Physician Musician
By: Gary Pettus
One of the first things Maxwell Dillon Bolden ever heard in his life was the sound of his mother’s singing. One of the next things he heard was the sound of his mother’s smart watch.
For so many milestones that mark the life of Dr. LaToya Mason-Bolden, music has formed the backdrop; and so, as she rocked her newborn son and watched her 2-year-old daughter Ari-Elle Grace play with her doll, she hummed a familiar hymn; she was at peace. Until the alarm went off.
“My smart watch was responding to my resting heart rate, which exceeded 130 beats a minute,” said Mason-Bolden, an associate professor of anesthesiology at UMMC. “I knew something was wrong.”
It was two weeks after the birth of her second child, and she had become so tired she didn’t feel like walking from her bedroom to the kitchen. “And I don’t live in Buckingham Palace,” she joked.
The strain of recent childbirth and the recent loss of her mother-in-law had put her in this state, she thought. But her friend and colleague, Dr. Rachael Morris, feared there was even more to it, and the associate professor of maternal-fetal medicine urged her to get examined, an appeal that led to a disturbing diagnosis: below-normal ejection fraction, an insidious form of heart failure that may affect women late in pregnancy or postpartum.
“It’s scary,” Mason-Bolden said. “I’m so grateful that my heart has now recovered its normal function, but if I wasn’t connected the way I am at the Medical Center, if I had waited longer to see a doctor, well, I still get nervous just thinking about that.”
Her bout with heart disease two years ago underlined for her the plight of many less fortunate women in Mississippi; it brought home the fact that maternal care is lagging in the state, that 86 percent of pregnancy–related deaths here happen post-partum.
“What happened to me speaks volumes about access to care,” she said.
It speaks to the reason she had chosen to magnify her medical training in obstetric anesthesiology: Years ago, Mason-Bolden became one of only a handful of experts in that subspecialty in the world. Anesthesiology is one of her two passions, and she connects with as intensely as she does with her other one.
“It was as a musician,” said the accomplished pianist, “that I wanted to do a medical specialty where I could use my hands.”
In fact, Mason may be the only person you’ll ever meet who can ease the world’s pain with epidurals and Duke Ellington, if not at the same time.
In the OR, her twin passions meet, shake hands and go to work. In the OR, there is music, and she asks her students to heed it. “I tell them to listen to the heart monitor – how with every stimulus, the patient’s heart rate changes,” Mason-Bolden said. “Their breathing rate changes.
“I tell them to notice how the tempo can show that the patient is in pain or losing blood. And to listen to the pitch of the pulse oximeter, which measures oxygen saturation. If it becomes lower, you don’t want to hear that.”
To administer anesthesia, you have to be in sync with the senses of sight, hearing and touch, she said. “You keep your eyes open, but you don’t have to in order to know what’s happening with your patients.” Likewise, as a musician, she doesn’t need her eyes to perform. She uses them anyway.
“I’m kind of a shy person. I get nervous when I’m in front of people,” she said in a stunning confession, considering that, on a stage not built for the timid, she competed for the title of Mississippi’s Junior Miss when she was 17.
Whenever she performed for a live audience, though, she used to flee to the sheltering arms of her nearsightedness. “I used to wear glasses,” she said, “but I wouldn’t put them on when I played – so I wouldn’t have to see the audience.”
Even now, after laser eye surgery, she said, “I can hide by looking at my hands – even though I don’t have to see them to play. That’s my safe place.” Even so, she’s anything but shy when it comes to her patients. She has wanted her own patients ever since she was one herself. “As a child, even though I didn’t want to be sick, I looked forward to going to the doctor,” she said. “The doctor could give me medicine and, somehow, it would make me feel better. The doctor worked magic. I wanted to do the same thing one day.”
As a little girl growing up in Jackson, Chawla LaToya Mason must have wondered if Mississippi and the Medical Center would grow fast enough to keep up with her dream. They did. Still, at the time of her birth, in the late 1970’s, the School of Medicine had graduated few students who looked like her.
As for the students watching fall football across the way, that was different. There, in the stadium looming over State Street, young LaToya attended Jackson State University games with her family, including her older sister, Roseannae; they cheered for an offensive lineman named Stevie Mason: LaToya’s older brother.
From her seat in the stands, she could peer into the near distance and see “the shell of University Hospital,” she said. Over the years, she saw the shell swell, even as her hopes did. “Trying to become a physician as an African American woman,” she said, “I was fortunate to be around people who were very encouraging.” While in high school, she was able to shadow at least one of them: Dr. Robert Smith, a legendary Jackson family medicine physician and early civil rights figure. “I remember LaToya as being an unusually culturally sensitive, caring person who expressed herself well,” Smith said.
Smith was, as far as Mason-Bolden can remember, the first African American doctor in her life. He began mentoring African American students more than 50 years ago, when the training of black physicians in this state was just beginning. Young LaToya Mason became one in a long line of students he hoped would adopt the profession he loved.
“I am delighted that she decided to go into anesthesiology and especially in an area such as maternal and infant care,” Smith said. “She will make a valuable contribution to help decrease maternal and infant mortality, for which our state continues to rank 48th, 49th or 50th.”
Unlike Smith, Eula Mason is not a doctor, but she is a muse to at least one. She is also a retired public school teacher and Mason-Bolden’s mother. “In many ways, seeing my mother teach and inspire the lives of so many is one of the reasons why I have sought a career in academic medicine,” Mason-Bolden said.
And there was Eli Mason Jr., a store manager at Smith’s Supermarket, “a doting father and a man from very humble beginnings,” his daughter said. He passed away early in 2021, after being diagnosed in the last years of his life with Alzheimer’s. Long before his death, he saw his daughter excel at the profession he and her mother helped her attain; she was the family’s first physician. For his funeral service, in a virtual ceremony on Zoom, Mason-Bolden performed “For God So Loved the World.” She had recorded herself playing the piano, and then the violin, before juxtaposing the recordings. It was a one-person duet of her father’s Scripture transformed into song.
She had been bowing the violin since she was in elementary school, and began taking piano lessons at age 6, learning her first notes from teacher Ernestine Ross. Years later, the 1994 valedictorian of Forest Hill High School accompanied, on piano, the school choir; played clarinet during concert season for the school band; performed on the dance team; served on the student council; and influenced the world of fashion – at least that part of the world reached by Gayfer’s department stores.
“You remember Gayfer Girls?” Mason-Bolden said, referring to the teen board who advised the store on the latest styles for teenage girls. “I was G.G. LaToya.”
And she was, the year she graduated from high school, a hopeful in Mississippi’s 1994 Junior Miss contest, entering it after the urging of a high school counselor. “That was two or three weeks before the competition,” she said, “and that was the first time I had ever heard about it.”
Maybe that explains the face you see in the photo of contestant No. 37: a trace of wonder mixed with tears melting into a smile as vivid as the bouquet she is holding; it was the smile of the first African American to claim the crown.
Her winning performance was a medley of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata “Pathetique” No. 8 and Duke Ellington’s “Satin Doll.” Her fingers raced across the keyboard. They had given her just 90 seconds to make history.
Ludwig and Duke were good to her. Katrina was not. Her Junior Miss scholarship money helped cover her room and board at Xavier University of Louisiana, filling in the gaps left by her other academic grants. When she applied to medical school, she decided to stay in New Orleans and was accepted to Tulane, also the site of her residency. “My last year of training was interrupted by a little storm called Katrina,” Mason-Bolden said. “It literally blew me west to Texas.”
At Texas Medical Center in Houston, the musician didn’t miss many beats; the following year, in 2006, she finished her anesthesiology training; then, at Baylor College of Medicine, fortified her expertise with a fellowship in obstetric anesthesiology.
For 10 years, she stayed in Houston. Stevie, the brother she had watched play football, was there too until he passed away in the summer of 2008. Long before that, he had become a Doctor of Physical Therapy.
At Baylor, LaToya Mason rose to the rank of associate professor before she turned 40, and received two of that institution’s most prestigious honors: the Fulbright & Jaworski Faculty Excellence Award and the Rising Star Award. Houston, it seemed, was the place to be. “Then I met a gentleman,” she said.
She had met him through her mom. Arnel Bolden was the mayor of Canton at the time. They were married in April 2016, the year she joined the Medical Center and was blown back east to her native state.
Since her arrival, in the fall of 2016, Mason-Bolden has made a name as a physician, mentor and teacher at the Medical Center. As course director for the M4 anesthesiology clerkship, she is a Trailblazer Award winner. The Society for Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology named her a finalist for SOAP Teacher of the Year.
“She’s an advocate for residents and medical students, and I appreciate that,” said Dr. Ly Zhang, an anesthesiology resident at UMMC. “When she’s teaching, she walks us through her thought process. It’s not like ‘do this because I told you to do this.’ With each of her patients, she includes us in their care.”
As a teacher, Mason-Bolden hopes to reach medical students through another of her interests. A skilled photographer and videographer, she produced how-to videos on epidural placement and the management of local anesthetic systemic toxicity.
Last summer, she created a video, “My Career Story,” which she screened during Insight, a Medical Center summer enrichment program for high school students under-represented in medicine.
High school and college students aren’t her only pupils. As a member of the Maternal Mortality Review Committee of the Mississippi State Department of Health and the Mississippi Perinatal Quality Collaborative, she works with her colleague to reach expectant mothers as well.
To raise awareness of the importance of access to care, she shares her own stories: the routine birth of her daughter, Ari-Elle Grace, which contrasts with the story of the birth of her second child. After Maxwell Dillon was born, she was diagnosed with a below-normal ejection fraction, a type of heart failure specific to pregnancies.
“It’s underdiagnosed because the symptoms can be subtle,” she said. She was fortunate to have colleagues at hand who could help save her life, she says, including Morris and the physician who “meticulously managed my therapeutic regiment”: Dr. Myrna Alexander Nickens, professor of medicine, cardiovascular diseases, who diagnosed Mason-Bolden’s heart failure.
“As a parent myself,” Mason-Bolden said, “it’s heartbreaking to know some babies will never see their mothers.” In May of 2021, for a virtual meeting of SOAP, she presented an abstract describing her ordeal; it was named one of the top 10 best case reports accepted – probably because it was so personal.
Like Mason-Bolden, Dr. Arthur Calimaran is an obstetric anesthesiology fellowship-trained anesthesiologist; apparently, they are the only physicians in Mississippi endowed with such expertise.
Obstetric anesthesiologists are especially adept at recognizing early maternal emergencies, said Calimaran, UMMC professor of anesthesiology, chief of obstetric anesthesia and medical director of the Wiser Hospital for Women and Infants Surgery Center. Their training is important in helping reduce deaths and suffering among the women they serve.
“In other words,” Calimaran said, “you are better off having an obstetric anesthesiologist on your team when a delivery goes south. Dr. Mason-Bolden, for her part, is passionate about making a difference, especially toward reducing maternal mortality.
“She is very detail-oriented, warm and caring. These are important characteristics for an OB-anesthesiologist.”
Mason-Bolden became an anesthesiologist because “if there’s any specialty that’s mobile, it’s that,” she said. And her hands are just as busy in labor and delivery – intubating, starting IV’s or epidurals – as they are on her baby grand piano.
“Everybody deserves the best care they can get,” she said. “It’s my job to give patients the safest anesthesia. It’s important for me to be able to help them get through this time in their life.”
Zhang, the anesthesiology resident, admires the way Mason-Bolden speaks with her patients. “She’s very warm; she lets them know what’s going to happen next at each step along the way, and involves them in their own care.”
For the most part, labor and delivery is “a happy time,” Mason-Bolden said. “When I first come into the room, the mom may be screaming, she may be in pain.” And by the time Mason-Bolden leaves the room, the patient has relief from pain, and a baby.
In October, LaKenya Robinson, 21, of Greenwood arrived at Wiser Hospital, dubious and nervous, and in labor for the first time in her life.
“I was very skeptical about the epidural,” Robinson said, “but then [Mason-Bolden] came in, and I wasn’t nervous anymore. She did great.” As did Legacy Nicole Dior Robinson, her new daughter.
