Alumni Spotlight: Dr. Michael Foster

Hear from Dr. Michael Foster, UMMC medicine-pediatrics alumnus, proud dad, and world traveler. Here, Dr. Foster shares a bit about his training and what he’s been up to since graduation.

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Tell us about your time at UMMC and where you are now.

I completed Med/Peds residency in 2014. After six years as a hospitalist at Baptist, I have now been living in Saudi Arabia for four years taking care of VIPs and dignitaries at the largest hospital in the Middle East.

I have always wanted to live overseas and as an undergraduate decided I would like to do that as a physician. Attending UMMC for medical school and staying for residency were two of the best decisions of my life. My mentors invested in me—my own goals and dreams—rather than forcing me into a cookie cutter mold of training, all while providing a robust, hands-on training that has been invaluable in private practice and now abroad. While in medical school, I was able to spend a summer in Cambodia, do relief work in Nicaragua, and do an external rotation M4 year in China (and respond to an earthquake in Tibet while there!). I would return twice more to China during my Med/Peds training, as well as medical trips to Peru and Kenya. Without the full support and encouragement of both the Medicine and the Pediatric faculty and staff, but especially the Med/Peds leadership—Jimmy, Michelle, Zeb, Jericho, and Jennifer—these experiences that were instrumental in shaping my journey would have never happened. These opportunities are what drove my decision to stay. At other residencies where I interviewed—including UAB, Vanderbilt, Duke, and UNC—there were relatively few international opportunities already established. And for those, the competition to participate was very high; if not selected for those opportunities, there was no allowance to develop a new experience. UMMC was willing, within ACGME guidelines, to individualize training experiences to my career goals.

During my five days off in the holiday schedule 4th year of residency, a mentor invited me to Primo’s for a blind date. He sat down, introduced me to Carlena, told us why we should get married, and then said he had errands to run and he left. I was mortified, but he was absolutely right. It has been nearly ten years now and our daughter, Joy Katheryn, turned six in April. Both of my Med/Peds co-residents were in my wedding. Justin and I both worked at Baptist right after residency, and I hit up Trent every fall in Knoxville when my family would vacation in Gatlinburg. The relationships forged in the trenches of residency are incredible.

After leaving residency, Carlena and I left the country as often as possible to do relief and development work, starting even on our honeymoon. After seven days in Greece, we traveled onwards for twelve more days to meet some friends in Kyrgyzstan in need of help with medical development work in rural villages. We would go on later to Nepal for urgent earthquake relief and Tajikistan for more medical development work. Throughout my time as a hospitalist at Baptist, trips abroad, and now living in Saudi Arabia, the solid clinical foundation I was given at UMMC has benefited my patients time and again. I feel well equipped to care for patients in both resource-scarce and resource-abundant environments.

I interviewed in Saudi Arabia in 2019 and submitted my ninety-day notice to Baptist the second week of January 2020. Almost immediately afterwards, news broke of some weird novel virus outbreak in Wuhan, China. Due to closed borders, we did not arrive in Saudi Arabia until August. Our planned fourteen-day quarantine turned into twenty-one when I was found to be COVID positive. My mother, a dialysis nurse, had transmitted it to us as she hugged us goodbye. While we were only mildly symptomatic, my mother became very ill, and my Med/Peds co-resident Justin personally transported her to the hospital and admitted her, where she recovered under the care of hospitalists and pulmonologists that were all UMMC-trained.

Since coming to Saudi Arabia, I have now become the Quality Director for the Executive Health Medicine Department at King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Centre, a 1500+ inpatient bed, quaternary referral center in Riyadh. I completed an MBA in International Healthcare Management from Frankfurt School in Germany in 2023. In this program we visited Baltimore, London, Frankfurt, Singapore, and Riyadh to study various healthcare systems. This year, I completed the SHM-CHEST certificate in point of care ultrasound, knowledge which I am sharing within our department for applications in the hospital and on home visits.

What do you miss most about UMMC?

I especially miss the collegiality and camaraderie. Private practice can be very lonely. As a private hospitalist, I was seeing twenty or more patients a day alone. I would quickly eat lunch and get back to rounds. I would have to actively seek out a colleague if I needed to talk through a decision. It has gotten a bit better moving to Saudi to a high quality, low volume VIP service, but the collegiality will never be truly comparable. It also becomes harder in private practice or in less familiar environments to be vulnerable and admit uncertainty. I wish I had cared less at UMMC about what people might think of me and embraced opportunities to plead ignorance and admit when I needed help working through lab derangements or reassessing whether a treatment plan was working, needed more time to know, or change was warranted.

Share a memory or more of your time here at UMMC.

Every third night call in MICU with Shawn Sanders when I was an intern. It was such a blur working alternating 30 hour and 12 hours shifts. But it was a blast. I learned so much that month and gained such confidence managing critically ill patients.

Med/Peds clinic at Grants Ferry was such an anchor point throughout residency. Our head nurse, Jenny, made that clinic an amazing place to work. She made such an impression, I was telling a story about her to a colleague just a few weeks ago. But, I will forever remember the day the nurses finally admitted they were funneling new patients seeking pain medicine to me because I was good at setting boundaries and sticking to them. I was not as honored as they hoped.