Some days in clinic feel like I’m standing at the center of a conversation that never stops moving. The door opens. A nurse leans in. A PA asks a question. An NP adds context. A tech whispers that a patient is afraid. And then everyone disappears again, like a tide pulling back just long enough for me to see what’s left behind.

This is the truth of team-based care. We don’t practice medicine in isolation. We practice inside a web of relationships.

And I carry my own history into every room.

I walk in as a Black woman and a family medicine physician. I walk in knowing my training shaped how I think, how I assess risk, how I respond when something inside a patient’s story feels off. But I also walk in knowing my presence is read before my knowledge is.

That awareness never really leaves me.

It sits with me when a patient directs their questions to someone else while I’m the one creating the plan. It sits with me when my judgment is second-guessed until another voice repeats the same decision. It sits with me in the moments when I wish I didn’t have to be both physician and translator of my own legitimacy.

But, I also carry gratitude.

Because I have worked with NPs and PAs who bring deep compassion to every encounter. Who see the social fractures in a patient’s life before the chart reflects them. Who step in when we are stretched thin and remind me that care is rarely a single-handed act. I have sat in offices where laughter softened the edges of exhaustion. Where collaboration felt less like hierarchy and more like mutual trust.

Those moments matter.

They keep me grounded in the truth that we are all here for the same reason. To care for people who place their lives in our hands.

But collaboration isn’t the same thing as sameness.

Our paths into medicine are different. Our lenses are different. And pretending those differences don’t exist doesn’t make the work more equal, it makes it harder to talk honestly about where friction comes from.

As a physician, I carry responsibility that sometimes feels invisible to others but heavy to me. The legal risk. The moral weight. The expectation to hold complexity and uncertainty long after a shift ends. I feel that responsibility in my body. In the nights when I replay decisions, not because I distrust my judgment, but because I respect the gravity of it.

And when you add the experience of being a Black woman in medicine, that weight takes on another layer.

I am still learning how to protect the parts of me that get worn down by subtle dismissal.

How to honor my own voice without hardening it. 

How to create space for collaboration while not shrinking inside it.

And I want to say this respectfully. I don’t want competition between roles to define how we work together. I don’t want resentment to live in the spaces where patients should feel safety. I don’t want us arguing about titles while someone in the next room is trying to breathe through grief, or fear, or pain.

What I want, what I hope for, is a culture where respect isn’t negotiated every day.

Where we acknowledge different training without shame.
Where we affirm one another’s strengths without erasing the real distinctions in our preparation.
Where every team member is valued and no one has to fight to be heard.

Because when our teams are grounded in honesty and care, patients feel it. The room softens. The story unfolds. The work becomes less about defending our place and more about protecting the person in front of us.

I’m still growing into how I hold all of this. My identity, my leadership, my vulnerability, my boundaries. Some days I feel tired. Some days I feel deeply supported. Some days the balance feels right  and I remember why I chose this path in the first place.

And if you read this, whether you’re an NP, PA, physician, student, nurse, or someone far outside medicine, I hope you feel invited into the complexity rather than pushed out of it.

Because this isn’t just a story about roles.

It’s a story about being human in a space where lives meet.

And I believe we can treat one another with the same compassion we promise our patients, without losing ourselves in the process.

Trisza L. Ray DO practices Family Medicine in Tulsa, Oklahoma