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[0:00] Robert Bannon: Are you ready? It's The Roundtable with me, Robert Bannon.

[0:09] Robert Bannon: Well, welcome to The Roundtable, everybody. My name is Robert Bannon. You're listening to us on Broadway World over here on the Broadway Podcast Network, iHeart, Spotify, wherever you listen to artists talking about art. Sometimes art comes in the written word. We have an author with us. Sometimes medicine is an art to me. And there's a doctor in the house, and then there's a doctor in the family. There's a brand new book that you need to check called, a memoir called Heal Thyself. And the founder of Doctor in the Family, and in Atlanta, doctor herself, is here to tell us her incredible journey from survival to wholeness. Please welcome Sherika, Dr. Sherika Newman. You worked too hard to not be a doctor. Look, if I was a doctor, you would, everybody would call me doctor. My mother would be, you better call me Dr. Robert. Welcome. Thanks for being here.

[0:59] Dr. Sherika Newman: Thank you for having me.

[1:01] Robert Bannon: So before we get into the book and everything that you do, where did you grow up?

[1:07] Dr. Sherika Newman: Oh my God. It's very, very good question, Robert. It's so funny. You said that you're from where? What did you say? I'm just what?

[1:15] Robert Bannon: Trashy Jersey.

[1:16] Dr. Sherika Newman: Trashy Jersey. And I always say, I'm just a little black girl from the ghetto. So when you said it, I was like, oh, he is my people. This is my people. He is me, I am he. So I grew up in Pompano Beach, Florida, and I'm very proud of where I'm from. We call it exit 36 because it houses the high school, Blanche Ely High School. That is the bread and butter, the life thread of our community. And so I am a proud native of Pompano Beach, Florida, by way of Cuyah City. It's Collier, C-O-L-L-I-E-R, but the natives say Cuyah City because that's what we do. And moved to Atlanta and made a community here too.

[2:03] Robert Bannon: Did you move to Atlanta for work?

[2:06] Dr. Sherika Newman: For work.

[2:07] Robert Bannon: For work.

[2:08] Dr. Sherika Newman: Yep. For work.

[2:09] Robert Bannon: So when you're growing up, she said this, this little white man did not say this. She said she grew up in the ghetto and at some point you had to overcome, I teach, I run an English department in Detroit now of alternative students who have to overcome insurmountable odds of their environment. Sometimes family situations, trauma, racism, discrimination, poverty, inner city life, sometimes role models that are lacking. It feels insurmountable to them sometimes to be able to get out. You have gotten out. So when did-

[2:45] Dr. Sherika Newman: Out, out.

[2:46] Robert Bannon: Out, out. She ain't in the ghetto no more. So what was the moment where you decided to take schooling seriously and your future seriously? Because you didn't have to.

[2:59] Dr. Sherika Newman: You know, it's interesting. My mentor, I have a mentor from Big Brothers Big Sisters since I was 13. So we've been together over 30 years. And she would ask me this down through the years like, what made you different? Like what created this? And to be honest, probably a lot of ignorance and just being a naive, whimsical little child. And to be, I was never comfortable in the environment. So I was like, this can't be it. You know? And my family would say I was always bougie, but I was like, I don't think that. I think I was normal. And I just wasn't comfortable in the environment. Not that it was a always terrible environment. You know, even all of our upbringing had roughage, but it's had very, very good parts.

Like I'm proud to be where I'm from, but I just was never comfortable. Plus I was actually bussed to school like an hour and a half ride away. So I never went to the neighborhood school. I was always emerged from kindergarten in this very diverse population of all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds. I went to Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvahs growing up. So I think it gave me a perspective that was different, but it was natural. I never noticed the juxtaposition of it until I got older.

[4:27] Robert Bannon: I love that, that sometimes naiveness or not knowing better, we dream bigger. We don't let society and the world beat us down.

[4:34] Dr. Sherika Newman: Right. And I want it. And you know, when I would go around the neighborhood, Robert, I want it to fit in because that's what our kids want to do. And I remember, you know, meeting this guy when I was younger and I would be hanging out with him and his friends and they would be like, where are you from? And I'm like, I'm from here with y'all. They're like, you don't, you don't talk like we talk. And I'm like, I do. No, I didn't. It took me a long time to appreciate it. And they would say, you're from across the bridge trying to, trying to come over here. Cause across the bridge was of course the better neighborhood. And I was like, no, seriously, I actually live in this neighborhood with you guys.

[5:15] Robert Bannon: So when I read about your book, which I want everybody to, I need to get myself a copy of the book. I need to get myself a copy and then I'm going to make you sign my copy. Doctor in the Family. It's available on Amazon right now. You can get it. If you're looking for the perfect read, if you love a memoir, like I love a memoir, I have a bookshelf of memoir. No shade to people who like fiction, but I like to hear real life stories that inspire me. If you're looking for the, if you're going on vacation, if you're going to be sitting home on this weekend and you need something to read, to be inspired and start over. I'm a teacher. So start over always in September. If you want to get through this, if you want to get to the fall and have be inspiration, here's your book.

Not to give too much of it away and not to get too personal with you, but you were a teenage mom. And I know that that could not have been easy to finish school and go to school and then have the ambition to be a doctor and have a young child at home and the pressures of that. How did that play into your decision-making and your journey, good and bad?

[6:15] Dr. Sherika Newman: Well, I think it, well, when I was looking to go to medical school, I definitely wanted to attend a school that was home because I knew I would need help with my son. I knew I could not do this without help. Undergrad, I took my son to school with me that first semester and did so terrible that my mom and sister made me send the baby home. Oh, they send the baby home, stayed at school for like two and a half more years, taught school for a couple of years before going to medical school. So it was important that I remained where my support system was. And thank God that people along the way saw what I was trying to do and bought into it with full-fledged support, hook, line, and sinker. So I always laugh with my medical school colleagues about how they actually taught my son to multiply.

They taught him his multiplication tables at the back of the room. And we would take turns watching this kid. Someone would be the note taker and someone would be in the back watching the kid and someone would get ice cream in between. It was just like a little village we formed because they bought into me succeeding and also my son succeeding.

[7:38] Robert Bannon: Which is so beautiful that this community embraced. Did you ever feel envious or jealous or you dealt with people who probably came from very different means, very different backgrounds who had a lot more handed to them while you had to fight and go without and provide for your son and come from somewhere that didn't have a lot to be able to pay bills and student loans and housing? How did you stay positive and not look at them and feel resentment or anger?

[8:09] Dr. Sherika Newman: You know, I don't know if I felt resentment, anger, any of that, but I did question where I would have been if I had not came from where I came from, not had the background, not had the son. You know, where would I be? Would I be further along? Would I be better off? You know, those questions rose up all the time. And I think when we look at others who are not like us, whether it's socially, whether it's economically, race, gender, we always see something in them that we desire, whether it creates jealousy or envy is up to you, right? You place the value on the thing. You see the difference. And I think sometimes I harnessed it for better, you know, like, yeah, there were people in my class driving all kinds of fancy cars.

I wasn't mad. No, let me see the inside of the car because one day I'm going to have this car too or I'm going to drive this car, right? So you can harness it the way you want it to. And I think that maybe because in medical school, we're all mostly type A's, right? And we are our life, the smartest of the bunch who are now all together. I think that shared experience connected us. And so, yeah, we wanted to be top of the class, but a lot of us just wanted to finish this grueling program, right? But I think it connected us and made us share things. And maybe because we were in a profession that has such high value in humanity, I think it made us share things in a way that didn't create a lot of animosity, at least for me.

[9:52] Robert Bannon: I think that's so beautiful. We're talking everybody to Dr. Sherika Newman. The book is called Heal Thyself. It's available on Amazon. You could follow her on Instagram at Dr. Sherika. The links are going to be below. So when you get through medical school and you go through all of this, the work has kind of only just begun in the sense now you have to go to work and be a professional and be in a... I cannot be adopted. I'm married to someone who was a nurse. I don't know how you all do it. It is very, there's a lot of pressure with people's lives. Your particular career to me is very moving, if you don't mind me asking a couple of questions about it, because you're a board certified in family medicine, but you're a hospice and palliative medicine doctor.

So you deal with families at their worst times and you deal with people at literally, maybe aside from when they're first born at their most vulnerable and needed support time. So you're such a sweet energy, like your energy pops off the screen, but your job has to be very draining, emotional and hard.

[10:57] Dr. Sherika Newman: Oh yeah.

[10:58] Robert Bannon: So how do you handle the pressure and the personalities and the day-to-day that you go to work and have to deal with?

[11:05] Dr. Sherika Newman: I mean, that's a good question. We have this saying in hospice and palliative, and that it's a calling. And for me, it was just that I had a patient, Ms. Youngblood, and I was taking care of her. I was an intern, first year out of medical school, and she didn't want a big workup on these new brain lesions we found on her CAT scan. And she went to hospice and I was like, okay, as an intern, you're like one less person to see. Thank God. Let me go to the next 500 things I got to do. But I get a call in a couple of days, Robert, and they're asking me to come to hospice to talk to Ms. Youngblood's daughter. And I'm like, does anybody know that I'm the intern? I don't know what you're asking. So I get there, it's like in Timbuktu, but when it opens these double doors, it is an oasis.

And I walk in and honestly, it was like heaven opened and I knew I was supposed to be there. And from then on, I started doing all my extra months that I could do in hospice and palliative with Dr. Sutton. And the more I did it, the more called I felt to it, the more I'm a highly spiritual person. And it felt so spiritual. Like you said, people are at their vulnerable moment. It is raw. You see their underbelly and they have nothing physically to give you, only something spiritual. And so I just connected so deeply with it. I was like, oh no, this is what I'm supposed to do. So I think on the tough days, one, I've given myself permission to be sad and to be human. Like it sucks when a young person is sick.

I can't stand it. And I tell my team, y'all know I'm finna cry. Cause it's a baby, it's a young person. I can't, I'm going to be here boohoo crying. Like I know these people. And then on the other days I have enough spiritual currency to give, or I tell myself I don't have it today. And I asked for help from my team. And so it's a balance of things that helps keep me. But at the end of the day, I honestly just love what I do. I love, I think my trauma helped condition it, right? I came from a big mess and vulnerability and I mean, I'm sorry, and chaos and all this stuff. And just growing up, I learned how to manage all of it, even the really bad stuff. And I think I use some of those skill sets in my professional life.

[13:48] Robert Bannon: Well, I give you a huge debt of gratitude because of somebody whose family, grandparents have been through hospice and through palliative care. We need you more than ever to take care and give dignity and support and relief to our loved ones at their moment. I was going to ask you about spirituality, science and medicine and spirituality sometimes can be an odd marriage, an odd pairing, but I've heard that people who do what you do have a very different connection to spirituality because they see things and they feel things and they see people transition in a way that we don't see. Has that job changed the way you think of life and what happens after?

[14:34] Dr. Sherika Newman: Oh, yes. I've had some experiences, Robert, that they just, you can't be the same after them. I was taking care of this high Hindi priest, like the top, top priests in Hinduism and I'm not a Hindu, but one of the practices at end of life is that they have their guide, shaman, whatever it's called, but this person was a nurse and she was standing in the corner. They had beautiful arrangements in the window and the entire family comes and sings and serenades this person during transition. Now, again, I'm not Hindi, but I walk in because I'm the medical doctor helping making sure that symptoms are managed during this time and I take that very seriously because I don't think people should leave this world in pain and discomfort, suffering.

I think that's terrible. So I'm doing my diligence, but in the midst of their singing, I feel a spiritual encounter from a religion that I don't know anything about, but I could feel my spirit rise in that moment. And moments like that make me realize that we are all spiritually connected. However you practice it, call it what you want, there is a connecting thread in humanity. There's a connecting spiritual thread in humanity and this profession taps into it wholeheartedly. And if you give yourself, there are people speaking, I've had encounters with someone who's speaking a different language and what they call an unknown tongue in Christianity. I had no idea what she was saying, but I knew what she was saying.

And when she stopped, I responded to her unknown language with English in a way that she knew I understood her, even though I didn't understand her. And that's only your spirit connecting. There's nothing, there's no other explanation. Science can't explain it and neither can mankind in and of itself. So it's only left in the spiritual realm. And this profession does it all the time to me.

[17:06] Robert Bannon: Well, you make me feel better. You make me feel like, you make me feel, if something happens to me, somebody call her, get me there. You now, you're an author, your book is out. We're talking to the doctor and her book is out. You click the link below, but you also, you go around the country, you speak about taking care of patients. You speak about, you know, being respectful and how to treat people. And that has to come a lot of the times the people who have been through the most pain or been through the most trauma have become the most sympathetic, empathetic people because they know what pain feels like for you. What did you do? What did the doctor do to treat herself to get to this place?

[17:44] Dr. Sherika Newman: Oh man, I paid my therapist a lot of money and had a lot of crying sessions in my car after therapy. At one point I said to my therapist, Allie, how am I paying you to make me miserable? And I think healing is so uncomfortable. And there are some days I said, I don't want to do this no more. Just leave me broken. I would tell Allie, leave me broke. I am over this. It's too painful. It's rewriting everything I knew to be true. And that's hard, but getting on the other side of healthy is so powerful. And seeing this Sharika, which I think is more of my authentic self before I got programmed by the world. One of the chapters is my, in my book is designed for success, programmed for failure. And now that I'm on this side of healthy and got a lot of unprogramming, I feel like I'm my original design, who God sent me here to be. And that was worth the pain of healing. That was worth every therapeutic session that hurt, every rewriting of my program, every failed XYZ. It was just worth it to be on this side of it.

[19:10] Robert Bannon: You know, I relate to that, you know, going up, growing up in my own trauma and mess. And it took me a long, I, this is why you're my people. I always say my therapist bought a house on the Jersey shore with my money. My insurance money did them well. You know, I'd be there. I'd be texting like, I know I saw you yesterday, but you free. I'm like, I was like, I just saw you last week and I didn't think I was going to meet you this quick, but you got an opening. And what's powerful to your message is that going through all of that, you can be successful. You can, it is hard. It is sometimes scarier to fix it, but the end result will change your life in the most beautiful way. And you don't have to carry that shame burden and trauma with you for the rest of your life.

You don't, and you don't have to bear and grin it, you know, and I'm hoping just like you're inspired that other people are inspired to come away with the same conclusion. This, this is how I don't have to stay this way because we all can choose to stay that way and stay broken, but you don't have to. There's something beautiful on the other side of this. And yeah, it's hard, but I promise you it's worth it. And you're worth it. So who do you hope read this 10 chapters? The book is out. Who do you hope reads it? When you envision somebody sitting with your book, who do you hope, who needs this book besides everybody? Who's got the money to buy the book, but who do you envision?

[20:35] Dr. Sherika Newman: I think wholeheartedly, I think about any person with trauma, you know, like there's a high number of people who are dealt with some type of childhood trauma, like 60 something, 80 something percent. I hope every person in that group reads it or that group adjacent people who know of people like that. And my hope is that they glean something from it, either from my personal story or the stories of my patients. I also have a podcast called Healing with Dr. Newman, where I bring people on to talk about their healing lessons and what they've learned, whether it's medical healing, spiritually, because I think each one teach one, our slogan is medicine is see one, do one, teach one. And I'm hoping that this book, any message I put out, the podcast is a teach one for everyone.

[21:28] Robert Bannon: Where can we hear the podcast is available wherever podcasts, wherever podcasts are at.

[21:33] Dr. Sherika Newman: All right. I'm going to be listening.

[21:40] Robert Bannon: Yes. Thank you. Secret. I have a podcast and I don't listen to podcasts, but I'm going to listen to yours. I had the flu. I should've called you. I would've been like, can you call the thing to CVS for me? I learned to love a podcast while I had the flu because I learned so much. So listen to her podcast. If you're looking to be healed and inspired and that I know that there's a young man or woman out there, a person out there that is struggling, who's going through it. And maybe they're, you know, a young person who has, doesn't feel like their best days are ahead or they're, they aren't able to surmount the odds. And then they're going to hear your story and what you were able to do. And I mean, this in all due respect, just knowing you, you are, you are a super woman in what you've done, but you are, you were a regular person that just took it a day by day, just like everybody else out here can do.

[22:27] Dr. Sherika Newman: Yes. Step-by-step break by break. And I actually have a copy of the book now. So,

[22:33] Robert Bannon: Oh, David always helps me remind this. This is young girl, Sharika being examined by Dr. Newman. It's an actual picture of my young self that the, uh, my graphics artist, JP refurbished and set it up so that I can examine myself.

[22:47] Robert Bannon: That's you looking into you. Look, Dr. Sharika, grown Dr. Sharika with young Dr. Sharika with the book Heal Thyself, which is available on Amazon. Plus she quoted a Whitney Houston preacher's wife song. So we've even liked that even more. And this is my friend. Now this is my people.

[23:05] Robert Bannon: Yeah, now, and we are, and we are going to be celebrate. We have a book club on this, on this podcast every single month. So for the month of August, everybody, everybody needs to go to Amazon and click the link and get yourself a copy of it because we all can use some healing. We've all could use some inspiration. We all could use some love in your life, in career medicine and spirituality and your journey, a grandmother. What do you think is the quote unquote secret? How do we succeed? How do we move forward? If you could sum it up as a secret.

[23:38] Dr. Sherika Newman: Oh, you know what I would say? Oh my God, keep going. Period. Period. Nothing else. That's what I tell my grandkids keep going.

[23:54] Robert Bannon: That's it. That's very moving. You know, speaking of hospice and palliative care, my grandfather was dying of stomach cancer. He was in hospice. The last conversation I had with him, he was an immigrant who came here from Italy. He didn't speak Italian. He didn't speak English. He started a business that my family still is running. And I said to him, how are you not scared? You didn't speak English. You came alone. You were 18. It's an illegal immigrant on a stowaway boat. And he said, Robert, you get up and you keep going. See, in the words of your grandpa and Dr. Newman. Keep going. Keep going. You better get this book. And if you're in Atlanta and things are not looking good, you better call this doctor right away.

[24:33] Dr. Sherika Newman: You better call her right. She's going to get you together. We could follow you on Instagram. We could get the book. And I hope you come back and talk to me again.

[24:44] Dr. Sherika Newman: Of course, whenever you want me, I'm your girl.

[24:46] Robert Bannon: You're a joy. Thank you so much.

[24:50] Dr. Sherika Newman: Thanks for having me. And I know that the hospitals and everybody probably gets mad at you because you probably spend too much time with your patients because you care too much. And that's the kind of doctor we all strive to have. So thank you for being what you are.

[24:58] Dr. Sherika Newman: Most certain. Thank you.