PERFECT MATCH
Medical students Gabe Gaweda, Maggie Jordan find love, success at Brody
Gabe Gaweda was willing to walk through lava for Maggie Jordan.
It wasn’t real lava, just placemats on a gymnasium floor to indicate lava.
Still, that game four years ago during their orientation at East Carolina University’s Brody School of Medicine has them on the brink of marriage, the brink of graduation and the brink of surgical careers.
Maggie Jordan and Gabe Gaweda are on the brink of marriage and surgical careers.
“I didn’t anticipate meeting my spouse here at all. I wasn’t trying to,” Gaweda said. “It just kind of organically happened.”
That initial meeting didn’t immediately result in courtship. A summer research project about 10 months later did. Since then, they’ve been together, leaning on each other to help get through the rigors of medical school.
“You have that person that understands exactly what you’re going through because they’re going through it with you,” Jordan said. “You have someone that you can talk about things with, but also someone that understands that sometimes the last thing you want to do is talk about it and you just need to do something else and kind of pretend that it’s not happening for a while, so it’s like that equal balance of having someone that you can only talk about medicine with and then completely avoid it at the same time. It’s actually beneficial.”
They bonded while studying and in surgery.
“We actually did our first surgery together, now that I think about it, a massive 30-pound mass off the inside of this guy’s thigh,” Gaweda said.
He proposed in November at the top of 9,000-foot Mount Tallac near Lake Tahoe.
“It was about a 12-mile hike, 3,500 feet elevation change, and my ears were ringing almost and part of me was like, ‘Maybe we should turn back,’ but I had the ring in my pocket and it was the right moment,” Gaweda said. “We made it to the top, and she was still out of breath, and I found somebody at the summit, and I was like ‘Hey take a picture of us,’ and she was still breathing hard, and I just dropped to one knee.”
“I didn’t know it was happening,” Jordan said. “I cried in front of a mountain full of people. It was great. Then we had to hike down.”
As a couple, they knew they wanted to do their residencies together, which can be difficult to arrange.
Maggie Jordan stands with her father, Dr. Joey Jordan, who attended the Brody School of Medicine and is a physician in Greenville.
“It’s just that we had to think about which places we thought were the best for us, like for what we wanted out of our residency and our careers,” Jordan said. “It’s a little bit of a compromise, but we want a lot of the same things, which is good.”
They found out Friday they both would be going to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.
Both came to medicine in a roundabout way. Jordan initially went to N.C. State to be a veterinarian but later switched to medicine after she shadowed a friend in an emergency department.
“I started thinking that maybe human medicine was the way to go,” she said. “I applied around for medical schools, but I really liked Brody because it’s in my hometown, my family is close by so I get to still see them — not every day but just about every single week — and I really like the small class size. It makes me feel like I know everybody.”
Her father, Dr. Joey Jordan, attended medical school at Brody and practices family medicine in Greenville.
“It’s just very interesting being here and knowing that my dad was taught by some of the same people that I was taught by,” she said. “It’s kind of eerie in a sense, but I feel like a lot of people don’t have that opportunity.”
For Gaweda, he was working as an auto mechanic out of high school in Wilmington. One afternoon on his way home, he came upon a crash in which a vehicle ended up in a pond. He jumped in to help the driver escape.
“I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was kind of the catalyst that got me moving in the direction of health care,” he said.
Gabe Gaweda stands with his mother, Amy Gaweda, who works as a nurse practitioner.
With a father in the military and a mother working as a nurse practitioner, Gaweda joined the Army, working to set up field hospitals. He quickly learned the importance of trauma surgery and gravitated toward that at Brody.
“In the military, most of the medicine that’s being provided — outside of basic primary care for soldiers — is trauma type medicine,” he said. “So, I think that’s what initially attracted me to medicine was specifically trauma, and so I kind of had an idea that surgery was the right fit for me. Notoriously, surgery is a challenging lifestyle and so I was trying to convince myself out of it the entire time through med school, and then I got to my surgery rotation and I was like, ‘This is it. This is all I want to do for the rest of my life.’”
Jordan also decided on surgery.
“Working through every other specialty I did, everything was OK, but when the clerkship was over, I didn’t feel the need to go back to it,” she said. “And then surgery from maybe the first week, I was like ‘This is the only thing I want to do for the rest of this year, for the next year and really for the rest of my life.’ I didn’t want that clerkship to end, so I felt that was a pretty good indicator that’s what I should go into.”
Now that Match Day has arrived, they’re looking forward and are grateful that Brody brought them together and set them on paths toward success.
“I think before I came into Brody, I didn’t really know what I wanted and I felt — and I still feel like a child half the time — but I definitely felt like a kid when I came here, like I didn’t exactly feel like I was capable of doing things on my own,” Jordan said. “And now I feel like I’ve grown up a lot since I’ve come here. I feel a lot more confident in what I’ve learned and in my abilities to actually go out and practice medicine.”
For Gaweda, he said seeing private practices, rural clinics and level one trauma centers along with conducting cutting-edge research while at Brody proved to be the best experience he could have.
“I’ve definitely matured as an individual and learned a lot and have a lot more left to learn and just feel more confident going forward and am just really looking forward to the next step,” he said.