The Paid Leave Podcast

How Family Tragedy Inspired a Surgeon to Become a Storyteller and Powerful Medical Social Media Influencer

• The Connecticut Paid Leave Authority

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In this episode of The Paid Leave Podcast, I speak with a doctor who I have followed for over a year on social media. Her inspirational storytelling has created her as a viral medical social media influencer, with over 150 million views and close to 900 thousand followers just on TikTok. Dr. Erin Nance is a board-certified orthopedic surgeon and viral TikTok creator known as @littlemissdiagnosed, where she uses humor and storytelling to make medicine feel human again. She’s the bestselling author of Little Miss Diagnosed, co-host of The Medical Detectives Podcast, and the founder and CEO of FeelBetr, a new platform bringing doctors and patients together to share real, credible health stories in the social media age.

Dr. Nance shares her journey to becoming a surgeon, influenced by a childhood experience with an orthopedic surgeon after she was injured. She discusses the importance of social media in raising disease awareness, citing her "31 for 31" campaign that reached over 100 million views. Dr. Nance highlights the significance of paid leave programs, sharing personal stories and the impact on her brother's life.  On her first day of residency, her brother had an accident in a swimming pool and became a paraplegic. He lives in Connecticut and has utilized bonding leave with Connecticut Paid Leave, when they welcomed their new child.


To follow Dr. Erin Nance on social media go to @littlemissdiagnosed on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. Dr. Erin Nance 🇺🇸 (@littlemissdiagnosed) | TikTok

To get to the FeelBetr platform go to FeelBetr | The FeelBetr Founder Story: Meet Erin Nance

For more information on Dr. Erin Nance go toErin Nance, MD | Orthopedic Hand Surgeon | Midtown East, NY

For more information or apply for benefits go to ctpaidleave.org

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Nancy Barrow:

Hello Connecticut, and welcome to The Paid Leave Podcast. The title basically says it all. I'm Nancy Barrow, and I will be delving into this new state program and how it can help you and your family. This podcast will give you information you should know about Connecticut Paid LOeave and maybe just a little bit more Connecticut Paid Leave brings peace of mind to your home, family and workplace. Welcome to the paid leave podcast. I found an incredible doctor on Tiktok last year, and have been following her ever since. Dr.Erin Nance is a board certified orthopedic surgeon and viral TikTok creator known as at littlemissdiagnosed, and the miss is (m, i, s, s.) She's very clever with that. She uses humor and storytelling to make medicine feel human again, which is awesome. And she's the best selling author of Little Miss Diagnosed, and co-host of the medical detectives podcast, and the founder and CEO of FeelBetr. It's a new platform bringing doctors and patients together to share real, credible health stories in this social media age. And welcome to The Paid Leave Podcast. Dr Nance.

Erin Nance:

Oh, thanks, Nancy, it's a pleasure to be here, and I love that I have a personal connection to Connecticut and family members who are utilized, have utilized your paid leave. So I'm thrilled to be here.

Nancy Barrow:

And that's the beautiful part of it, right? Like, I followed you before, and I was like, wow, you have family members in Connecticut. The connection is, you know what, seven degrees of separation? Well, tell me why you decided to become a surgeon, and what that journey was as a female in the surgical world. You know, it's a boys club. We all know that it probably wasn't easy in med school and residency and fellowship.

Erin Nance:

Well, my story starts with my own fall. When I was a kid, I fell down the stairs and broke my arm, and when I got to the hospital, I wasn't seen by an ordinary doctor. I was seen by this man in a tuxedo, and I was very confused. I mean, I was only seven years old, but I like, I don't think like James Bond, you know, works in the hospital. And it wasn't until years later that I learned that that orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Lexiadis, he was a friend of my father, who was a lawyer for the hospital. He wasn't a doctor, but he was very good friends with the orthopedic surgeons, and he had called him. He was not on call that night. He was at the opera with his wife, and he left the opera to come and take care of me. So I have always been, you know, enamored with orthopedic surgeons, and I just wanted to be that person. I wanted to be Dr. Lexiadis. And when I was seven years old, I didn't know that orthopedics was 94% male, right? I just knew this is someone who was my hero, and I wanted to be just like him. So to be honest, I probably had blinders on and that I didn't know, and I didn't care if there was only, you know, very few women that went into it, because I just this was something that I wanted to do, and I dedicated pretty much my entire young adult career to becoming an orthopedic surgeon.

Nancy Barrow:

And your parents were pretty influential in that, too. You talk about that in your book, little misdiagnosed. Tell me a little bit about your parents influence on you?

Erin Nance:

Well, it's funny, because my dad would always say, you can be anything you want when you grow up, just not a lawyer. And really funny, because he was a lawyer, and I was like, Dad, wouldn't you want me to be a lawyer like you were a lawyer, and I see it in myself too, with my own daughter, you know, she's I would never discourage her from doing anything. But I know, as you could tell from the book, all of the dirty back end stuff that happens to reach that goal, and that happens in any industry, right? I'm sure people who are in entertainment, they'd be like, don't go into entertainment, right? So, you know, my parents, they were very, you know, encouraging. And whatever I wanted to do, they were so supportive. They would have, you know, I commuted an hour and a half each way to high school every day just to get to the best high school that I could go to. And looking back, that's crazy. I can't imagine having my, you know, 14 year old just, you know, take trains and subways and busses every day. But I think they just saw that that was my passion, that I had a goal, and this was the path to get to that goal. So however they could support me, they did.

Nancy Barrow:

They must be, like, fascinated with your social media. I mean, are they like, floored, and how did that like come about your social media?

Erin Nance:

So, to be very fair, almost none of my family, including my parents, my husband, my you know, cousins, know anything about the social media part of my life. They themselves are not on. Social media. And I think early on, they were kind of thinking like, what are you doing, not not in a judgmental way, but, you know, thinking like, Oh, I thought you were a surgeon, or I thought, you know, this is what you're doing. And I still am a surgeon, and I still see patients and I still operate, but what I found is that I have such a larger impact with what I'm doing on social media than I could ever do seeing the, you know, 20 plus patients I see a week in my office. Also, to be fair, when I first started on social media as Okay, I want to have a like, a professional presence, not just as a mom, posting pictures of like my dinner or, you know, a kid's birthday party, right? I intentionally wanted to have a professional presence, and I worked with a social media company called hook point, and they are the ones who really taught me how to, in essence, reverse engineer viral videos. This is not luck, this is all can be learned. So they kind of taught me that there are certain structures that exist, that you can utilize those structures, but put your own spin on it. So for me, what I really gravitated towards was the storytelling nature of social media. So for example, I'm sure a lot of people have heard or seen these Get Ready With Me videos, right about people putting on their makeup, absolutely right? It's not about the makeup, okay? That is a cue that you are going to listen to a story, right? And that's what I kind of adopted, I use social media as a educational platform through which storytelling is the method in which I educate.

Nancy Barrow:

And I love the fact that you really stay in scrubs and you know, so there is that professionalism and that people do trust you with the information, and has it changed for you throughout your social media experience that you've sort of changed a little bit, because now you're going to really cool stuff and going to like MIT and finding out new things for people to use.

Erin Nance:

Well, when I first, first started, I did a lot more of my own personal storytelling, and that became the basis for little misdiagnosed those stories. In fact, like a little known secret, is when I was approached to this book, they said, Well, you have to have 50% new material. So I stopped telling my personal stories because I needed things to write about in the book. And that's when I started putting an emphasis on disease awareness. So I had these very, very popular campaigns called 31 for 31 the most commonly misdiagnosed conditions in women. And those are the campaigns that really, I would say, put me on the map. That's when I went from, you know, a couple of million views to over 100 million views in a year, and, maybe 100,000 followers to close to a million followers today. So I have spent probably the past two years focused on bringing awareness to conditions which, to be fair, they're not even rare, they're just rarely diagnosed. So that has been the focus, and now my focus is really on shedding light to the innovations and the solutions that exist for these problems. Because, as we were talking, you know, off camera, about different, you know, innovations that even I have not heard of, right? So for me, I take the responsibility of showing up as a doctor online very seriously, as a presenting as a doctor, I have a different responsibility with the content that I am putting out there, because there is this implicit trust and authority that goes along with me being a doctor on screen.

Nancy Barrow:

I just wanted to thank you for your latest post on Tiktok about finding a lump in your own breast. Why was that so important for you to share? I mean, you're very personal. You've talked a lot about like, oh, I have the numbness on one side of my body.

Erin Nance:

And the story about finding the lump in my chest, I had been a guest at this innovation summit, and there were these two young men who created this new device to help with early detection of breast cancer. And the story that they shared with me was that this this young man, he had a young cousin who felt a lump in her breast. She went three months without saying anything, because she was just so nervous. She didn't know what to do, she didn't know if it was real, and she went to his father. Happened to be a physician, and when she brought it up to him, and he palpated the mask, he said, You have to go get a mammogram tomorrow, right? And so that was the story about how they created this tool to help women have more confidence in if what they were. Feeling is real, is real, right? Because I think, and I talk about this in a different Ted, talk about the stages misdiagnosis, but the first stage is denial, right? You think, Oh, it's nothing. I must have slept on it. Funny. It'll go away on its own, right? So that is a natural part to how we kind of just protect ourselves.

Nancy Barrow:

Talk about your own journey, about being misdiagnosed.

Erin Nance:

I, after covid, came down with some random symptoms that as an expert in hand surgeon orthopedics, I kind of myself went through my whole the whole denial pattern thinking like, Oh, this is will go away. I was reading the entire Harry Potter series with my daughter, so I was like, Oh, I just had a heavy book on my hand for the past four months, and it took over a year to get a diagnosis for something that I'm an expert in, right? So if it took me that long, and I have to say that I was very fortunate in that I never came up across the barrier of people not believing me, right when I said I feel numbness and weakness, even though no labs ever showed anything. The EKGs, you know, we're all or the the EMGs were all coming back normal. I still had doctors who were willing to be like, Okay, let's do this thing. Let's try this thing. Let's go through this pathway. And so I would say I was really more, you know, undiagnosed technically, than necessarily misdiagnosed. But not everybody gets that, you know, curiosity and that willingness to work with their doctors, to keep going, to keep pressing for a solution. And the post that I just made from the MIT, from the tall research lab, it really was the first time I could see in black and white, the proof right. Here it is. Oh, my God, we can show people. We can tell people this is what the dysfunction is, and that's why having a diagnosis is so powerful.

Nancy Barrow:

Yeah, it validates what you're saying. Why are so many women misdiagnosed, and why is there such a disparity?

Erin Nance:

The practice of medicine is built off of pattern recognition. Okay, so, for example, if I tell you to close your eyes and tell me, like, Who do you picture when I say someone is having a heart attack, it's a 60 year old man, right? It's Mr. Big.

Nancy Barrow:

It was my dad, yeah, yeah, Mr. Big Yeah.

Erin Nance:

Okay, but did you know that women are twice as likely to die after having a heart attack than men? So we as physicians, right, have been taught all of these to recognize these patterns of symptoms, but for men, not for women. Women, their symptoms of heart attack are typically diagnosed as a typical symptoms, and that's only because it's atypical compared to how men present right. Women are likely to say are more likely to say that they have shoulder pain right, more likely to say, I just am feeling off, right? As opposed to the man who's saying, I feel like an elephant is sitting on my chest. So and that's because we just have a complete lack of studying women in all these research studies. So it wasn't until 1993 that women were even included in the majority of research studies. So we have a long history of excluding women, and because of that, the pattern recognition that all of the physicians that we have grown up with and we have been taught have basically been patterns to recognize how men present with symptoms.

Nancy Barrow:

Maybe it's a good place to talk about your brain child platform, feel better. How did FeelBetr come about?

Erin Nance:

The point of developing FeelBetr, just B, E, T, R, FeelBetr, is that I want to empower the individuals, the patients, to have a more informed conversation with their doctor, because they have seen content from verified sources. Right? The problem is that when you go onto social media, you do not know who is the source of the content, all right? And that's where I think we need some guardrails that just don't exist on Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram, Reddit, right? And that's why, when you go to your doctor and you say, Hey, I saw this on Tiktok, they roll their eyes. Yeah, exactly. And it doesn't mean that there's not really great physicians and medical experts giving good information education online. It's just that the platform itself is untrustworthy. So we're aiming to build this go to place for trustworthy resources. That can then empower you to have a more informed conversation with your doctor.

Nancy Barrow:

And your book, someone approached you about doing little misdiagnosed a surgeon's guide to breaking bones and bending rules, which I love. Tell me what you're most proud of in this book?

Erin Nance:

I think I'm most proud of the fact that I think right now there is a lot of anger and sadness and mistrust in the healthcare system, and I just wanted to write something so that people knew that there were people who cared, that people physicians are going above and beyond to help people despite the system that we're working in. So I write in one of the chapters, and it's actually in the back of my book, but I say that hope is the most powerful drug, and hope can come in many different forms. It can come in learning about a new medication, learning about a new treatment. It can come from having a family member say, I believe you. It can come from family members saying, let me go with you to your next doctor's appointment so you have someone there right for backup, for support. So I wrote this book for anyone who has felt like they have felt almost hopeless navigating this system that there are people who want to help you.

Nancy Barrow:

Yeah, I think that Jorge like who refused the hand surgery after a fall because he was worried about being deported. Like that was such a powerful and very current kind of situation that people are really dealing with. And I thought that, and there's tons of them throughout your book, of examples of people who have had good results or scary things happen to them.

Erin Nance:

This book was written from a very particular point in time in my life. So it really captures just my residency, which is over 15 years old. And what I was finding is that almost every story, every vignette that I talked about in the book, is still current, is still happening. And when I wrote that chapter, you know about the gentleman who had a terrible fall and needed life saving emergency medicine, but he was too scared to have it because of what the potential consequences could be. I wrote that chapter two years ago, right? That have that event happened over 10 years ago, but when I told that story online, I had never told that story online before, and I told it, I think in maybe August, on social media, and it is one of my most watched videos ever, because the themes stay the same, For better or for worse, in this case, for worse. But these are themes that people, unfortunately, are dealing with every day.

Nancy Barrow:

Your storytelling is so powerful and it helps so much with awareness. And you told a really personal story on Tiktok about your brother. Would you mind sharing that story?

Erin Nance:

Sure so this was really the reason why I have a social media account, why I wrote this book. But I tell people, I feel like everyone has a Netflix worthy story about their lives, but you will not know when it will happen or how it will play out, and for me, I always wanted to share the story of my first day of work as an orthopedic surgery resident. And I have, as I told you at the beginning of this podcast, my whole life, I have worked towards being this orthopedic surgeon. I did pre med I went through med school, I did all of the you know, get the highest scores on the exams all this. And I finally match into the orthopedic program of my dream, which is Lennox Hill Hospital, where my dad used to work as a lawyer. And I'm so excited to start, and I'm about to start the shift on night floats, which, if you've seen any you know, TV shows about night flip, you know, night floats, pretty scary. It's a bunch of 20 year olds running the hospital, running around. And I go to start my first assignment, which is doing a pre op note for a patient who needs an emergency surgery. And I get a phone call from my mom, and it turns out that one of my brothers had dove into a pool, broke his neck and unfortunately became a quadriplegic. And I went from being the doctor right on call there to help people and solve everyone's, you know, problems, to now being part of the patient side. And I left, you know, Lenox Hill, you know, drove out to Stony Brook where my brother was and that story and that incident really is what shaped me as a doctor. You know, I just remember those mornings waiting with bated breath for the doctors to come in and talk to us. And so now, whenever I'm that doctor doing rounds. I always make sure that I stick around to answer questions. If it's too early and no family members are there, I say, when your family gets here, have them send me a message, and I will come back and I will talk to them. But I don't think I would have ever done that if I didn't have that experience. On the other side, how's your brother doing? He's doing incredible. He and his wife live in Connecticut. They have a one and a half year old. I just saw them this past weekend, and he lives a very fulfilling life. He works full time. He owns his own home. You know? He has a beautiful, loving, supportive family. Is it still really hard? Yes, it is really hard. But one thing that I really credit Kevin is that he always has hope. He is always sending me articles. We, in fact, are going to visit a surgeon. I went to a talk again, as I said, Now, my focus is on learning about all the latest innovations. I went to a talk about a plastic surgeon who is doing literally, life changing surgery, nerve transfer surgery for people who are quadriplegics, and so we're going down to Johns Hopkins in a month to get him evaluated. So I think again, it goes back to that hope, right? And hope can take many different forms, but you always have to keep that flame alive, and you just have to be ready to accept that hope when it presents itself.

Nancy Barrow:

Yeah, is Kevin, the one that used Connecticut Paid Leave when he had his baby,

Erin Nance:

When he had, when he had his daughter.

Nancy Barrow:

That's so beautiful. I mean, that is like so perfect. Dr Nance.

Erin Nance:

I remember he spent, I want to say it was many weeks, 12 weeks. We have up to probably months, yeah, being able to be with his daughter. I know his wife also took time off as well. And they were able to kind of stagger it also so that they could get, like, the maximum, right amount of time with their with their newborn daughter, and something like that is so important, you know, and especially for a dad, the fathers need just the same amount of bonding time with their children as the mothers. So the fact that he was able to use that without anyone giving him any grief or any judgment, a very different situation from my own family, when my husband took the rest of the week off, and that was it, and then he was back to work. That was 10 years ago in a different state, but I'm just so proud that there are systems in place that put this priority on this really critical bonding time for both moms and dads.

Nancy Barrow:

And I'm so glad that your brother, Kevin, got to take advantage of that. I know you live in New York. Your Practice is in New York. How valuable are programs like Connecticut Paid Leave or New York Paid Leave to the people that you know and care about and the patients that you treat, because it's caregivers too, that they get caregiver leave if they're dealing with someone who has a serious health condition.

Erin Nance:

The joke was, whenever people asked me if I was on maternity leave when I had my daughter. I write about in my book that I had a job offer taken away because I had asked about, what are the policies surrounding, you know, maternity leave and, you know, call situations. And so I would just say that, well, I'm on maternity I'm just doing straight up maternity I'm not, I don't have a job, so I don't have maternity leave, but I really recognize for me, that was a blessing in disguise, because it gave me five months off with my daughter, and it also allowed me the time to create the job that I wanted. It gave me the time to take a step back and say, Okay, do I want to work in some workplace where I'm only going to get, you know, two weeks off, and if something happens, I can't leave to go, you know, to Michael when I cover my own daughter's emergency. So I see in my patients, right? I am a hand surgeon. I'm dealing with complex orthopedic problems. It is so important that they have a recovery period, right? So if it's the patient themselves, if it's someone who is helping cover a family member who is having a massive surgery and needs to take time off to cover them, if someone is, you know, pregnant and needs the time to obviously, you know, bond with their child. The fact that there's so many different ways to utilize this sleeve is just incredible, because in the end, we're talking about full body health. All right, whether it's, you know, due to pregnancy, due to illness, we need people to recover both their. Body and their spirit, right? And they're emotionally and I hear it time and time and again from the women who've been able to take that full time off. It's never easy to go back, right? It is always hard, whether you're handing your kid off to a daycare center or the nanny or Grandma, you know a family member, it doesn't I can't say it gets easier, but knowing that you've had at least some protected time, and that you feel okay, I am now more confident in sending my child to daycare, in leaving my child with a nanny, because I've had that special protected time first, there are so many surgeries that people need, honestly, full time help, and they're probably not going to get it in the term of a, you know, full time official nurse. So a lot of that work falls to the family. And we're talking about, even if you right, you had knee replacements. It's hard just to get to the bathroom.

Nancy Barrow:

Right? Really.

Erin Nance:

You need you need help. So again, I'm just very proud at all of these states who have put these systems in place where you don't feel like it's a burden, right? To go to your boss and say, Hey, I'm so sorry. And that's not to say that you can't do really good planning and leave your like, I'm an employer, right? I have employees. I really appreciate the advanced planning and what we can do. But in the end, these programs make it easier on both the employer side and the employee side to say, yes, you handle your business. We're going to be able to cover our business on the other end.

Nancy Barrow:

Yeah, and it's great to take you know FMLA to protect your job. That's we always tell people to do that. But if Kevin ever needs anything, you now know my email, so tell him that he can email me if he ever needs any help. Because we cover like we cover so much mental health. We cover it's, it's a really comprehensive program here in Connecticut. I'm really proud of it.

Erin Nance:

But this is why programs like this podcast are so important, because I doubt anyone knows all of the possible ways to use leave, right? They may just think it's just for maternity, paternity leave. And so this is a great platform for people to learn. Oh, you know, if my mom fell and broke her hip, I could take off three weeks to help get her situated through her rehab, you know, and finding a place for her and know that you are supported legally and financially through this process.

Nancy Barrow:

Yeah it's such a great thing. And being in New York, where you work, or being in Connecticut, you know, we're very lucky to be in states that have these programs that are pretty vast, and you can do intermittent leave or reduced schedule from work, or take that full time off that you want to to bond with your baby or to recuperate from a surgery. What would you like people to take away from this podcast, Dr Nance?

Erin Nance:

I want people to know that they are not alone, right? This is probably the most, I think, valuable lesson from just having a social media presence in that I recognize what I am really good at, and I am really good at creating spaces where people feel safe, where people feel seen, where people feel hurt, and I've been doing it on Tiktok for years now. I do that in my office right one on one with patients, and I really just see social media as an evolution of healthcare communication. The reason why I built FeelBetr as a platform is because I wanted a safer, more trusted platform for health information, because, as I said on the top of the podcast, we, as physicians, we have a responsibility to give that information, not only in a accurate, credible way, but also in forums, in using networks that are also trustworthy and credible. So you know that that's the real reason for social for feel better is to be that go to place for credible health information, but also for people to find one another who are going through the same thing. So they just do not feel alone, because you are not alone.

Nancy Barrow:

And you can maybe find an answer, like you finally found an answer at MIT.

Erin Nance:

Correct, as you know now, I would say the shift in my content is towards shedding light on the answers, on the new treatments, the new therapies, the new diagnostics, because people they want to get better. And the overwhelming message I have gotten from my followers is help me, help myself, right and in any way that I can do that, whether that is something you can do physically on yourself, or something that you can do in partnership with your physician, you know that's that's the relationship that I. I want to help.

Nancy Barrow:

Dr Nance, you are amazing, and thank you so much for all the time that you gave me. I know that you prioritize a lot.

Erin Nance:

Thank you, Nancy, so much for having me.

Nancy Barrow:

For more information or to apply for benefits. Please go to ctpaidleave.org. This has been another edition of the paid leave podcast. Please like and subscribe so you'll be notified about new podcasts that become available. Connecticut Paid Leave is a public act with a personal purpose. I'm Nancy Barrow, and thanks for listening.

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