized, oh, this isn’t clicking, this isn’t how my brain works. I kind of hopped around between different specialities. With my mom’s condition, I thought about gastrointestinal for a long time, then I realized I did not want to be an internal medicine physician. I knew I needed to do procedures. I thought about anesthesia for a little bit, but then I realized I wanted to do what was happening on the other side of the anesthesia curtain, which is be a surgeon. 

It really came down to OB/GYN and general surgery. I chose OB/GYN because I love that continuity of care. I get to see my patients from puberty onto menopause and beyond, take care of them at different aspects of their life and then doing preventative care or helping them through their menopausal journey. 

I love that I have patients where I deliver two or three of their children and we establish a relationship and rapport with people that continues over a long period of time. That, to me, is really rewarding that I get to see people through those times. Being an OB/GYN, especially the obstetrics side of things, it’s a very vulnerable time in someone’s life, so for them to trust you, that’s huge. Everything’s not going to be perfect all the time, but I just want to make sure that people feel safe. Being able to hopefully be a safe place for someone is huge to me. 

People don’t realize the vulnerability that comes with seeing a gynecologist. There are a lot of things that make pelvic exams very hard for a lot of people, and I want to make sure that people feel comfortable when they’re with me in that space. 

Studies on Black maternal healthcare were becoming well known as I was finishing residency in the late 2010s and early 2020s. It was becoming very well known that there are such huge health disparities between Black women and other birthing mothers, and so I feel like moving back to Iowa, knowing that we are not very large in the population in terms of Black individuals, I knew that I was going to serve a specific role as a Black woman practicing OB/GYN whether I wanted to or not. I have that responsibility to speak up on behalf of people through pre-pregnancy counseling, pregnancy, postpartum and make sure they know about the health disparities and that there’s someone who’s advocating for them and they have a resource to go to for certain things.

I think I realized the gravity of it, but not to the point where I thought that people would gravitate to me so much. Some people put pressure on me, but people also try to give me grace. I wish I wasn’t the only Black woman OB/GYN in Central Iowa, but that speaks to the disparities in getting folks from high school to college to med school through residency, which is a huge thing. Then on the other side is a practicing physician who actually wants to stay in a community. There are a lot of roadblocks and barriers that, whether they be overt or subtle, stop people along that track. I grew up with many people who thought they were going to become a physician. A lot of them are still in the healthcare field, but they are not practicing medicine for various reasons. Systemic racism, roadblocks or being told they weren’t good enough. 

I always say that just because I am a Black physician, I may not be the OB/GYN for you. I tell people you have to find your fit for your physician and who you feel most comfortable with. Feel free to ask questions and make sure that your questions are answered. If you come to me and you don’t think that we mesh, that’s OK. I want you to feel safe in whatever space that you’re seeking care.