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Dr. Connie Micklavzina

Dr. Connie Micklavzina remembers her first delivery as a physician like it was yesterday.

“I had to ride on a stretcher down a long hallway and up an elevator, shouting ‘pa pousse,’ which I was told meant ‘don’t push.’ Unfortunately, the elevator was not an express and as the doors opened two floors down from the labor floor, I delivered her baby in full view of a dozen lay spectators,” Micklavzina said. “They shouted and clapped for me, so maybe the glamour and attention drew me into the specialty.”

Approximately 4,000 babies later, Micklavzina, the outgoing president of the Orange County Medical Society, continues to bring her obstetrical and gynecological care to women throughout Central Florida.

“In taking care of them, they draw you into their inner circle and make you part of their lives,’’ she said. “Being an OB/GYN is like having a second family of about 2,000 women who need you but also care about you. When I ask my patients, ‘How have you been?’ it isn’t surprising that they also ask, ‘And how have you been, Dr. Mick?’

Micklavzina first decided to be a physician during high school. “Unfortunately, it was too expensive and I was working my way through college as a waitress,” she said. “So I ‘settled’ for being a pharmacist, hoping that I could combine my love of science with a way to help others.” She found the pharmacy profession confining and unsatisfying – but has loved being married to her pharmacist husband, Stephen, for more than three decades.

After returning to medical school, she worked in Ft. Pierce for the National Health Service Corps to pay off her medical school scholarship. Then began her life in Central Florida, where she started a private practice in Winter Park in 1991 with the help of the hospital, which was privately owned at the time.
Micklavzina stopped delivering babies in January 2005 to try her hand at teaching. She worked four days a week in her office doing gynecology and taught anatomy and physiology two nights a week at Seminole Community College.

She loved teaching and had been considering retiring from medicine to teach full-time when, in November 2006, she was offered a job teaching residents at the Winnie Palmer Hospital for Women & Babies in Orlando. Micklavzina took that full-time faculty position in August 2007. She now teaches residents and still sees her private patients two days a week in her Miller Street office in Orlando. When she’s not teaching, or spending time with patients and family, she enjoys playing tennis and the guitar, and quilting. “I made my son a quilt to cover his bed while I was waiting for babies to come at night. It has a calming and comforting effect to sit in a rocker and quilt,” she said.

Reflecting on the changes in her field, she said there are, for example, many new procedures for the treatment of women with bleeding disorders. Most have been developed during the past five years, and she points out that younger doctors therefore often have more formal training and experience when it comes to treating such disorders.

Board certification processes also are changing, Micklavzina said. OB/GYN physicians will be required to take a written test every six years, beginning in 2014. Physicians also will also have to complete special “modules” of case management. “It will be more difficult and time-consuming to be board-certified in this and many other specialties,’’ she noted. “You may see a more severe doctor shortage in 2015 as many older doctors retire earlier to avoid the new exams.”

She said that while many men make fine OB/GYNs, “I wish they could somehow know what it feels to have a menstrual cramp or a labor pain. It’s easier to empathize when you’ve been there.”

One of Micklavzina’s most memorable deliveries involved a patient who wanted everything done naturally. “She had nothing for pain, was quiet as a mouse and didn’t scream,’’ Micklavzina recalled. “The room was dim, the music played ‘Here I am to Worship’ over and over again, and when I delivered him after only a few pushes, the single light in the room was shining down on him exclusively. It was truly an inspiring moment and I was given a beautiful picture of the baby with my hands holding him in his special light.”

Now practically grown — one a University of Miami sophomore, the other a high school tennis player — Micklavzina’s two sons were born in Ft. Pierce, and were 1 and 3 years old when her family moved to Central Florida. “I was wimpy when I had my deliveries, by the way,’’ she said. “I had to be on bedrest from 25 weeks onward with both boys, and my first was born a month early. I had to have a vacuum extraction for my first and a C-section with my second for breech presentation. I always tell my patients that I hated both deliveries, and there is no easy way to have a baby — not to scare them, of course.”



February 2008

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