Adventist Health Sonora | Health Living | Spring 2020

AdventistHealthSonora.org • Healthy Living  7 Cardiology and cars Melanie Davidson, M.D., cardiologist Ever since she was a young girl, Melanie Davidson wanted to be a doctor. “I just always knew that’s what I would do,” she says. Still, it never hurts to have a backup. “For my medical school interview, they asked what I would do if I didn’t become a doctor. I told them I wanted to be an auto mechanic,” she says. “It’s pretty similar to medicine in that you try to learn everything you can about fixing the human body and how it works. So I didn’t think it was too far off.” Dr. Davidson’s dual passion isn’t surprising. While she was growing up in Southern California, her mother worked as a medical technologist, and her father did auto-body repair. During medical school at Loma Linda University, a cardiologist spoke to one of Dr. Davidson’s classes. “I just thought she was the coolest thing ever,” Dr. Davidson says. “She talked about all the procedures she got to do and how what she did impacted her patients’ lives.” So after finishing her residency at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Dr. Davidson completed a cardiology fellowship at East Tennessee State University. She was working at a Tennessee hospital when she learned about an opening at Sierra Cardiology. “I have friends and family here still,” she says. “And when I came to interview, all the people I met were very welcoming. I really love the people here.” Another of Dr. Davidson’s passions is bass fishing from a kayak with her husband, Scott, and daughters, Phoenix and Maddox. The family is also restoring a 1971 Chevrolet Chevelle muscle car. You can make an appointment with Dr. Davidson at 536-3240 . My mountain home Kyi Kyi Thwin Win, M.D., internal medicine At first, Kyi Kyi (pronounced “Gigi”) Win wanted to be a civil engineer, like her father was in Myanmar (formerly Burma). “He was the Indiana Jones of civil engineering in Burma,” she says. “Every weekend, he would take me surveying. We would go deeper and deeper into the jungles, laying down roads and railroad tracks.” But during her second year of studying civil engineering in college, Dr. Win volunteered at a Los Angeles homeless shelter. They put her to work as a receptionist in the health clinic, an experience that made her think about becoming a doctor and devoting her career to another way of serving others. Dr. Win earned her medical degree from UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine. For more than 20 years, she and her husband, James, ran a busy private practice in the high- mountain community of Lake Arrowhead. Seeking a career shift, Dr. Win briefly worked as a Soledad Prison physician. But recently she decided to return to community medicine. “That’s what I do best,” she says. For Dr. Win, coming to Sonora feels a lot like a homecoming. “I’m a mountain girl,” she says. “I realized you can take the girl out of the mountains, but you can’t take the mountains out of the girl.” You can make an appointment with Dr. Win at 536-6925 .