Alycia Valente: a mom doing it all
By Cindy Fertsch
Alycia Valente is a 2004 graduate of Mainland High School. Today she is a mother, a wife and a Medical Doctor specializing in Emergency Medicine. Today’s moms can do it all and Valente exemplifies this!
Valente’s interests lie in humanitarian medicine which ultimately took her to an emergency room on the Navajo Reservation in Flagstaff Arizona.
Serving the Navajo and Hopi people, Valente notes “It is a rural city in the red desert with wild horses and rodeo. They are some of the coolest people I have ever met.”
The Navajo Nation has an area of over 27,000 square miles and is situated on the southwestern Colorado Plateau. Very often, the size of the Navajo Nation is compared to that of the state of West Virginia. It is the largest reservation in the United States and is characterized by arid deserts and alpine forests with high plateaus, mesas and mountains reaching as high as 10,388 feet in altitude.
The language and traditions are preserved.
“Sometimes patients will go to both a traditional healer and a medical doctor. The longer I practice medicine the more I realize it is about the people, the stories and the culture. I am fortunate because I get to see the entire fabric of a city,” says Valente.
In contrast, Valente did her residency in Philadelphia. As an emergency doctor, she says she can sum up her entire job in one word: stabilization. One day, Valente treated 20 gunshot wounds within 24 hours. “It was pure adrenaline and pure skill. The challenge is to find a way to continue doing your job without getting hard and not bring the stress home.”
Another form of Valente’s humanitarian work is asylum medicine. “If someone is seeking asylum to enter this country because they have been persecuted or tortured, it is my job to perform a medical evaluation.”
As Valente prepares to celebrate her first Mother’s Day as a mom to her son, Max, there is another transition on the horizon. Her husband, Kyle has accepted a job in Boston and the family is preparing to relocate in just a couple of months. With life’s uncertainties, one thing is for sure – Valente will continue to make a positive impact in her communities, near and far.
