Associate Medical Director, UAMS Blood Bank

Gina Pesek, MD, realized early in her medical career that getting to know her patients and seeing them get better would be the most gratifying aspect of her work.

She started her training in both anatomical and clinical pathology, but missed seeing patients.

“When I started the transfusion rotation, I really liked that (interaction), so I switched to the clinical pathology side, where I could see patients on a daily basis,” she said.

After completing her clinical pathology residency at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in 2007, she went on to a fellowship there in transfusion medicine. Pesek now serves as associate medical director of the UAMS Blood Bank, and is an instructor in the College of Medicine.

Her work in the blood bank entails performing therapeutic procedures and collecting peripheral blood progenitor cells. Patients she treats include those with multiple myeloma, sickle cell anemia and leukemia.

Through therapeutic apheresis, she said, they can pull off plasma from the blood of a patient with an autoimmune disorder, for instance. For sickle cell patients, red blood cells can be removed, and in patients with leukemia and a high white blood cell count, those cells can be removed.

“It’s really a neat process and that’s why I love it so much,” she said. “We get immediate gratification from many of the procedures we do.”

In addition to treating patients, Pesek said, “I spend a fair amount of time doing lab work and administrative duties, with the blood bank I’m managing procedures, and all of those things are more laboratory oriented.”

Born in Hot Springs, Pesek enjoyed accompanying her mother, a home-health nurse, on patient visits. That may be where she developed her affinity for patient contact, but her career path was more a matter of evolution than decision.

“Things were never a direct choice career-wise,” she said. “They just seemed to happen.”

In her junior year at Southern Arkansas University in Magnolia, she decided to apply to both medical school and veterinary school. However, she didn’t get her veterinary school application in by the deadline, and after interviewing at UAMS, she was accepted there in 2000.

“So I finished up my required courses at a community college that summer and started med school the next month,” she said. “Not necessarily a path I would recommend.”

Pesek is married to a physician, Robert D. Pesek, who for the last two years has lived in Tampa, Fla., so he could complete an allergy and immunology fellowship at the University of South Florida College of Medicine. She and their 4-year-old daughter, Emma, are eagerly anticipating his return to Little Rock this summer, when he’ll start work at Arkansas Children’s Hospital.

“We’re 21 months down, three months to go,” Pesek said.

For two years, she and Emma have flown to Florida every couple of weeks to visit Robbie. Still, “it has been extremely challenging to be a married single parent,” Pesek said.

Emma is too young to remember a different lifestyle, “but it really pulls at the heartstrings to watch her ‘hug’ Daddy on the computer every night,” Pesek said. “Skype is a wonderful thing, though.

“I couldn’t do it alone, and have a tremendous support system,” she said. “My mom deserves a special award, and Emma’s godparents are a lifesaver. I sometimes have to go in during the night when I’m on call and I couldn’t do it without them.”

As if she didn’t have enough on her plate, Pesek also is a runner – “though a slow one” – and completed her first marathon, in Little Rock, on March 6.

“I trained with my sister-in-law, and though we walked the water stops, we ran the whole way,” Pesek said. “Never ‘hit the wall,’ never got discouraged, just had a wonderful time. Four hours and thirty-one minutes. It was such a huge accomplishment for me.”

Pesek’s busy life doesn’t keep her from stopping to smell the roses, though.

“I adore flowers and could happily have been a florist,” she said. “I think it must be a very rewarding field.

“If someone is happy and they get flowers, they are even happier. If they are in love, it makes their stomach do flip-flops; if they are sad, then it brightens their day. I could like that.”

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