When I entered the operating room, I was wearing a sterile gown, mask, gloves. Not a hint of a dress, heels, or perfume. Everything on the outside was restrained, functional, and precise to the millimeter. But inside, I always remained a woman.

Medicine is a world where you have to be cold, collected, and precise. There is no room for hesitation there, you can’t “cry at work.” But there was always someone in me who loved beauty—in the shape of a suture, in the curve of tissue, in the look of a patient who woke up after anesthesia and knew he would live.

Being a woman in surgery means proving every day that you have the right to be strong. But I don’t want to prove it. I just live. And I bring with me into this world my tenderness, my intuition, my sensitivity—all that was considered “superfluous” in the profession for many years. And it turned out to be the most valuable.

I love beautiful dresses, I love doing my hair, drinking coffee from a beautiful cup. This does not contradict the scalpel in my hand. It is a part of me. A woman can be a surgeon. And a surgeon can be very feminine.