September bowman built a new career at an age when others start building their retirement homes.
Three decades after graduating in psychology and marrying her college sweetheart, John Bowman, ’63, she set out to practice medicine. She had gone to nursing school and worked as an RN to help put their three kids through college. When the youngest (James, ’95) left the Farm, she headed back, training at the Medical School as a nurse practitioner.
“I told my husband, ‘I’m just not happy. I’ll be sad if I die without doing this,’” she says.
Nurse practitioners are licensed to do most things a doctor does, with a supervising physician to consult as needed. “I really wanted that kind of independence,” says Bowman. “I also love the intellectual aspect of medicine, and I wanted to care for the underserved.”
In Stanford’s certification program, she spent three months on campus, then a year working under a physician preceptor in her hometown of Santa Barbara, Calif., returning to the Farm for a week each month for classes and exams. Her friends thought she was crazy. Her kids thought she was cool, “like they do when I walk in a peace march.” Her much-younger classmates joked about her advantage in geriatrics. But in the end, at age 57, Bowman landed her dream job at Santa Barbara’s Westside Clinic, a nonprofit center whose patients are mostly Spanish-speaking and poor.
The clinic is in a big old house where fresh roses from Bowman’s garden grace every waiting room, exam room, office and lab. She wears sneakers, jeans, casual shirts—never a white coat, which symbolizes authority and creates a barrier, she says. “A lot of our patients fear and mistrust doctors, so they avoid seeking care for themselves or their children. As a family nurse practitioner, I try to build their confidence.”
Does she wish she’d started earlier? “In a way I do . . . but then I would have missed that time with my children. At this point, I just love going to work every day. I love my patients, and I don’t ever want to quit.”
