Welcome✨ START HERE if you're new : Me, Myself, and I

A few blurbs to introduce myself vulnerably and nakedly (literally)

Hello lovelies,

I’m so happy to have found this platform and be amongst tons of inspiring creatives!

Here comes my first post after much perfectionistic hesitation and fear of overexposure. After all, I worked as a Plastic Surgeon for nearly three decades and kept myself very private.

Bullet point highlights of my fifty-seven-year journey below will help you get to know me a bit - the good, the bad, and the not so pretty. These experiences don’t define me though they clearly have informed my path and brought me to enter the deep spiritual journey I’ve been on for the past 16+ years. I’ll expand on some of these experiences in future writing, but if you’re feeling extra curious and can’t wait till then please feel free to send me a message and connect. I am open and welcoming of any questions, comments, or observations you might have.

*Disclaimer : this might feel like an autobiography LOL 57 years is a long time to live this life and I want to give you a taste of me. Many of these events will show up in my future writing so it’ll all make sense to you eventually. As the old saying goes, trust me, I’m a doctor (are we still trusting doctors?).

Deep breath, pace yourself, and here we go :

• At the age of Zero, I came in to the world with spiky red hair. It only lasted 4 months and has been blonde since (irrelevant detail but I wanted to have full disclosure from the get-go, building trust with my audience).

• At 8 we changed countries. My parents moved our small family (my younger brother and I) from the desert climate of the Middle East to NYC in February, of all months! It left me with a lifetime of cold intolerance, having me move to Florida as soon as I could buy my own plane ticket (but let’s keep to the timeline).

• At 8.5 I said I’m going to become a surgeon. I don’t know to this day where this idea came from but later in life learned that both my parents had wanted to study medicine. Maybe the thought was inscribed in my DNA.

• At 9 I learned English

• At 9.5 I found my father passed out exsanguinating on the bathroom floor from a perforated duodenal ulcer (we found that out later), I called for help and luckily he survived after a major surgery that restricted him from drinking his beloved coffee and converted him into a tea drinker.

• At 13 I wrote my first poem -and began journaling - and haven’t stopped since! Poetry became my sanctuary. A safe space for all the emotions that had nowhere else to go since neither of my parents had the Emotional I.Q. to have real talks and guide my sensitive self through this life.

• At 18 I fell in love with a Parisian boy who broke my heart, but helped perfect my French.

• At 19 My parents divorced, blindsiding me as I had no idea their marriage was on the brink. It was confusing, harrowing, and disorienting. Poetry and inner contemplative silence got me through it. Plus, I took on my first lover : chocolate !

• At 20 I became vegetarian and still am. It was an easy decision because I never liked eating animals, since childhood.

• At 21 I spoke 4 languages fluently, no need to be so impressed, I got the first three as freebies from my family heritage and life circumstance : (1) Spanish-my mother tongue since my parents are South American (2) Hebrew-my birth country’s language (3) English-which I learned upon arriving in NYC (4) French-which I studied in high school and college, while taking pre-med curriculum (5)* I also studied Italian and German in college (and Russian years later) but am not as fluent as the other languages. I might go back to studying them in between posting on Substack :)

• At 21.5 I fell in love with an Uruguayan man on a trip to Montevideo. He operated the elevator and we kissed between floors. I left back to NYC and bought him a ticket to move countries and be with me. After a year together, we lost touch (longgg story) and 35 years later, out of the blue (if you believe in blue vs. karma) we saw each other at a convention center where I was giving a presentation on Holistic Plastic Surgery. Yes, it was shocking to see his dark eyes and thick hair hadn’t changed a bit, though the mole between his brows seemed larger (something only a Plastic Surgeon would notice) ! I couldn’t make this up if I tried!

• At 22 I started medical school in Guadalajara, Mexico in order to live with my father who was attending dental school after his divorce from my mother.

• At 24 I transferred to and graduated from Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in NYC

• At 25 I met my future husband in NY’s Central Park as he walked by to go jogging while a fellow medical student friend and I were having lunch on the lawn. She knew him and called him over to say hi. We had an eyeball-meet-eyeball sparkly moment and he called me a few days later to go out.

• At 27 I got my dream surgical residency at Albert Einstein and Montefiore in the Bronx and trained as a Plastic & Reconstructive Surgeon and Microsurgeon. Here I learned the delicate impermanence of life as I navigated the trauma in the emergency rooms of the Bronx Zoo, as we mockingly named it.

• At 30 I got married in NYC.

• At 31 I birthed the first of our 5 kids, all within 10 years. Pushed out each one of them, no twins, though I would have loved it.

• At 32 I had a miscarriage with my second pregnancy. All my dreams dissolved in the bloody water of the toilet bowl in a NYC Barnes and Noble where I was studying for my Plastic Surgery Board Exam daily, and subsequently miscarried.

• At 32.75 Fortunately I became pregnant again within months and delivered my second healthy child in NY, before moving south. Though the emotions I carried around the miscarriage — sadness, anger, frustration, disillusionment, heartbreak — where not processed until many years later.

• At 33.5 we moved south , leaving the NYC winters and finally warming my bones.

• At 33.75 I began my entrepreneurial career as a business owner of my solo Holistic Plastic Surgery practice.

• At 34 after a lifetime of intention and hard work plus 14 years of higher education I finally fulfilled my dream of becoming a Board Certified Plastic Surgeon

  *sorry for the huge pix, no idea how to shrink the photo, flower in scrub cap for Women Physicians Day.

  

• At 34.1 I boarded a flight to NYC, in deep sorrow, to support my best friend from high school at the memorial for her young husband who perished in the towers in 911. My friend was pregnant with their second child and chose to abort, unable to envision raising another child without her husband. I did my best to support her with our long distance late night phone calls over the next year.

• Between 34-42 I worked non-stop building and running my surgical practice and Wellness Center, raised my 5 young kids, ran my household, oh yes, and there was the husband, too.

• At 42 I cracked! Finding myself crying on the floor of my walk-in-closet (a-la-Eat Pray Love dark-night-of-the-soul moment), unable to keep up with the life I had created. Wife, mother of 5 young ones, business owner boss lady, surgeon and healer for my patients. Needless to say, imposter syndrome kicked in hard. This was the beginning of the end of my marriage and the deepening of my self discovery journey and spiritual awakening . Isn’t there more to life than this , was the question I grappled with.

• At 45, after three years of deep emotional purging in therapy and by diving into the wisdom of the ancient mystical paths, I divorced. I entered a new life of raising five kids ages 4-14 mostly on my own, all while working as a surgeon and running my business and household. I still haven’t found the words to describe the difficulty of those years.

• At 45.5 , still floundering post-divorce, I supported my 14 year-old daughter through her deeply painful clinical depression, one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. She’s active in destigmatizing mental health challenges and so I can share here openly. Despite being a physician, I had never experienced a family member with depression, less so my child, and was learning in the trenches.

• At 46, my aunt and best friend, Miriam, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I supported her through her journey. As a physician, niece, and soul sister I had a uniquely, painfully, intimate view of her journey. Helping her end her life was one of the most humbling experiences of my life.

• At 49 , Miriam left her body and I spread her ashes in our beloved Florida ocean off the pier after supporting her for three and a half years in her ovarian cancer journey. Miriam was my mother’s younger sister, which didn’t help the lifelong tense dynamic between my mother and I.

• At 49.75 I fell in love like I had never fallen in love before. Deep love. Wordless love. Soul love.

• At 50 I was still grieving Miriam when I turned 50, four months after she died, and wanted to feel alive, so what’s a woman to do? Obviously, nude body painting #1! My nipples, thighs, lumps, and bumps were all in full sight as Alvin, the artist sprayed every inch of me. I had him paint my body into a unicorn because that was the spirit animal that Miriam and I connected with.

  *I highly recommend this amazing experience to ALL women. It sparked a healing journey in my relationship to my body, after a lifetime of conflict.

  

• At 50.5 I did another nude photo shoot #2 (starting to feel good in the nude, though only on camera, not in public beaches). It was for a project called Unleashed that photographed women and gave a voice to their stories. My oldest daughter also did this shoot, in separate sessions, and turned out to be a bonding mother-daughter experience for us both. I was given paint and free to smear it all over myself in self expression. It was so freeing! Here I am just after the session, looking like I had a paint fight with a toddler and lost.

  

• At 51 My beloved grandmother died. Safta. She was twelve days short of 99! We were besties and confidants. It left a hole in my heart.

• At 51.5 I ran my first half-marathon after never having run to the corner store. I wrote Miriam and Safta’s names with black sharpie on both my calves and ran the whole darn thing! Other than birthing my babies this is probably the hardest physical act I’ve ever participated in.

  

• At 52 I did the third #3 and last (thus far) of my nude photo shoots. I asked the same talented body art artist from the first shoot to do a camouflage motif. We met at the pier where we dispersed Miriam’s ashes and he painted my body so as to blend with the ocean, sky, and pier. It was an early morning in June and the camp kids and elderly men that gathered to watch the body painting that day got more moon-ed than they got sun 🤣. In the photo below you can see me standing on the sand, there is no photographic trickery. His magnificent body painting blended me in, making me One with Miriam, whose ashes were thrown off that pier and lived in that ocean, in all the oceans🙏✨💗

  

• At 52.5 I ran my second half-marathon, as I approached the finish line, Miriam’s favorite song came on my air pods, Celia Cruz, La Vida Es Un Carnaval. I felt her running with me.

• At 52.75 I travelled to India for the first time to an Ayurvedic Center to have a Panchakarma (detox) with my mother. She had just retired from a long career in investment banking and it got me wondering about my own ideas about retirement (I had never before considered it). In India, Mom and I began connecting and healing a lifetime of mother wound between us, she was 72.

• At 53 Covid hit the brakes on my life. During quarantine, I was home with my five kids and we built a vegetable garden, pruned bonsai, and I had the time to reconnect with my passion for poetry and art, both have always been my spiritual medicine. After three months in quarantine I wondered what do I want to create in my life, now that the world has changed ?

• At 53.5 I sat for my first of soon to be many silent retreats. The silence was easy - embracing, loving, whole.

• At 54 I left my 25+ year career as a Holistic Plastic & Reconstructive surgeon and continued my path as a healer - as a Soul Surgeon✨ My patients gave me this name and I kept it. I recounted this experience in A Surgeon's Journey Home

  *apologies for big pic, again, no idea how to cut the pixels down

• At 54.5 I created my next venture, the The MindFul Space . A virtual and in-person place to offer Soul Surgery, with the ultimate goal of supporting deep transformation through becoming aware of patterns, releasing suffering, and reconnecting with our true nature. It’s about living in the lightness of being – a state of freedom, presence, and self compassion. It’s the art of waking up to who you really are – and realizing you were never broken in the first place.

• At 55 I also took time to grieve releasing my identity as a Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeon. It took lots of tears to shed this part of my life, it felt like I had amputated a vital part of me. Though I finally learned that I didn’t need to strive to be the best version of myself anymore, just be the most authentic.

• At 55.5 I learned I was HSP. Though I had known I was raising my five HSP-kids, somehow I never connected the dots to realize, I too had extra sensitivities beyond the norm. Many of my sound, taste, texture, and emotional sensitivities began to make sense under the guise of the Highly Sensitive Person spectrum. This newfound awareness brought me to meet myself with renewed grace and compassion.

• At 56 my oldest daughter, who has been my super-duper-close person for her entire life became estranged and it’s been nearly two years since I’ve talked to her, hugged her, or seen her in person. No one prepares you for this kind of pain. Ambiguous loss, they call it. I wrote about it here in two parts, Relationship on Mute.

• At 56.5 I began writing my memoir. I dabbled in prose writing in the past and finally got serious about it. The multi-tasking, over-achiever in me was sure I’d have it published in 6 months, ha! I was not at all aware of the huge undertaking it entails, and the emotional rollercoaster it takes you on. Still writing and will post some of it here.

• At 57 a combination of unexplained symptoms (rash, hives, migraine, vertigo, diffuse random swellings) from the last 15 years culminated in a diagnosis of an Autoimmune Disorder. Still figuring this one out.

• At 57.5 I joined Substack 😊and continue evolving through all the iterations of me in this life.

  

  Photo by Campbell's Photography on Unsplash

  WHEW !

  YOU DID IT !

  THANK YOU !

If you got through the entire bio, please take a deep breath, stretch, and possibly a bathroom break. I applaud you and thank you! You’ll be happy to know that this is the short version LOL! It’s quite a humbling experience to see my life laid out in bullet points as I’ve never done this before.

Looking forward to sharing much more from the musings of my mind. I’d love to meet YOU in real-time. Click on this link if you'd like to join our sacred zoom C.O.R.E. community.

Thank you for inviting me on your journey 🙏

In Love & Presence, with a dash of humor

XO Dr. Tamy

*ps I named myself Skye✨

*pss If you’re curious for more, here’s my Journey From Plastic Surgeon to Soul Surgeon

*psss i love you, really. I come from Love. I live as Love. And you are that Love, too.

✨Your presence here is so deeply appreciated. Leave a comment, like, and subscribe if you feel inspired. Would love to meet you in your inbox as well as get to know YOU.