Never Say Never
Surgery was the last specialty Dr. Jenni Nix had in mind during medical school. Now she can’t imagine practicing anything else.
Story by Dick Baltus Photo by Thomas Boyd
It was during her third year of medical school when Dr. Jenni Nix experienced the “little existential crisis” that changed the course of her career. Fortunately for Roseburg residents requiring future surgeries for a range of conditions, that moment came and went quickly.
Roseburg’s newest surgeon says she had wanted to be a physician since she was a child growing up in Culdesac, Idaho, a tiny town of 300 near Lewiston. But after graduating from the University of Idaho with a degree in chemistry, Dr. Nix’s career path started in a different direction.
She headed for Austin, Texas, and a job as a chemist with a large corporation in the pollution control technology and waste product management industry. It was an interesting job, Dr. Nix says, “but about a year into it, I realized I didn’t want to do it for the rest of my life.”
A year and a half later, she entered medical school at Tulane University in New Orleans. While earning her medical degree and master’s in public health and tropical medicine, Dr. Nix served a series of clinical rotations in several specialty areas.
“I had been thinking I would be a family physician or internist, but during my medicine rotation I realized it was not for me,” she says. “I had decided to save the surgical rotation for last because I was convinced I’d hate it. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to be a surgeon.”
It wouldn’t be long before Dr. Nix learned the answer. “Surgery’s where I found my people,” she says.
That’s also where she found something of an identity crisis. “I had always thought this was something I really didn’t want to do and suddenly I really wanted to do it. I’m kind of a control freak, and I couldn’t figure that out,”she says, laughing. “Finally, I called a mentor and he talked me down.”
Dr. Nix was drawn to surgery for the opportunity it gave her to be the ultimate patient care problem solver. “As a surgeon, when patients come to you with a problem, you can fix it. You don’t have to call someone else,” she says.
After medical school, Dr. Nix completed a five-year residency-training program in general surgery at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital. She and her husband, Steven,wanted to head west to be closer to their families. He’s from southern Idaho and her parents had moved to Dallas, Ore., while she was in college. She also has siblings in Monmouth.
Through a colleague, Dr. Nix heard about an opening at Centennial Surgery, where Dr. Mark Donovan, who had also trained in Santa Barbara, was practicing.
“Steven and I saw this as a chance to get back to the forests and a beautiful river and to a small town,” she says.
Dr. Nix has been seeing patients since August, providing general surgical services with a special interest in breast cancer surgery, hernia repairs and management of thyroid and parathyroid disease. She’s a firm believer in a whole-person approach to health.
“Patient education is very important to me,” she says. “If your nutrition is poor, if you’re not active, if you have mental distress in your life, those all affect your ability to get well.”
Dr. Nix says she’s looking forward to rediscovering all the pastimes she used to enjoy before her intensive training schedule required her to set them aside. Those include baking, hiking, exploring the region’s wineries and breweries and, at some point, starting to hunt again
