‘There’s no such thing as perfect timing’: Former teen mom fulfills dream of being doctor

Dr. Katie Clark started dreaming of being a physician when she was in third grade.

“My mom tells the story that she remembers me coming home from school in third grade and being very confident and using the word physician. Not that I’m going to be a doctor. I said I will be a physician,” Clark recalled during a recent interview.

But that dream was put on hold for several decades when she became a mom at age 15.

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Next month, the married mother of four boys ages 12 to 27 will finish her residency training in family medicine at Cleveland Clinic Akron General.

Clark, 43, will start her position as a staff physician at the Akron General Health & Wellness Center in Stow this summer.

“Life can take you on some crazy roads,” she said.

Indeed, Clark’s path to becoming a doctor wasn’t a straight one.

Katie Clark was a teen mom at 15 at Magnificat High School

As a 14-year-old freshman at Magnificat High School, an all-girls Catholic school in Rocky River, then Katie Dickerhoof got pregnant.

“I don't know how or why, but I knew pretty confidently that I was going to keep him and raise him and be his mom,” she said. “I, fortunately, had the support to be able to do that.”

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That included support from her school and family, she said.

She gave birth to a boy in May 1994, right after she turned 15. Clark stayed in school until about three weeks before Brian's birth, when she starting coming in once a week to hand in assignments and take exams.

“After he was born, I brought him (to) school in a stroller and took my finals in the office,” she said. “The summertime between freshman and sophomore year was my maternity leave.”

How Katie Clark took main responsibility for son's care

The young single mom took the main responsibility for her son’s care while living in Lakewood with her mom and younger sisters, one of whom has special needs.

She enrolled Brian in a daycare that offered financial assistance. When she started back at Magnificat her sophomore year, she still was too young to get a driver's license.

“I walked him over to the daycare and then would leave the stroller and the stuff and him,” she said. “Then I would go over and catch my bus and ride out to school and then do that in reverse for home.”

Eventually, the city started a program that provided transportation for young parents directly to the daycare and school, she said.

Throughout her high school years at Magnificat, she juggled motherhood with typical teen activities.

She also took babysitting jobs and brought her baby along.

“I felt satisfied with the social engagement and school experience that I had,” she said. “I didn’t feel necessarily like I was missing out on a whole bunch of things. I did feel different from my peers, but I felt like a normal mom where I had to get a babysitter if I wanted to go to the movies. And in some cases, it was I had to get a babysitter for homecoming.”

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She got up at 5 a.m. before her son was awake, went to practice and then came back home to get both of them ready for daycare and school.

But she never swam in a high school meet because logistics didn’t work out to bring the baby.

“I trained and went to all the practices and I didn't ever go to any of the swim meets,” she said.

Another baby arrives when she was in college

Clark said she didn’t date in high school and took difficult classes. After graduation, she continued to live at home with her toddler while taking classes at Case Western Reserve.

During her freshman year at Case, she became pregnant again. She dropped out of college and had her second son, Andrew. Neither father has been involved in the boys’ lives.

At that point, she said, she believed her dream of becoming a doctor “was gone.”

“It was over.”

Instead, she focused on finding a job and supporting her sons without a college degree

She started work as a temp at a de-icing salt company and ultimately got hired full-time. She was excited to have health benefits, but with two kids in daycare, “I was definitely on public assistance and that was important. It was needed.”

Eventually, her pay was slightly above qualifying for that assistance, “so you just have to stretch and budget and be very careful and live very leanly.”

Clark lived at home briefly, then roomed with a sister and eventually got her own apartment.

It was a whirlwind romance when Katie Clark met her husband

In the fall of 1999, she met Curtis Clark, the older brother of one of her best friends from high school.

The two didn’t necessarily feel sparks flying. Curtis was heading to his first year of medical school in Toledo and Katie said she never considered anything romantic since she was the young mother of two young boys.

Fast-forward to New Year’s Eve. Katie needed a date for her company. Her friend suggested Curtis, whose New Year’s plans to drive his grandparents to Florida had fallen through.

“It was purely platonic,” he recalled. “She didn’t have a date and I was looking for something to do.”

The two had a lot of fun, he said. A week or two later, he was home from medical school and called to ask if she would like to hang out.

He didn't see an issue with her being a young single mother.

“I didn’t look at it as a big deal. I have a bigger family and my mom adopted a bunch of kids. I like little kids and I was always taking care of little kids so it didn’t really register for me. I mean, it added some challenge and interest,” he said with a laugh.

They were engaged by October and married a year and a half later.

How the new family continued to grow

In 2003, when Curtis was finishing his final year of medical school, the couple decided to expand their family and had their first child together, Colin.

Katie and the boys did not move to Toledo to be with her husband. The couple decided they would reunite when they moved after Colin's birth to Lexington, Kentucky, where Curtis had a five-year urology residency.

In Kentucky, Katie said it was her first time as a young mother that she had the “luxury” to stay at home with the kids. Even though Curtis’ residency salary wasn’t great, she didn’t have to be a single mother working and taking care of her kids. Curtis also adopted both Brian and Andrew.

As the Clark family got settled in Lexington, Katie began to take community college classes in 2004.

The dream of becoming a doctor was still “a very dim, faraway light,” she said.

“I still had it in my mind to maybe pursue pre-medicine coursework, but my confidence was absolutely gone and I had to create family anew in Lexington with friends and a support system.”

She took some classes in between availability of child care, “but it didn’t work so well that I was able to be available for an O-Chem [organic chemistry] lab that’s like from 5 to 9 p.m. every Wednesday. It didn’t feel realistic.

“I also remember actively thinking ‘I cannot figure out a way that both of us can be doing this amount of work,’ because I was seeing how much work he was doing and the hours he was putting in and imagining a world where both of us were doing that at the same time. I felt like neither of us would have ever seen our kids at all.”

She earned an associate’s degree and then transferred to the University of Kentucky, where she earned an undergraduate degree in anthropology in a few years.

In 2008, the family of four moved to Sunnyvale, California, where Curtis had a two-year pediatric urology fellowship at Stanford. In California, the couple had their youngest son, Max, in 2009.

Clark began working part time for a nonprofit, using her anthropology degree.

When Max was six months old in 2010, the family moved back “home” to Ohio for Curtis’ current job as a pediatric urologist at Akron Children’s Hospital. They settled into a home in Silver Lake.

By this time, Brian, the oldest, was a junior in high school, Andrew was a middle schooler, Colin was in second grade and Max was still an infant.

How Katie Clark restarted her dream of becoming a doc

In 2013, when Clark was 32 and her youngest son was in preschool, she thought it might be time to again pursue her dream of becoming a doctor. She mentioned she might take classes for med school or to be a nurse.

She told herself, “I'm just going to sign up for physics and see how it goes.” She knew she needed physics and other classes in order to prepare for the medical school admissions test, the MCATs.

She fit in classes whenever she could over the next two years. The family joke was that oldest son Brian and his mom were taking classes at Kent State at the same time.

“Now at this point I can afford a babysitter and the teens can drive and babysit,” she said.

She earned a second undergraduate degree — this time in biology — in 2015.

When it came time to look for medical schools, Clark said it was “very good fortune” that she was accepted into a new Ohio University program in Cleveland that's affiliated with the Cleveland Clinic.

“I was not the oldest student in my class, but by far, I had the most children,” she said with a laugh.

The first few years of medical school, she was still coordinating child care and activities while studying. But her husband was established in his career and could help with the kids.

“By the end, he was really doing everything. You know — grocery shopping, laundry, carpools, etc.” she said, calling her husband her No. 1 supporter.

Curtis said Katie made so many sacrifices for his career that he was happy to support her.

Inspiring just one person

“If even one single mom sees this story and says ‘Oh, look, this lady did it with four kids.’ Obviously she’s a special case in some respect, but there’s other special cases out there, too,” he said.

“It’s a pain in the butt to go to med school as a 20-whatever-year-old when you’re used to not sleeping and studying for hours and hours and hours and you don’t have all the other stuff going on at home. And then to do that in your mid to late 30s into your 40s, when you have all this other stuff and lived plenty of life not studying. It’s an amazing story of determination,” he said.

Clark said she decided to share her story to encourage others to continue to “pursue their dreams in spite of the barriers that are bound to come up for anyone for any time.

“They certainly came up for me and timing has been a major factor for actually achieving those goals,” she said. “There’s no such thing as perfect timing. It doesn’t exist. You can keep looking for opportunities to make dreams reality.”

Treating patients with ‘dignity and respect’

Clark said she hopes her experiences will help her be a compassionate physician.

“I hope to best serve my patients and my community and show all of my patients the same dignity and respect and compassion that I was shown,” she said.

She also acknowledges that not everyone supported her.

“Sure, there were hard days and there was sometimes harsh judgment,” she said. “But more so I was shown tremendous care and compassion. None of the humongous privilege I’ve been afforded is lost on me.”

Curtis said his wife "is great at understanding where people are coming from because she’s been in those spots."

“She's very determined, intelligent and nice and empathetic,” he said. “The more doctors we have like her, the better off we all are.”

Beacon Journal staff reporter Betty Lin-Fisher can be reached at 330-996-3724 or blinfisher@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her @blinfisherABJ on Twitter or www.facebook.com/BettyLinFisherABJ To see her most recent stories and columns, go to www.tinyurl.com/bettylinfisher

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Silver Lake mother of four fulfills doctor dream at age 43