Focused on the Heart

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She could pass for a twentysomething, but Dr. Lakshmi Parvathaneni is a respected cardiologist with St. John’s Health System who has studied medicine for more than 15 years. Dr. Parvathaneni sits erect on the sofa, the walls of her home punctuated by pieces of East Indian Art in this typical midwestern subdivision southwest of Springfield. She is a diminutive woman who speaks in measured tones and laughs easily. Such is the depth and contrast of this year’s keynote speaker for the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women event.

“I grew up in a village in southern India knowing that I wanted to be a doctor,” she says. From a young age, Dr. Parvathaneni was greatly influenced by her father, SambasivRao Alapati, who is a surgeon in their town of Chagallu. “We were surrounded by the field of medicine,” she says. “It demands your attention every day.”

As one of two children (her brother is a surgeon in Des Moines), Dr. Parvathaneni recounts the important role her father played in their village: “We would go away on vacation for two days when I was little, and people would run up to us as we came back into town and say ‘Where were you? Do you know who has been sick since you have been gone!’ My father was, and is, greatly respected there. He continues to be my role model.”

Finding Her Path

Following in her father’s footsteps meant making a commitment to medicine at an incredibly young age; she was only in ninth grade. “Although you do not enter medical school in India until after high school, in the years prior you are studying for the tests to gain entry,” she says. In India, students who want to become doctors can attend a six-year medical school directly after 12th grade. They graduate at the age of 21. “My young years were so busy,” she says recounting the difference between her education and that of a medical student in the United States. “It would have been nice to have had the undergraduate years as a time to mature and explore other areas,” she says.

Dedication to study and hard work paid off for Dr. Parvathaneni when she was accepted as one of only 200 students in the entire country chosen to attend the state-sponsored Rangaraya Medical College in Kakinada, India. There was virtually no discrimination in the entry to the school; only the top scores are accepted, be they from men or women. About one-third of the students who attended school with Dr. Parvathaneni were women.

It was during those years that she became increasingly interested in studying cardiology. “My favorite professor was a cardiologist,” she says. “I really admired how he followed the progression of a disease. It is really an art.” At Rangaraya, the technology that was available to the students was very basic. “Funding was limited, so there was not a lot of high-tech equipment,” she says. But that worked advantageously for her, allowing her to hone the clinical assessment skills needed to base her diagnosis.

Creating Family

Just as her medical school training relied on traditional methods, so did meeting her future husband. “It was a semi-arranged marriage,” she says to describing her union to Sirish, a St. John’s cardiovascular surgeon. “His father was my father’s tutor, and we were actually initially introduced as kids of family friends. It was never imposed on us to get engaged, but we both came from traditional families, and I think there was hope that we would be compatible.”

After graduation from medical school, Dr. Parvathaneni moved to the United States and married Sirish, who grew up in Chicago and attended Northwestern Medical School in Evanston, Illinois. After working as a researcher in St. Louis for one year, Dr. Parvathaneni applied for a hospital residency. Fortunately for the newly married couple, programs for both were secured in the same city.

Working at Christ Hospital and Medical Center in Oak Lawn, an area south of Chicago, Dr. Parvathaneni focused on the tasks at hand: fulfilling her residency and starting a family. “There is never an easy time to have a child,” she says. “But this seemed like the best time before I entered into the demands of a practice. Besides, I had a lot of family help to get me through.” Today her son, Adeesh, is 8 years old. Her daughter, Asha, is 7.