“My journey to the fertility world wasn’t like most. In medical school, I had done a rotation through the brand-new fertility program at Hadassah Medical Center. I watched my professor, Dr. Laufer, calling people saying, ‘Guess what? You are pregnant!’ and I loved it. But I wanted to be a hero, so I decided to do surgery. It was exciting, but I wasn’t evolved enough to take care of the sick and dying. I couldn’t comfort people; I was a problem solver. You come in and get shot in the leg, I’ll fix it. I didn’t know I needed to empathize with my patients and it was hard to empathize with people getting shot or drunk drivers. I did two years of training heading in that direction, then my first wife said, ‘This is too much. You’re doing 100 hours a week and we’re having a baby.’ So I switched. I went into the OBGYN world with the purpose of going back to that other thing I loved — fertility. When she dragged me to St. Louis, I got lucky because there was a guy here interested in me working with him at St. Luke’s Hospital. He trained me. 

For years, I worked as an OBGYN on Ballas Road. Everyone wanted to have a ‘Palace on Ballas.’ But then I went full-time into fertility. I thought, ‘This is a cash-pay biz. People are charging whatever the market can bear. That goes against everything I believe in as a doctor.’ I wanted my clinic to be different in that it would be excellent care but at a low cost. On Ballas Road, there were already four fertility programs next to each other and I wanted to go where there was need. It was 2008, the worst economic downturn in 70 years, and someone told me, ‘Go West.’ At that time, St. Charles County was the fastest-growing county in the US for people aged 25-45, but there was nobody there doing fertility work. A real estate agent showed me this space, told me I could put my logo out front, and I was like, ‘Okay!’ They didn’t have much of a synagogue out here, but I thought, ‘Well, I’m not going to spend my sabbath at work and I don’t need Jewish people around me to be a fertility doctor.’

I see myself as an Israeli Jew and was amazed at how accepted I was in St. Charles. I’ll never forget one guy sitting here telling me, ‘C’mon, Doc. Ain’t it Rosh Hashanah tonight? You better get yourself home before you get in trouble with the wife.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ because it was.”

📷| Colleen O’Connell Smyth