WVSOM grad practices in the best of both worlds as an OB-GYN

Graduate profile: Jessica King, D.O.

WVSOM grad practices in the best of both worlds as an OB-GYN

Before Jessica King, D.O., received her Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degree, she assisted in the delivery of about 50 babies.

The Class of 2024 graduate, a native of Bethpage, N.Y., said she still remembers the first time she witnessed a cesarean section delivery in the Dominican Republic. Ever since, she knew she wanted to be an obstetrician and gynecologist. However, King had wanted to be a doctor since high school.

“I was born premature at 25 weeks. My birthday is in August, but my due date was November and I always joke that I wanted a summer birthday,” she said. “I was a sick kid and growing up I was in and out of hospitals so I was attuned to medicine, but I didn’t decide I wanted to be a doctor until I was 14. I loved biology and it made a lot of sense to me and helped educate me about my own body and the things I went through growing up.”

After graduating from college, King earned a master’s degree and took time to travel to countries such as the Dominican Republic and Thailand. After three gap years, she began medical school at WVSOM. Beginning in her first year of medical school, she assisted Chris Pankey, Ph.D., a WVSOM associate professor of physiology, with research on sheep, looking at how obesity during pregnancy alters cardiovascular development in offspring.

During medical school, King was a member and later treasurer of the school’s chapter of the American College of Osteopathic Obstetricians and Gynecologists, was part of the school’s first committee for Grand Rounds, a student-led series in which WVSOM alumni share case-based presentations with students, and was a member of the Student Admissions Leadership Team, a program in which current medical students assist with WVSOM applicants and the admissions process.

King said her research and club involvement strengthened her ability to find a career as an OB-GYN.

“I like the combination of the specialty. Gynecology can take the roots of primary care with the surgical side of obstetrics. I always knew I wanted to operate and I love being in the OR, but I didn’t like that with most surgical specialties you only saw patients a couple of times during follow-up appointments,” King said. “I wanted to go into a specialty where I would see a patient before, during and after a surgery and I would be able to form a relationship with them.”

She recalled how, in her third-year clinical rotations, she developed a physician-patient relationship with a young mother. King helped deliver the woman’s baby, and the teen began scheduling postpartum visits around King’s schedule.

“I felt so honored, and that was the moment where I thought, ‘This is the job for me,’” she said.

King is the first person in her family to become a physician. And while she is excited to have begun her residency in an OB-GYN specialty at Good Samaritan University Hospital in West Islip, N.Y., she wants to focus on trauma-informed care and possibly maternal-fetal medicine.

Good Samaritan is a Level I trauma center that performs about 3,000 deliveries each year. King expects that approximately six months into the residency she will be responsible for delivering infants and providing women’s care under attending supervision.

“Instead of looking at patients from the clinical standpoint when things appear normal, trauma-informed care is looking at things through the perspective of patients,” she said. “Forty-four percent of women rate their birth experience as traumatic even if everything goes OK. Taking a few extra minutes to get to know a patient and listen to things from their perspective will strengthen my relationship with patients. I’m curious to explore that more throughout my residency.”

I wanted to go into a specialty where I would see a patient before, during and after a surgery and I would be able to form a relationship with them.