Rajee Hari:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Protean Pulse, a health care podcast from ProteanMed.
I’m Rajee Hari, President and CEO of ProteanMed, a health care staffing and recruiting solution provider based out of the Woodlands, Texas.
I have a beautiful guest today. Her name is Doctor. Keerthana Sankar.
She is a first year pulmonary and critical care fellow at Cedar Sinai Medical Center in LA, California.
The interesting aspect about Dr. Sankar, is that she is also a very successful Indian classical musician, who performs both vocal and on violin internationally.
What we love about Sankar is her passion for anything she pursues in life.
She is extremely proficient in her academic achievements and also in her co curricular activities, and there is no compromise.
And she gives nothing but her absolute best I’m excited to welcome her to ProteanPulse.
Welcome to Protean Pulse, Dr.Sankar.

Dr. Keerthana Sankar:
Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for that wonderful introduction.

Rajee Hari:
I have seen your journey in the past ten years, I would say.
And it’s been nothing but heartwarming and very inspiring to say the least.
So tell me a little bit about your journey, what you have done and how you came into the medical field.

Dr. Keerthana Sankar:
Yeah. Absolutely. So becoming a doctor was something that was on my mind since probably childhood, you know, the age of five or six.
And I think a lot of that really came from looking at my older derek Kalama, and she already was interested from the age of ten or eleven.
So being the younger sister, you know, I just wanted to do everything my older sister was doing.
You know, nobody else in the family was interested in medicine. I kind of latched on through my sister.
And that was just the beginning childhood phase.
So I think as I progressed through school, high school, college, I really found myself enjoying the sciences gravitated towards biology, chemistry, learning physiology, learning anatomy, and those are the classes that I happen to be good at.
I would say what really triggered my entrance into medicine was an experience that I had in high school where I was volunteering with cancer patients.
And that was really when I saw the patient care aspect of medicine, not just the academic side.
So I was able to interact with patients, their families, and really kind of understand what it means to be with people when they’re so vulnerable.
And that’s what really kind of helped my emotional side get invested in medicine.
And at that time, that was really focused on cancer research because I had sort of thought I wanna go psychology.
That was my initial thought after working with these cancer patients.
I continued that same path in medical school thinking that I was gonna be an oncologist.
And it wasn’t until residency where I really got enveloped in the intensive care unit scene.
And realize that I absolutely love that environment.
And I kind of made the transition from wanting to be an oncologist to wanting to be an intensivist in a pulmonary and critical care specialist.
So that’s kind of what led me to starting fellowship this summer.

Rajee Hari:
Very nice. That’s inspiring how you came from oncology into pulmonary. So what was your undergrad then?

Dr. Keerthana Sankar:
So in undergrad, I studied neuroscience as my major, and I actually did a minor in moral and political philosophy.
And the reason for that was because I was really interested in how the brain worked from a scientific aspect, hence the neuroscience major.
But then I kind of wanted to understand how the mind works, you know, practically and how the mind thinks and how the mind approaches problems.
And I thought philosophy would be the best way to kind of compliment the sciences.
And it kind of parallels this overall picture in my life of kind of doing arts along with science.
So the parallel of kind of studying like a very hard science major with this kind of philosophy, kind of more artistic, kind of more not as rigorous in the scientific aspects.
I thought they complimented each other really well.

Rajee Hari:
That’s true. I mean, it it also gives you a different feel for the sciences.
While coming from the philosophical side. That’s very interesting to know.
What exactly is the role of a pulmonary and critical care physician And what do you think are the key responsibilities and what are the usual challenges that you face in a clinic?

Dr. Keerthana Sankar:
Absolutely. So I’ll kind of start by giving you an overview of what the field in itself encompasses.
So pulmonary and critical care. So there’s two aspects to the fellowship.
One is pulmonary.
And what that is is anything to do with lung medicine.
So that could be from lung transplant to COPD, to asthma, to pulmonary vascular disease, pulmonary hypertension, sleep medicine.
So basically any pathology that has to do with the lungs.
The critical care aspect of it is basically any patient who requires admission to the intensive care unit or the ICU.
The reason that these fields coincide and you train in them together is because a lot of patients who are admitted to the ICU, their primary issue is a respiratory or a pulmonary issue that requires that they need to be on a ventilator.
That’s kind of how the fields coincide.
When you learn the pulmonary aspects of care, you’re able to become a master in ventilator management, in critical pneumonia management.
Basically, a lot of the conditions that require that initial ICU admission.
Of course, there’s other things that we learned that have to do with ICU medicine.
A lot of them are procedural.
Placing chest tubes, doing procedures like thoracentesis, paracentesis, managing hemodynamics in the ICU.
How do we manage blood pressure in a critically ill patient, what are the life support medications we give in that scenario?
It’s a pretty large field and people who train in this can then go on to decide, you know, I only want to do critical care.
I only want to do pulmonary. I wanna do a mix both. I want some time in sleep medicine.
Because the field is so broad, people are able to pick and choose when they’re done with it.
I think the second part of your question was what are the the challenges in this field?
I think, you know, one of them is that it is so large.
There’s a lot to master in the field.
I think when you’re training in residency in medical school, you’re not really getting that procedural exposure.
Then suddenly you go into fellowship and you really have to become an expert in bronchoscopies.
You have to become an expert in intubations or place that breathing tube.
There’s a steep learning curve in this field, but I think that’s also what’s so exciting about it.
I would say the second major challenge, which I think a lot of people don’t realize is sort of the emotional burden of being in critical care.
Learning how to navigate family dynamics, learning how to navigate really difficult patient conversations.
Because as you can imagine, people getting admitted to the ICU are extremely sick.
A lot of the times, whatever we can do for them will not lead to the quality of life that the patient or the family are looking for.
I think family dynamics and the ICU is becoming more talked about.
You really kind of need to have a way with people and how to approach these topics with people.
You’re really meeting for the first time at a very, very tough spot in their lives.

Rajee Hari:
That’s true. How do you do this?
How do you tell the family that end of life or this is it. It’s hard.
I’m looking at it from the receiving end.
It’s gonna be very difficult and devastating for me to hear that from a doctor.
But from a doctor’s perspective, how do you approach?
What are the steps that you go through to even reveal this to the family.

Dr. Keerthana Sankar:
That’s a great question. The research currently, there’s a there’s a lot of focus on understanding this better and developing an algorithm to make this more of like protocolized way to approach it.
Of course, it’s really tough because human interactions are so dynamic and each situation can be so different.
We’re kind of taught skeleton way of approaching it and we kind of fill in the spaces as needed for patients.
I think the biggest thing for us is to always make sure that you’re exuding empathy.
You can have the longest day. You can be in the IC for twelve hours.
Then a patient could come in very critically ill and the family’s devastated.
Yes, you’re burned out and yes, you’re tired.
But, first and foremost, you need to be present with that patient and that family and you have to put in that effort.
You have to be conscious that, you know, this might be your hundredth time breaking the news, but this is the first time for them.
So I think just like presence of mind of what you’re dealing with and and always thinking about it while you’re having the conversation from the patient’s perspective or from the family’s perspective is really helpful.
I think that’s kind of the first thing that I always do.
The second thing that we do is always assess their understanding of what’s going on first.
We typically start these conversations with, you know, what is your understanding of what’s happening here?
We do that to recognize that there’s gonna be a big gap between how we’re understanding things, you know, this person’s in multi organ failure, their numbers are showing this versus that.
Compared to how the family is receiving it, and they oftentimes have very little interaction with the health care system.
So we’ll hear their perspective.
That’s a great place for us to start because once we hear where they’re at, we can start filling in the gaps.
Okay. You know, this is what’s going on. This is the medical side of things.
Then we kind of give a brief overview of prognosis or can our interventions actually lead to a meaningful outcome.
Then we kind of go into sort of like a ethical question and this, again, studying philosophy and, like, bioethics and morality and undergrad kinda helped me with a lot of the things I’m doing now.
I never imagined it to help as much, but we assess two different things.
One is called the minimally accepted outcome, and the other is called the maximally accepted burden.
So what these two terms are referring to is how much are you willing to go through and to what outcome.
What outcome is acceptable for you as a family or for you as the patient?
Like, would it be okay if you could never eat again? And you had a feeding tube.
Would it be okay if you were bedbound? Would that be a quality of life that is compatible with what you previously wanted for yourself?
They say, yes, that’s what we want.
We don’t we’re not afraid of this person or this patient being bed bound. We’re okay with that.
Then the next question becomes, okay. What are you willing to go through to achieve this outcome?
Because as you can imagine being in the ICU, there’s a lot of procedures.
There’s a lot of pain and suffering that comes with being admitted to the ICU.
It’s not an easy hospital stay by any means. So that’s kind of where we start.
Those are the initial assessments.
I think the most important thing to do is to continually to the families and continually give them updates.
The reason for that is because the acuity in ICU is so high and things can change, you know, within seconds.
You always want to keep the family members in the loop.
If there’s a significant clinical change, we need to tell them about that.
Constant communication and really open communication and understanding their wishes are I think the most important things.

Rajee Hari:
This is a lot. This is a lot.

Dr. Keerthana Sankar:
Yeah.

Rajee Hari:
I you know, I see you as as as a stressed what do you call incubator?
I would call it. Right? Just listening to what you just said. I was like, wow.
This is a lot. How did you handle it? How do you handle the emotional stress?
What is your stress buster?

Dr. Keerthana Sankar:
I think you very well know the answer to this, of course, having known me for a decade, but really it comes from music.
It comes from both family and music, I would say.
So music, obviously, you know, after you come home from a long day like this, and you’re able to use your brain in a completely different way, completely creative way, not even really, like, focused on anything that has to do with the hospital.
You’re just making good music and you’re in your own world, all of a sudden.
I find that that completely decompresses me. And it just completely just alleviates the stress from the day.
Of course, you know, having supportive family, you know, my husband, like, everybody is so understanding of how I operate. They know that I kind of need to do certain things to keep my peace.

Rajee Hari:
I think everybody understands that. And your husband in medical field as well?

Dr. Keerthan Sankar:
No. He’s in tech. He works at Google.

Rajee Hari:
Oh, thank god. That’s good. I can totally understand how much you will be leaning on him and how much he will be able to provide for you under such circumstances.

Dr. Keerthana Sankar:
He’s the best cook ever. So that is one thing I have taken care of.

Rajee Hari:
Okay. For fusion, perfusion, medical professionals, Make sure you marry a good cook. That’s another stress buster. That’s a good – That’s a big buster.

Dr. Keerthana Sankar:
But, yeah, it was Having somebody who’s not in the medical field, first of all, so that you can just kind of talk about normal things.
You’re not always talking about life or death scenarios and your head space can just move on to something else.
But then also having, you know, my sister who’s in medicine and if there’s something that was really weighing on me that happened in the hospital, I can reach out to her and be really technical in how I speak, and she’ll fully understand it, right, because she’s in the exact same line of work So she’ll be able to understand that.
So I have this, like, amazing kind of balance in my support system, like somebody to go to when I just wanna talk about medicine, and something to go to when I just want somebody to listen to me and understand and just, like, make me feel good at home.

Rajee Hari:
I wanna come to the music towards the end. I’m saving the best for the last.
I mean, I’m not saying the best of the lot, I would say. Everything is just amazing.
I wanna touch a little bit on COVID nineteen, and I know it brought a lot of global attention to, you know, respiratory illnesses and critical care and pulmonary issues.
What was your experience during the pandemic? And also the lessons that you have learned.
And I know you did some research and presented papers on the post ICU condition.
So tell us a little bit about what you did.

Dr. Keerthana Sankar:
Absolutely. You know, I am in a really interesting position because I started residency during the COVID nineteen pandemic.
The pandemic started May of 2020, and our residency started end of June 2020.
So we were just starting to understand this illness.
What a time to start training as a doctor when you’re one month in.
I would say the only way to describe this pandemic was chaotic eye opening, just tragic.
I think what we really saw in Los Angeles, we our hospital was the hospital that took the most number of COVID19 patients in Southern California.
We were seeing huge numbers patients.
And, of course, as you correctly said, it was a predominantly respiratory illness that required ICU stays.
So our hospital was overrun with patients. We did not have staffing capacity. We did not have bed space.
We were putting patients in areas of the hospital that are not typically used for patient care, and that’s just because we were running out of space.
We were firing travel nurses like crazy because our staffing just could not handle the amount of patients that we had.
So many challenges that came with that training as a new physician, learning a new disease, dealing with the bed shortages, dealing with the long hours.
Of course, dealing with the emotional side of patients dying left and right from this illness.
One of our pulmonary and critical care fellows had said back when I was an intern that, you know, you as interns are pronouncing more patients dead than I have in all of my training, and he was like a third year pulmonary fellow.

Rajee Hari:
My goodness. I can imagine that.

Dr. Keerthana Sankar:
Yeah. Yeah. So he was already in practice for six years, and we were there for three to four months.
So you can just imagine, like, the high mortality rate that we were seeing.
Absolutely taxing emotionally, physically, mentally. Any way you look at it.
Nobody in my class decided to go into pulmonary and critical care, except for me.

Rajee Hari:
You are the brave one. Right?

Dr. Keerthana Sankar:
I think there’s there’s there’s something that’s, you know, a little bit odd maybe in how my mind works.
Despite the chaos, I was just loving the fact paced nature of how things are moving.
It was really just touch and go.
Again, I think this this ties back to music and just being on stage and improvising with your co-artists and, you know, playing off of each other, not really knowing what the next moment is going to bring on stage.
I really think that fed my interest in critical care.
You don’t know what the next moment’s going to bring.
You just have to act based on all this knowledge that you’ve hopefully accumulated.
And that you’re making the right decisions, and I really like that fast paced nature of it.
So there was a silver lining in it for me personally because I found the specialty that I absolutely love now.
I think because of the pandemic and because we were spending so much time in the ICU.
Guess things were bad, but for me personally, I kind of found the good in it or found what I wanted to do from it.

Rajee Hari:
You found your calling through the pandemic. That’s interesting.

Dr. Keerthana Sankar:
Yep.

Rajee Hari:
So tell me a little bit about the research you did and the paper that you presented.
I read a little bit on that.

Dr. Keerthana Sankar:
Yeah. So one of the new and upcoming fields in critical care is post intensive care survivorship.
The reason this field is really new. It’s come about in the last maybe decade or so.
The reason for that is because people were starting to notice that once patients leave the ICU, let’s say they get better from their critical illness, they still have a extremely long road to recovery after leaving the ICU.
A lot of that is because of the interventions we do in the ICU leads to a lot of post acute complications for them.
This has been termed post ICU syndrome, our PICS, And what PICS entails is, three domains of deficits that patients have after leaving the ICU.
So the domains are physical, cognitive, and psychological physical because they’re laying in the bed in the ICU.
They have a lot of mobility issues.
They have undergo a lot of physical rehabilitation to get back to the level of strength that they once had.
Psychological, because, you know, just the anxiety of being in ICU setting.
A lot of people develop depression and post traumatic stress disorder just from being in the ICU, and that’s been proven in the data for decades now.
Cognitive because of things like ICU delirium.
The medications we administer kind of leads to this brain fog that lasts for, you know, months to years after they leave.
So the big interest and what happens to these people after they leave the ICU?
That’s a question that hasn’t been answered well.
What I did in that field is particularly what are the psychological complications in critical COVID19 patients after they leave the ICU.
I focused on a subset of the post IC syndrome, which is a psychological component, and I focused on a subset of ICU patients, which is COVID19 patients, published this paper in Chest, which is one of the major thoracic journals out there.
We found that COVID nineteen patients are likely at higher risk for psychological complications.
The reason for that is really due to things that were pandemic specific, like social isolation. Right?
Families couldn’t come see these patients.
They were alone for the most part.
We used a high dose of medications that tend to precipitate delirium in the ICU.
That then subsequently leads to other psychological complications.
These patients were typically on the ventilator for a much longer time than other critically ill patients.
Being on the ventilator itself means you have to administer certain medications for them to stay calm and kind of in a medically induced coma.
Those medications will then have long term psychological effects.
I found that these patients are particularly at high risk for leaving the ICU and having a lot of trauma to deal with after they go.

Rajee Hari
I think getting COVID itself is a traumatic experience by itself.
Added on to that is the ICU experience and all the medication, and I can totally understand where this is all going.
How is it now? Has it all come down?
How is your workload and I see you and where do you see this going?

Dr. Keerthana Sankar:
There’s sort of this distinction in my mind of the pre-vaccination period and the post-vaccination period, and there’s a huge difference.
After vaccines started becoming more widespread.
The worst of it was really the first wave of it, which was May through July 2020.
There was another horrible wave of December 2020 through January 2021.
That was the delta to surge as we called it at our hospital.
That was actually the time that vaccines were being administered to healthcare workers.
I remember getting my vaccine December 2020 you know, as a healthcare worker.
But still seeing tons of COVID patients in the ICU because the vaccinations just were not widespread at that point.
I would say, into 2021, we sort of saw dip and then, you know, another upswing during the omicron surge.
Then after the omecron variant, we saw like a deep downtrend.
Currently, there’s very, very few patients, if any, I would say in our hospital with a COVID predominant illness.
What I mean by that is they may come in that they might incidentally test positive for COVID, almost like in an asymptomatic way.
But, Their COVID is not their reason for their hospitalization.
So that’s been the biggest difference.
And, you know, I think it’s all due to vaccinations and the boosters and people making sure that they’re getting their vaccinations and boosters on time.
We still do preventative things.
Like, we still wear masks in the hospital even though LA County has lifted the mask mandate.
We still do that in the hospital just because we’re working with high risk patients.
I think the question of where is this all going based on the last year, I think it’s reassuring that things are trending in the right direction.
I think based on the fact that new boosters are being developed, for high risk populations, and they seem to be working.
I think that’s also an indication that things are trending in the right direction.
I’m hoping that pandemic and surge, things like that are of the past, and that in the future, maybe this can be treated more like flu precautions.
Yeah. So, you know, that’s where I feel like the data is headed, and that’s what I’m seeing on the ground.

Rajee Hari:
The trend going in the right direction is exactly what everyone is hoping for, and we don’t want any more pandemic.
We don’t want any more COVID. We just hope to worst this over.
And we can all look forward and move move on with life. And that’s the hope. And and thank you.
Thank you to the medical professionals like you who really put your life on the line to, you know, to help fight this pandemic.
It was not easy. And I have spoken to quite a few physicians, and the general trend has always been like, they could not even think about themselves.
Some of them even took an apartment separately from their families so that they don’t bring in anything from the hospital into the house.
I was like, wow, this is serious sacrifice from the medical professionals for sure.
Coming to your music career, I know we’ve been chatting for thirty minutes and things are so interesting that I can keep going on.
But I want to touch a little bit on your music journey.
Tell me a little bit about about your music journey and kind of how it has impacted your medical profession as well.

Dr. Keerthana Sankar:
Yeah. Absolutely. So You know, I grew up in the most musical environment that I could have imagined.
Both my parents are deep lovers of carnatic music or South Indian classical music, which is the type of music that I grew up performing and still do perform.
So, you know, I remember at the age of one and two, my dad would just be singing around the house.
We always be attending concerts. I’m pretty sure I started singing at the age of two.
My parents were not performing musicians, but they had this deep love for music and the arts.
So we were really immersed in it. Our environment facilitated it from a very young age.
I didn’t start formally learning until I was six is when I started playing violin.
As you learn an instrument, you start learning vocal music right along with it just so you can understand the lyrics and understand how to play the instrument and match the lyrics.
I didn’t start formally learning vocal music until the age of about eight or nine.
And, you know, I started learning along with my sister.
So in childhood, we were very rigorous about our practice, and I think a lot of that comes from my mom and my sister. It definitely wasn’t me.
So, you know, being the younger sibling, I just wanted to go out and play.
But my sister was really the one who enforced discipline and enforce that we sit down and practice for a couple hours a day.
In childhood, we started participating in of national competitions. And I started winning some of those competitions.
So I was kind of pushed into the limelight. I would say around the age of twelve or thirteen.
A few years after that, I participated in a Indian TV show carnatic idol where I was first runner-up.
So that was also telecasted across India.
So it’s kind of this interesting journey of just kind of practicing at home and then suddenly you’re winning a few competitions.
Suddenly, people know your name, and then suddenly you’re on this TV show.
So it escalated pretty quickly, and I don’t think my parents or myself ever thought that we would pursue it to the level that we did.
I would say maybe high school is really when I took it upon myself to excel in it, and I develop my own passion.
And I think any child probably goes through that.
There’s like this phase where your parents are kind of telling you to do something.
And then you kind of enter into this new phase where you’re like, oh, no. Like, I really enjoy this.
Like, I’m doing this for myself.
So I would say I found that in high school, This is also when outside of competitions, I started performing a lot of concerts.
I started traveling around the country and playing for visiting artists and visiting musicians from India.
So that’s really when my world was open to the the musical scene that existed in India as well.
And I started making these trips to India because that’s really where the hub for carnatic music is.
So this kind of opened the door to having this, like, dual life, you know, some of it here, some of it going to India and, like, being really immersed in the music field there.
And I also started performing there, especially during their big music festival in December, what’s called the December music season where there’s hundreds of thousands of concerts that happen across Chennai, which is the major city where the all happens.
So Escalated quickly.
I would say the balance between music and medicine is always something that is the forefront of my mind, you know.
In the beginning, it was more so a fear of how am I going to do everything that I wanna do in music while pursuing a really demanding career.
So that fear was definitely there and more so at the end of college and right before starting medical school because you know, everybody always warns you, like, oh, medical school is so intense.
You won’t have time for anything else.
I listened to it, but I also questioned it.
Because is it possible that you can just do one thing like study for twelve hours a day?
It just doesn’t seem very efficient, right? Because you’ll eventually get tired.
He’ll eventually not be as productive as he once was he once were earlier in the day.
So, I really found like, the synergistic way that my music and medicine helped each other.
And the way that it really helped me was like I mentioned earlier, like exercising different parts of your brain.
Because when you’re doing one thing, like, you’re getting a recharge in another way.
We’re doing that thing. You’re the other part of your brain is getting recharged.
So medical school is really where I found that the two were really working together to help me.
You know, during the day I would study for maybe six hours. I would take a break. I would go sing.
After I sang, I thought reenergize, I could study again for the rest of the day.
But had I not had that break for my mind to kind of, like, wander and do something else I don’t think that I would have been as productive in medicine.
The other thing, you know, it works in reverse too because when you only have a finite amount of time, to focus on your passion outside of, you know, your career like music, you know that you really have to be on your game for whatever time that you have.
So if I only had an hour or an hour and a half, it would be the most focused practice that I could do in that hour and hour and a half.
You just don’t have time otherwise.
You’re working within your limitations, and I think sometimes that pushes you to focus even better.
So that was the trend that I noticed through medical school.
And luckily, I’ve been able to keep that up in residency. Although, I mean, it gets harder.
That’s for sure.

Rajee Hari:
Yeah. So I want to ask, this is like having two full time professions.
Your two carriers definitely keep you busy for sure. Right?
What would you give as an advice for anyone who wants to pursue medicine and also their artistic passion?

Dr. Keerthana Sankar:
My biggest advice is that those two things help each other and that you should stick with it.
There’ll be a lot of people along the way that will say, if you wanna do one thing well, you have to give up on your other interests or other hobbies.
I don’t think that that’s true whatsoever.
I think that it’s very possible to have multiple passions and to pursue them to the fullest extent.
And the reason is that, you know, very few people attempt it and the people who do attempt it will tell you that they work synergistically together.
So I think my biggest advice is to actually continue doing both or three or whatever – How many ever things that you have?
Especially people going into medicine is to maintain their life and hobbies outside of medicine.
Because medicine can be so all consuming, and it’s very possible to just live at the hospital and just have that kind of life consume you.
But if you wanna have a balanced life and if you want to have interests and enjoyments outside of the hospital, it’s just really important to keep it up.

Rajee Hari:
So true, I totally agree with you.
It also helps with your mental health in many ways just balancing it out, having an outlet, having something else to focus on other than just your hospital situation.
In your case, the traumatic ICU lifestyle.
I’m so glad and happy to hear what your journey has been and how your family has been a huge support for you.
I mean, this is something that many people have mentioned, but in your case, it’s just wonderful how it has all come together to, you know, to channelize you and to you know, empower you to do what you’re doing right now.
So I’m really, happy to see that. And god bless you.
Let the world is your oyster, and you have really proven that. I hope you continue this journey.
We are excited to have a critical care physician and also a musician, par excellence in our community.
So Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
And is there any any place that how can people reach you?
If they need some advice or suggestion, what is the place to reach you?

Dr. Keerthana Sankar:
I think my Instagram is probably the best way to reach me. I can give you my Instagram handle.
It’s just Dr. Keerthana Sankar, and my name should pop up. It’s a public profile.
And that’s really where I showcase a lot of this, like, balance between my music and medicine.
So you’ll see a lot of photos and videos from life in the hospital and, me practicing at home and people tend to message me on there and like ask for career advice or ask for advice on how to balance hobbies with professional pursuit.
So I think that’s the best place to reach me.
I also have a Twitter. That’s mostly for medicine, and I can give you the Twitter handle.
I think it’s might be the same Twitter handle.

Rajee Hari:
Great. So people, you can reach her on Instagram and also on Twitter.
So feel free to hit her up and, get your bit of advice from this high achieving young lady here.
Thank you so much for coming on our podcast, Dr. Keerthana Sankar. Subscribe to Protean Pulse, everyone. Don’t miss the beat.
We are on Spotify. And you can also search for Protean Pulse and remember to leave us a feedback.
I will see you in the next episode. Until then, we are signing off from Protean Pulse.

Dr. Keerthana Sankar:
Thank you.