The Uncomfortable Truth About Mentoring

Three years ago, a high school student named Kavish reached out asking if he could

get a peek behind the curtain in medicine and research. He was curious, eager, and —

like a lot of aspiring physicians — desperate to see what the work actually looked like

up close.

I said yes. And if I’m honest, the moment I did, I felt a familiar sinking feeling.

Because here’s the truth nobody posts about mentoring: I often regret agreeing to it. Not

because I don’t want to help — I do, deeply — but because I know myself. To do it well

takes more than I usually have to give. I’ve felt this from my own mentors over the

years. You reach out, full of hope, and sometimes all you get back is silence. Crickets.

And you wonder if you asked too much, or if you just don’t matter enough to make it

onto someone’s calendar.I didn’t want to be that person. But I also wasn’t sure I had the

bandwidth to be anything else.

What made me say yes anyway was something I hadn’t fully admitted to myself yet: I

was sitting on a decade of sleep medicine data from my global health work — data

collected from an underserved population on a tiny island in the Pacific that most people

couldn’t find on a map.

Saipan. The Northern Mariana Islands. Closer to Japan than Hawaii. One sleep lab.

One sleep doctor (me, when I visit). A predominantly Pacific Islander population — one

of the highest-risk groups for obstructive sleep apnea in the world — and almost nothing

published about them.

The data existed. The story was there. I just didn’t know how to tell it rigorously enough

to matter.

I’m a clinician, not a statistician. And despite being in an academic setting, the research

infrastructure I had access to was minimal. No dedicated biostatistician on speed dial.

No research team waiting to be assigned a project. No grant funds.

So I did what I’ve learned to do since launching SomnoSeal — I got creative.

Through the problem-solving lens I’d developed as a physician-entrepreneur, I found

Benjamin, a university-trained statistician based in Bogotá, Colombia, who was not only

skilled but helped drive the project. He didn’t just run numbers. He became a core

intellectual contributor — and ultimately, a named author on the paper.

Then there was David — a sharp pulmonary and sleep physician based in Portland who

collaborates with me remotely on sleep studies for the island. He made the trip to

Saipan himself this year, contributed to the writing, and as a fellow physician brought

the clinical credibility we needed to pressure-test our thinking.

And Jasmine, an outstanding MD/PhD sleep fellow at OHSU — determined, reliable,

and not the type to take no for an answer. When there was a trip to Saipan, she found a

way onto that plane. And she turned out to be as much a mentor to Kavish as a scientist

on the project.

And Kavish — the high school student who started all of this — learned research

methodology in real time, contributed to the analysis, and despite a graduation and two

moves (including one overseas), never once quit when the timeline stretched from

months into years.

Three years. A Grand Rounds presentation. A poster at APSS. Critical feedback from a

seasoned researcher that made us question whether to continue — and a decision to take

what was useful and keep going. And finally, a peer review process that pushed us

to sharpen every argument we’d made. In the end, our paper was finalized for publication in Sleep Epidemiology:

“Age and Sex Differences in Sleep Architecture and Obstructive Sleep Apnea in a

Predominantly Pacific Islander Population: A Single-Center Study in Saipan,

Northern Mariana Islands.”

Read the full paper here → https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleepe.2026.100134

What we found isn’t groundbreaking in isolation — the patterns of OSA severity, sex

differences, and age-related risk are broadly consistent with what the sleep medicine

literature already knows. But that’s almost the point. Pacific Islanders carry a

disproportionate burden of cardiovascular, metabolic, and lifestyle risk factors —

including significant rates of obesity and low health literacy — that amplify OSA and its

consequences. As a US commonwealth, the Northern Mariana Islands falls under the

same federal insurance programs as the mainland — and untreated OSA carries a

significant financial cost to the system. Early identification and treatment is not just a

clinical priority but a shared public health and fiscal imperative. And one of our

reviewers, who pushed us hard in the initial review, said it best upon acceptance: “My

thanks to the authors for having taken on this work — important, indeed, as there is littledata on Pacific Islanders who have a unique set of cardiorespiratory and metabolic exacerbating risks to obstructive sleep apnea and related disorders.”

But what I keep thinking about isn’t the data. It’s the team.

A high school student in Portland. A statistician in Bogotá. A pulmonologist who flew to

a Pacific island to see it for himself. A sleep fellow who willed herself onto a plane to

Saipan. And a physician-entrepreneur who almost said no.

Here’s what I actually learned about mentoring:

The uncomfortable truth is that you won’t always know if it’s worth it when you say yes.

You can’t calculate the ROI upfront. The timeline will be longer than you planned. There

will be stretches of silence that feel like failure.

But sometimes, if you say yes to the right person and stay in it long enough —

something real gets built.

Kavish is now in college, on his way to medicine. He has a first-author peer-reviewed

publication before finishing his second year of undergrad.That’s not because of me. That’s

because he didn’t quit. My job was mostly just to not get in the way.

If you work in sleep medicine, serve Pacific Islander patients, or know someone who

does — I’d be grateful if you shared this. This population deserves more research

attention, and this paper is a start.

Kimberly Hutchison MD is a Neurologist and Sleep Medicine specialist.