Dr. Janet Kerrigan joins Marriage & Medicine to share the story behind the letter that helped get Carter into medical school, and the road she walked to become the kind of doctor who could write it.

Dr. Kerrigan completed her Family Practice residency in the U.S. Navy and is board certified in family medicine. She came up in medicine at a time when the system was not built with women in mind, and this episode gets into what that actually looked like: what she had to push through, what she had to prove twice as often, and what it took to build a career in medicine and in the military when very little of it was designed for her to succeed. By the time Carter came along and she saw something in him worth vouching for, she was writing that letter from decades of having had to earn her own place first.

Carter shares a glimpse of his own path through the Army's HPSP scholarship, from committing to service before he'd even started medical school to now completing his residency at JBLM under that same commitment. Hearing her story next to his gives the conversation a full-circle thread, two very different eras of military medicine, one letter connecting them.

If you are in medicine, know someone who had to fight for a seat at the table, or are curious what military medicine looked like a generation ago versus now, we hope this conversation encourages you.