JENNIFER BOULDEN

Elizabeth Schneider, M.D. loves being both a pathologist and mother. The Schneider family includes Elizabeth, her husband anesthesiologist Michael Schneider, and their two children, Cecilia, 6, and Jack, 3.

Maybe she was born into it. Baptist Health pathologist Elizabeth Nestrud Schneider spent about 12 years of her life at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, including the very first day.

"In medical school, people would ask me where I was from, and I would say 'Well, I was born in this hospital. I didn't really go far!" laughs Schneider.

A Little Rock native, Schneider graduated from Pulaski Academy at age 16, and from Hendrix College at age 20. Her bachelor's degree was in psychology, but she wasn't sure what she wanted to do with it, so she said she "kicked around" a few years after college. That entailed being a psychiatric counselor at Arkansas Children's Hospital and a research assistant at UAMS for Tim O'Brien, PhD, in the Obstetrics and Gynecology department.

That molecular research job started out as book research, but Schneider was increasingly drawn to the microscopes. At Hendrix, she had not taken a single biology course, so she signed up for pre-med coursework at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and set her sight on becoming a physician.

She applied to medical school at the University of Arkansas and was accepted on the first try. While waiting to hear about her admission, she met a third-year medical student Michael Schneider, fell in love, and was married to him just over a year later.

Schneider thought she would go into ophthalmology, but made a last-minute decision to explore pathology. She loved it.

"I've always been a bookworm, but also love working with people," she said. "Everyone said, 'Oh, but you're such a people person! Why would you want to go into pathology?' But it clicked for me."

She said people used to regard pathology as a sort of black box in which physicians put in data and the box spits out the answers.

"These days it's really not like that. We have all the computer facilities, we can look up the radiology, we can get the clinical information on the patients, and through clinician communication, we can pull it altogether to get the best diagnosis for the patient. It's like pulling together a bunch of different pieces of a puzzle, a highly interactive and varied process."

Her job includes some occasional patient interaction, and she said she enjoys working with clinicians from across every department at the hospital, helping solve the questions of how to interpret data or order complex lab tests.

She spent five years at UAMS in residency and then did a surgical pathology fellowship and a cytology fellowship there. She and Michael had two children during that time—Cecilia, now 6, and Jack, 3.

A little more than a year and a half ago, Schneider took a position with Pathology Laboratories of Arkansas working at Baptist Health Medical Center.

"My group has 14 of us, including part-time people. That's a pretty big group compared to other groups in the state, and there's a huge comfort level because there's not only varied levels of experience among the group members, there's also varied levels of expertise. We have a lot of very well-trained people. A lot of times if you have questions, you don't have to send it out, you can just send it across the hall and say, 'Hey what do you think about this?'"

She said many of her pathologist friends from other areas have commented on the convenience and intuitive workflow of the pathology department's set-up at Baptist. "We're not depending on couriers to deliver us things from blocks away. We're right here, right next to the labs and histology and communicating with clinicians all day long. If there are issues, we can respond to them right away," she said.

"Our histologists and our lab technicians aren't just names or someone to talk to on the telephone, they are faces," she continued. "We have baby showers we go to with each other. As women, transcriptionists and histologists and technicians, we sound off about our children and commiserate about snow days and getting childcare. It's a true community."

Now that her training years are over and her children are getting bigger, Schneider says she's starting to find some time for herself again. She's recently begun swimming regularly again and she runs four or five times a week. Always the voracious reader, she said she really enjoys participating in her book club.

Schneider also puts her creativity to use on a personal blog. The forum allows her to filter the joys, trials, trifles and amusements of her days through her dual lens as a pathologist and parent to share with her friends, family and co-workers.

As a doctor who is the daughter of a doctor (Little Rock neonatologist Richard M. Nestrud) and married to a doctor, Schneider has a pretty informed opinion about the challenges of living a physician's life while raising a family.

"It's a challenge certainly for both of us to be doctors and have a family, but my job usually takes place during office hours, allowing me to be home with the kids in the evening," she said. "Plus, talking to the technicians or histologists, it's easy to find that we all have the same challenges working and raising a family no matter what kind of work we do. It's a tough balance some days, yes, but it is of course always worth it."