Miles of Courage

Hi, friends!

Welcome to Miles of Courage. I am so glad that you are here!

I’m Ifeoma (pronounced phonetically in English: ee-foam-ah).

I am a Christian Nigerian-American physician living in the Mile High City of Denver, Colorado with my wonderful husband Tim and our beautiful one-year old daughter, Amelia.

Skin pathology (dermatopathology) is my clinical specialty so I spend hours (upon hours) a week looking through a microscope and diagnosing skin diseases. This includes everything from common inflammatory conditions like eczema and psoriasis to tumors like melanoma and other rarer skin cancers. Being a part of people’s healing story has been incredibly rewarding and one of the greatest honors in my life so far… plus it’s pretty FUN, maaaaybe just a little bit nerdy, and incredibly interesting of course!

As a pathologist and a physician, I spend much of my time examining details (facts, symptoms, and images)… details that I subsequently use to construct a multidimensional picture of the suspected disease process in question. This examination process allows me to get closer to the most correct and truest diagnosis. And the right diagnosis is important as even life-saving treatment often times can be harmful in medicine if the diagnosis is incorrect.

Similarly, as a lover and follower of Jesus Christ for the past 20+ years, God has been helping me to take the same examining spiritual eye towards my own heart in my walk of faith with the God of the universe. My life journey in medicine, marriage, and now motherhood has felt like a marathon of sorts. It has been a course marked by incredibly rich (sometimes painful) growth and self-discovery. But if I may be honest with you, as in most marathons, these middle miles in life, while satisfying to the distance runner in me, have not uncommonly left me feeling overwhelmed, defeated, discouraged, and disillusioned. I have shed many tears in each of these areas, sometimes from joy and other times from heartache that has felt utterly suffocating.

But it is in these middle miles, where I have felt the least seen by even friends and family and the most overlooked, that I have discovered the depth of the Father heart of God for ME. It is also in these middle miles where He is helping me to slowly shed the things that have weighed down my heart and my spirit for decades, and to walk in the freedom and confidence that is my inheritance as a child of the living God. I may be pretty bruised, but I am a better and more courageous doctor, wife, and mother because of Him. I am learning how to better love others with earnest and deep compassion and with empathy because of Him.

Miles of Courage is a space where I hope to share elements of this run of faith with Jesus in my own life story, specifically as it pertains to marriage, motherhood, and medicine. I hope the words here will encourage you on your own walk of faith and/or spiritual journey no matter where these words find you. I hope it encourages you towards living more freely in the security and confidence of God’s love for you through Jesus.

Now. Since this is the first post, I thought it might also be fun to share a few fun facts about me:

1. I have been writing since the age of 7. If I could choose a career besides medicine, it would 100% be writing professionally.
2. My favorite color is green; followed by navy blue; followed by mauve
3. I fairly easily (and often quickly) connect with most people, but I have only a handful I would consider close friends.
4. I enjoy chocolate but often only in small portions.
5. I can sew and crochet, both of which I taught myself as a teenager.
6. I love to read: I received an award for having read the most books (almost 200 books in 9 months) in the whole school. These days, I struggle to find the time; I am lucky if I finish even 2 books a year.
7. I often test 50-50 on the extraverted and introverted scale.
8. My husband and I are from different racial and ethnic backgrounds and it has been one of the greatest strengths of our marriage
9. I can count the number of times in a year I wear makeup. It’s often less than 10.
10. I enjoy cooking and often make Nigerian food.

Thanks for stopping by; I am looking forward to sharing with each of you and learning and growing together.