Authors: Meenu Immaneni, Meghan Etsey, Vashti Price, Dr. Cristina LePort – on behalf of AMWA Gender Equity Task Force
“Our Voices, Our Future” is a podcast by the Gender Equity Task Force of the American Medical Women’s Association that explores the challenges, stories, and successes of those working to advance gender equity in medicine. Through candid conversations with changemakers, advocates, and leaders, each episode dives into issues like pay gaps, leadership disparities, and inclusive workplace culture. Tune in to be inspired, informed, and empowered to take action. Full episode listening links are available below the transcription.
Meenu: Welcome to Our Voices, Our Future, the podcast where we amplify the voices driving change in equity within medicine and beyond. Brought to you by the Gender Equity Task Force, a committee of the American Medical Women’s Association. We’re here to challenge norms, break barriers, and ignite conversations that matter.
I’m Meenu Immaneni, and in each episode, we dive into honest conversations with leaders, change makers, and advocates working to create a more inclusive and just world. No more silence, no more waiting. It’s time for Our Voices, Our Future. Today, we welcome Dr. Cristina LePort, a board-certified physician in both Internal Medicine and Cardiovascular Disease, with more than 30 years of experience in clinical practice. Born in Bologna, Italy, she began her medical journey at the University of Bologna. She completed her training at Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn and the University of California, Los Angeles. After years of dedication to medicine, Dr. LePort has turned her talents to fiction, writing medical thrillers that combine clinical position with page-turning suspense. Her debut novel, “Dissection: A Medical and Political Thriller,” released in 2022, explores the tense intersection of medical crisis and political intrigue, and her latest novel “Change of Heart: A Miner & Mulville Medical Thriller”, continues in that tradition offering a gripping narrative that tackles complex, a ethical dilemmas and richly drawn characters. Dr. LePort, welcome to the podcast. We’re thrilled to have you today.
Dr. LePort: Thank you very much for having me.
Meenu: Dr. LePort, you’ve had an incredible journey from growing up in Italy to becoming a cardiologist in the US. Can you take us back to the beginning and share what inspired you to pursue medicine and what that path has been like for you over the years?
Dr. LePort: I decided I wanted to be a doctor when I was 12 years old. I still remember that day I was sitting on a little terrace of my apartment building in Bologna, Italy. I was thinking, what can I do with my life? This is obviously something I was thinking about over time, not just in that particular moment, but that particular moment. The final decision came, and he never really wavered after that. I was asking myself, what can I do with my faculty, whatever I have, whatever intelligence I have, and all that, what could be the most important thing I could do with my life? Medicine came to mind because, you know, you save lives if you do a good job. So I couldn’t think of anything else much more important than that. It is interesting because I did not tell my parents for many years because at the time.
You know, a woman in Italy in the fifties. You’re supposed to just get married and have children. So, even like when I finally told my parents, because I had to say to them at the age of 18, because in Italy you don’t have college, at the age of 18, you decide what you’re gonna do after you finish high school. I had to go to the University and the Faculty of Medicine. Even after I told them, my mother kept saying, “If you want to be a doctor, at least be a pediatrician. You have to do with children; you work in schools or something.” So it’s interesting how medicine has developed since then, because now a woman can be anything she wants. It wasn’t so at the time when I made that decision to become a doctor. There weren’t too many women going into medicine,
Meenu: Medicine has come a long way since then. I remember that my grandmother was one of the first in the family to be a working woman of that age, and that’s inspired generations past to where I am now as well. So you’ve done that as well for the generations that come after you.
Dr. LePort: You know, it is interesting because my mother was a teacher, and she was very adventurous. She would go on a Lombretta in the little hills of Italy during the winter, even when pregnant. If you think about it, it’s probably terrible, but it’s very brave. Then she quit after she had me. She told me during my life, “You should work.” I think she regretted it. I became a project, but she recognized that she would work if she had to do it all over again. She would take care of me, and probably it would’ve been better for me because I probably wouldn’t have had some of the things I had to overcome by being so attached to my mother, not to go into psychotherapy now.
Meenu: So what made you pursue cardiology after internal medicine?
Dr. LePort: That was a midlife crisis, a professional midlife crisis. I practiced internal medicine. Well, I came, you know, to the United States after medical school, and I did my specialty in internal medicine, and then I practiced internal medicine for almost 20 years. I got to a point where there were two things. One, I felt almost like I had exhausted my thing, you know, and I needed some different challenges. Another thing was the widespread, I don’t know if we can go into that politics now, but of managed care. I became a gatekeeper, and I did not like that. So I just wanted to become something. My favorite specialty was cardiology. It was extremely hard. I was in my late 40s during my fellowship. So it took me three years of working part-time in research and this and that, getting a partner for my practice, and transferring my patients over. Finally, I matched with the VA UCLA program. I became a cardiologist, and I was very happy I did. I just brought new challenges and everything, I’m happy I did. My midlife crisis was successful.
Meenu: I am so glad to hear that. So what started your interest in writing medical thrillers, and how has your medical background shaped the authenticity and depth of your storytelling?
Dr. LePort: That was a late development because I was in school in Italy. I have to confess, I hated writing. I just did not like it at all. In class, we had this assignment called “il tema”, the theme. They would give a title, and you would write for two hours in class. I hated that; it was like a nightmare for me that day. So I never really imagined that I would be a writer or an author. When I came to the United States, I barely spoke English again. It was a challenge. I remember my first day of my internship with my little dictionary in my pocket. The only thing I knew was about bed pans because I had worked as an aide just to learn the language for a couple of months. Long story short, when I was thinking of getting into cardiology, I started reading other things, just to find new interests. I came across a short book by the author Ayn Rand, who wrote “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead”. She also wrote a nonfiction book about the art of fiction. If you know that book, which is very short, but if you know every word of it, you are a great author. The way it is described is unbelievable. I was almost flabbergasted to find out that if you are an author, you create your own world, then you invent your characters that you want to meet, and then you can make them do anything you want. So it was incredible.
I said, I’m gonna try writing a novel, and that’s how I started.
Meenu: That’s cool. Do you also like storyboards? When you write your novels, do you storyboard where you’re creating the world? What’s your creative process like?
Dr. LePort: I do not do storyboards. It may be necessary for certain books, but I have not found it helpful so far. I certainly have to have at least the full story in my head. That is one piece of advice that they give you in this book. It’s not a good idea to see where your characters bring you. I hear people doing that. I have to have the whole story, including the climax and how it ends. Now I have an outline, which only I can read. I throw everything in the kitchen sink in my outline. If some dialogue occurs to me, that would be nice. Whatever, comment. It’s very rough, but I need to have the story. Now, of course, as you write the actual book, things may change. In “Change of Heart”, I completely changed the ending after I finished my book because I realized that the protagonist was not in the climax. She was in a hospital bed, so that’s not acceptable. So obviously things may change and you can change stuff around as you write but I think at the beginning it is very important to have the whole story and you can be as detailed as you want in an in your outline, but I don’t think it is good to just go by the seat of your pants with a story.
Meenu: That’s cool that you have almost the big picture, and then you fill in the details, and things vary and change, but you have like where you want them to go.
Dr. LePort: It makes sense because you know art is a very selective field. So it’s selective recreation of reality, basically, but how can you be selective? The possibilities are infinite. So you have to have a standard to select something. Your standard is your story; it’s your central idea. Otherwise, you can start talking about something that may be very interesting and you find it delightful, challenging, or thrilling. If it has nothing to do with the story, that is, if it doesn’t push you along into your story, then it should be out. If you end up, if you don’t have a story, you’re gonna end up writing a lot of stuff that then you have to cut off. You’re going to end up with writer’s block. Everybody has writer’s block now and then, but it usually means that you’re not clear on something, and you have to put down whatever it is that you used to write. You have to think and think more about your story. Where is it going? Where should it go?
Meenu: That’s good advice. Can you share some challenges you may have faced during writing and publishing your first novel?
Dr. LePort: Actually, writing was the easy part. Publishing was the most difficult thing I’ve done in my life. I’m not saying the most important, but certainly the most difficult. It was harder than raising my kids; saving lives was a walk in the park. It was a terrible, gruesome deal. I wrote these books anyway; obviously, I wanted people to read them. I do not just write for myself. I write for myself as I’m writing, but I wanted to read the writing; otherwise, there is no final destination. It took me years and years. It took me some serious work. When I finally decided, okay, I will do this seriously, not just as a hobby. I got a writing coach, I got editors, I got this and that. Despite everything, I got rejection after rejection, I got more than 300 rejections for my first book, from the publishers and the agents. Finally, I made it. So you just have to keep on going. The rejection always hurts. I mean, you don’t develop crocodile skin from rejection. You hurt each of them, because this is your baby, you know? You rejected it. You put all this work in, and then, they don’t even read it, and they reject it before you even read it, because if they don’t like your query, they don’t read it. So, you know, you feel terrible. The only treatment that I find useful against rejection is to write more. Because when you write more, you can say, well, you didn’t like that, but this is new. So I had four full books by the time I got a publisher. So now they’re coming out one at a time because he loves them.
Meenu: Lovely. You did the work ahead of time.
Dr. LePort: It was really hard. It’s very discouraging.
Meenu: Yeah, the publishing world is really hard to get into, especially for new authors.
Dr. LePort: By the way, one of the agents suggested that I should publish as a man. I want you to know it happens even today, it’s incredible. I mean, how many women authors are best-selling authors?
Meenu: I mean, it’s like all the authors I read.
Dr. LePort: Imagine. I mean, it’s just amazing.
Meenu: Yes, that is crazy. Someone said that to you. It’s like it’s about writing. It’s what it should be about. Well, I’m glad the publisher said yes, and that you kept going, and that we have the books, and I’m excited for the next few books as well.
Meenu: My next question is about your books. So your novels feature complex characters. They’re navigating intense medical ethical dilemmas. Is there a particular storyline meaningful to you, or was it personally challenging for you to write?
Dr. LePort: I must say that “Dissection” was a pleasure to write. I was so excited. It was very strange because when I started, when I got the idea for Dissection, I was very depressed about my first book because there was a book before this one, which will be published next year. It received so many rejections, and it had gone through a lot of changes. I was so depressed because I had done everything, the editors, everything, and was still getting rejection. So I was watching TV and I saw this commercial about aspirin. There was a man in a suit, and his secretary ended up with a card, and the card says, “Your heart attack will arrive tomorrow.”. Of course, the commercial says it would be nice to know so that you can take aspirin, and you don’t get it. I was just frozen. I said that’s the book that’s going to get published. I changed it to your heart attack will arrive within an hour. That’s how people get this card. It goes from heart attacks to almost World War III because it becomes a political thriller. The medical part was easy. This cardiology is a dissection of the artery. The political part was challenging, although it was a pleasure. The political part, I had to do a lot of research to get it right, because you think you know things. I thought I knew all about the presidential succession and all that. There are so many things that when you start writing, you have to be precise. So I had to do a lot of research. My husband was afraid the FBI would show up because I was researching, you know, weapon mass destruction and where they are located, how far the missiles take to go to Los Angeles, New York. It was really interesting, but that was a challenge to some extent because I didn’t know enough. It took me several months to search for it, but it was pleasurable. It was fun.
Meenu: Good. I’m so glad. So what message or emotional impact do you hope readers get from or take away from your books?
Dr. LePort: Well, in general, I like to write about heroes with no fear. I read so many books, they’re all mixed, these people. I mean, it’s very hard to find a book that’s black and white.
That some people are good people and some people are bad. I mean, of course, you can have little things, but it’s like a lot of times I finish a book, I put my time into it, and I am not satisfied because, you know, the bad guys don’t get what they deserve, and things are hanging. The good guy, well, it’s good, but it’s got all these problems. It turns out the twist is not as good. I like to have people who are heroes; they don’t have to wear capes. They’re usually regular human beings who find themselves in a situation where they have to make big, important choices and have integrity. So they make the right choices, although it’s very difficult to make the right choice in this particular situation. Not only that, it is very challenging and difficult, and there is a lot of danger in making these choices, but they still do. They’re very scared, courage is doing the right thing despite your fear. It’s not like you’re not scared.
I want that message to go to my readers: that if you give me your time and read my books, at the end, you will not be left hanging, and you’ll know who your heroes are. Again, somebody may start not being a very nice person, but the arc shows that he had it in himself to be a hero, and he is a hero at the end. So I like that particular arc in all my books. Of course, there are particular messages, such as in the “Change of Heart”. I should say this because it’s not intuitive.
In “Change of Heart,” obviously, the background is about a transplant. Although a novel is written just for entertainment, it is not written to teach or convince you of anything. It is about an important subject. Hopefully, it’ll make people think there are many problems with heart transplants. There aren’t enough hearts. There could be more, maybe if we can do something about that in certain ways, but because of that, there is a black market. So, a lot of bad things can happen. So there is a message. I like my readers to get that message and develop their own opinion. Again, I’m just there telling a story and entertaining people with the story. I mean, the reader is not passive. The reader does a job.
He gets all these things that happen, all these events, the characters, how they develop, and everything, and he forms his own idea. Obviously, there will be an overlap between the idea of the reader and a certain idea that will overlap with the idea that the author had to begin with. The author may have thought about a lot of new developments.
Meenu: It’s a conversation. Are there any themes or topics you’re eager to explore in your future writing projects?
Dr. LePort: Yes. My next book is about cryogenics. It’s coming out in early 2026, and it’s called “Defrosted”.
Meenu: I love that. I love your titles, I want to say.
Dr. LePort: Defrosted is a story of a doctor who gets frozen in our time, and he gets defrosted 200 years in the future because there is a problem with the world that only he can solve, because he had already solved it in our time. Now this problem reappears, and nobody knows how he got there 200 years later. This doctor was not very favorable because of politics and everything. The government didn’t like him, and that’s fine because he constantly complained about things, such as health care and this and that. So nobody wants to defrost it, and it was also illegal to defrost people 200 years ago. So they have no choice. He gets defrosted at a time that’s much worse than the time when he got frozen. Because now, unless your life belongs to society, basically, 200 years from now, and unless you do something just for the good of society, they’re going to let you die. Unless you solve this problem, it’s basically doom. The whole world is doomed, so that it will be doomed anyway. It’s not a good society. A lot of people are lying and cheating. How is he going to keep his integrity? How is he going to do his work? And so I’m very excited about that book coming out.
Meenu: Well, that sounds interesting. It’s almost sci-fi futuristic.
Dr. LePort: Yes, very futuristic and on the verge of sci-fi.
Meenu: Lovely. Okay. My last question for you is about just giving advice to women. You’ve had such an incredible career in many fields. A big journey coming from Italy, starting a career in the US, and not speaking any English at all. Do you have any advice for women in medicine who are going into medicine like me?
Dr. LePort: Yes, I do have advice. You have to be very passionate to be in medicine. The way it’s changing today, you have to be even more passionate than you had to be before. If that’s your passion, go for it, do your best, and put all your abilities into it. Don’t let anybody stop you or tell you you can’t do something. This is a country, I have to say, this is the best country still on Earth. If you want something in this country, if you want something, you work very hard, and it’s not irrational what you want, and you’re going to get it. There is a good chance you get it. It’s not so in all the other countries. I could never have done what I’ve done here in Italy. I could never have gone into cardiology in my 40s in Italy. I couldn’t have even gone into cardiology at the very beginning. Maybe now it is a little easier, but it was a male world at the time. Unless you had a connection, and sometimes not a very good connection, you know? You’re a woman having a hard time going into a specialty. It is not so now. Here, I think the world is maybe because I came from Italy, to me, it looks like a great world, you know? I think we’ve come a long way. So my advice is to go for it, don’t let anybody stop you. Work on your passion and put all your strength into it.
Meenu: Lead your life with passion. I love that. Thank you so much, Dr. LePort, for sharing your incredible journey with us today and all your insights. We’re so excited to see what stories you’ll bring to life next, and we’ll be reading. For those listening, you can find Dr. LePort’s books, including “Dissection” and “Change of Heart,” at cristinaleport.com or wherever you get your books.
Meenu: That’s a wrap on this episode of “Our Voices, Our Future”. We hope today’s conversation inspired you, challenged you, and reminded you of the power of raising your voice. The fight for equity doesn’t stop here. Join us in the movement. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast, and if you love this episode, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Until next time, stay bold, stay vocal, and keep the conversation going. This is “Our Voices, Our Future.”
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About the Authors
Lakshmi Meenakshi Immaneni, MS3
Meenu Immaneni is a third-year medical student at the Burrell College of Osteopathic Medicine. She has a Bachelor of Science in Public Health with a focus in Nutrition from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Passionate about patient advocacy and advancing equity in healthcare, Meenu is a dedicated member of the American Medical Women’s Association, where she serves on the Gender Equity Task Force. She is particularly interested in promoting mentorship, and championing women’s leadership in medicine. When she is not studying, Meenu enjoys spending time with her husband and their cat, playing board games, reading, and traveling to explore new places.
Meghan Etsey, MS4
Meghan Etsey is a fourth year medical student from St. George’s University. She has a Bachelors of Arts in Biology and a Bachelors of Arts in Nutrition and Dietetics from Bluffton University in Bluffton, Ohio. She served as the President of the St. George’s University’s Women in Medicine chapter in St. George, Grenada where she expanded relationships with the community and worked towards educating women and helping the youth. She is also a member of the Gender Equity Task Force and Sex and Gender Health Collaborative Committees within the American Medical Women’s Association. When she is not pursuing medicine, you can find her with her friends and family on different road trips and adventures exploring the world.
Vashti Price is a third-year medical student at St. George’s University. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, a Master’s in Biological Sciences from Alcorn State University, and a Master’s in Health Sciences from Meharry Medical College. With a strong passion for public health and health equity, Vashti has dedicated much of her time over the years to volunteering with underserved populations, including individuals experiencing homelessness and children in need. Her commitment to service continues through her involvement with the American Medical Women’s Association, where she serves on the Gender Equity Task Force and the Sex & Gender Health Collaborative Committees. Vashti is particularly interested in the intersection of medicine, public health, and community outreach. Outside of her academic and clinical pursuits, she enjoys spending time with friends and family, attending festivals, exploring new cities, and winding down with a good Netflix series.