Genetic Counselor, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary

Naomi: All right. So my name is Naomi Wagner and I'm about to start my career as genetic counselor. It is a group of health care professionals with masters level training who are specialists in both genetics and counseling. So what that typically looks like is more traditionally in a patient provider sort of role. Talking to patients about their genetics, and risk for genetic conditions. But since we're specialists in genetics, and in dealing with sensitive topics, we can have roles in lots of different fields as well. Not just one on one with patients, but also in the research, in the pharmaceutical field, stuff like that as well. So, genetics comes into play at a lot of different stages in life. We sort of separate it out based on stage of life. So in the pre-natal world, genetics would come into play during a pregnancy. People can choose whether or not they want to test their pregnancies for conditions like down syndrome, which could happen in any pregnancy or also if they want to test for conditions that are known to run in a family. In the pediatric world, genetics comes into play for many individuals with differences either in learning or in physical features, because we know that genetics plays a role in the development of children. So nowadays a lot of children with developmental delay or autism might undergo a full genetic evaluation. In the adult space there can be genes associated with cardiology conditions, also cancer conditions is sort of the main adult region of genetics it's very popular right now for people with cancer diagnoses or cancer in the family to try to figure out if it's a cancer that happens sporadically or due to environmental causes, or if there is actually something in the family that made them more at risk to get cancer and therefore their relatives more at risk to get cancer. In some settings we might see six patients a day for example and we'd have some administrative time in between appointments, and then we'd see a patient normally in an office setting and sit with them and talk. In a patient appointment, some classic features of a genetic counseling session would be checking in with the patients, seeing what they know about the appointment. Going through their family history and medical information. And we tend to take a family history pedigree drawing out with squares and circle the family and trying to find some patterns to make sure there's nothing we're missing. Because of advances in technology, most cases we can offer some sort of genetic testing to the patients. So we have genetic test options that we're normally offering during an appointment. And if patients would like to proceed we can normally do it that day and then in a couple weeks when the test results comes back we'll be the ones to follow up with them and talk about what those results are and what they mean. Genetics is really complicated information so often we'll have an appointment to meet again and discuss the genetic testing results too.