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Santa Fe New Mexican Article

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A doctor’s path to discovering
her place in the world

Written by Carina Julig on April 5, 2024 (a 6-minute read)

Longtime Santa Fe resident Dr. Erica Elliott's first memoir, Medicine and Miracles in the High Desert, riveted readers with her experience working first as a schoolteacher and years later as a doctor among the Diné people on the Navajo Reservation. Elliott's new memoir — part of a planned series of four — fills in some of the gaps between those years and details Elliott's circuitous path to becoming a medical doctor.

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From Mountains to Medicine: Scaling the Heights in Search of My Calling is Elliott's no-holds-barred account of her childhood and young adult years, including a stint in the Peace Corps in Ecuador where she fell in love with mountain climbing.

Elliott, who will share her stories at a book talk and signing Saturday, April 6, at The Ark Bookstore, says she wrote the book largely to inspire her patients.

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"A lot of lessons I learned from overcoming difficult things I apply to my patients to help them not lose hope and know that they can turn these horrible experiences they're having, health-wise, into blessings."

Her motto, she says, is "never waste a bad experience."

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There are plenty of bad experiences in From Mountains to Medicine, from a mental health crisis and a hasty marriage that ended in divorce while still in college to more romantic heartbreak and life-threatening climbing experiences later in life while in South America. But Elliott says everything she went through was worth it because it led her to what she describes as her life's calling: medicine.

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Elliott plans to write two more memoirs focused on her career trajectory into the medical field, which started out traditionally and led her into private practice, where she became known as "the health detective" for her work trying to find the underlying causes of her patients' aliments.

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Elliott says she wants to write a fifth book as well titled How My Son Raised Me but that her son won't give her permission.

"He's very humble and doesn't want the spotlight on him," she says with a laugh.

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Elliott is one of the founding members of The Commons on The Alameda, a Santa Fe cohousing community in operation since 1997. She's lived in New Mexico since 1986, starting in Cuba after finishing her medical training at the University of Colorado and later living in Eldorado and Santa Fe. She describes The Commons, where she raised her son, as "a sanctuary."

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Little of From Mountains to Medicine — which begins with Elliott's college days at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, during the height of the counterculture movement and goes back in time to her childhood in a military family in the U.S. and Europe — is set in New Mexico. Much of the book is set in Ecuador where Elliott is sent by the Peace Corps to work with Quecha-speaking Indigenous communities, and it ends in Boulder, Colorado, as she is accepted to medical school as a thoroughly nontraditional student. (An advisor encourages her to steer clear because as a 29-year-old woman, she is "too old" to become a doctor; luckily she didn't listen.)

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The book reads as if Elliott is sitting next to you and telling you her story. She credits her impressive recall of events that took place decades ago entirely to her journal and contemporaneous letters sent to friends and family, which she used to piece together the narrative.

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"I had articles published, and I had journals, and tons of letters to my siblings, and they saved all of them," she says. "They knew someday I wanted to write about all of it, and they sent them all to me, including my letters to my parents who are long dead. So I had this big tub of all this stuff, and my only challenge was putting it all together."

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Hikers in the Santa Fe area are likely to have bumped into Elliott, who at age 75 remains an avid outdoorswoman, along the trail at some point. Her excursions in Santa Fe are less daring than the climbs she recounts in her memoir, which include climbing up Chimborazo, the highest mountain in Ecuador, and Aconcagua in Argentina, the highest mountain in the Americas and one of the "Seven Summits."

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Elliott says it's impossible for her to name a favorite expedition because they were all so different.

"Realizing I could overcome my fear was hugely exciting for me," she says of her first expedition, which was up the Ecuadorian volcano Cotopaxi. "But they all have their special meanings to me."

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Some of Elliott's expeditions were marked with altitude sickness, fights with fellow climbers, and close calls on high mountain peaks. The most frightening part of the book, however, doesn't have anything to do with mountain climbing but rather with a harrowing illegal abortion Elliott recounts having in Quito in Ecuador at the beginning of her time in the Peace Corps.

It's the one thing about that time in her life she says she almost left out.

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"It was so terrifying, I can't even tell you," she says. "In fact, I told my editor, I'm not going to put this story in, it's too horrible. And she said, no, you have got to put that in so people can see what it was like when it was illegal. It's your obligation, you have to do it. So I did it, even though it was so gruesome."

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Most people "don't have a clue" what illegal abortion is like, says Elliott, who adds that she felt lucky to be alive after the procedure because of the high risk of infection from unsterilized medical equipment.

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It's those sections of the memoir that make it more than just "an adventure book," as Elliott says, and is one woman's experience of finding her way in the world.

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"I am an adventure woman, but there's way more to the book than that."

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Elliott says her main piece of advice to young people working to discover their place in the world is to not be afraid to follow their intuition.

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"Follow what brings you joy, what brings meaning to your life, even if people around you don't understand what you're doing and why you're doing it," she says.

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She also encourages young people not to let mistakes get in their way, but to use them as springboards to something better.

"One of my patients calls it 'composting disaster,'" she says. "And that's what you do: You take these bad experiences that we all have, and you use them somehow so they're not wasted. So you don't suffer for nothing."

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