Regina Foster can still remember the exact quality of light in the delivery room when her cousin invited her to witness a birth. She was in high school, an age when most teenagers are preoccupied with college applications and weekend plans, but something in that experience, the intensity, the vulnerability, the profound transformation, imprinted itself on her in a way that would shape the entire trajectory of her life. "The experience was exhilarating," she says now, with characteristic understatement. From that single afternoon, she knew with certainty that her future lay in healthcare, though she could not have imagined then how circuitous and personally demanding that path would become.
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What began as a calling toward the drama of birth gradually shifted its focus toward the quieter, more complex terrain of aging and memory. Foster pursued a degree in Gerontology, drawn to questions about how we care for people in their final chapters, how we preserve dignity when the mind begins to fray. It was academic at first, a field of study that fascinated her intellectually. Then her grandmother, the woman who had been the gravitational center of their family, received a diagnosis of dementia. Suddenly, Foster found herself navigating territory she had studied in the abstract, but now the stakes were achingly personal.
"I knew being a long distance care partner would take on a new meaning," Foster reflects. "My family needed more than just my clinical advice." The statement contains within it a profound recognition: that expertise, however valuable, is not the same as presence, and that caring for someone you love requires something beyond what any textbook can teach. She was hundreds of miles away in Richmond, Virginia, trying to support her family through one of the most disorienting experiences a family can face. The professional knowledge she had accumulated became both a resource and a reminder of its own limitations. She understood the disease process, could anticipate the stages, knew the terminology. But she could not be there to help her grandmother find her way back from confusion, could not sit with her family through the daily accumulations of loss that dementia brings.
This collision between personal experience and professional expertise seems to have refined Foster's understanding of what healthcare actually requires. When asked what being a healthcare professional means to her, she offers a response that cuts against the grain of much medical training: "Compassion and empathy comes before the need to be right." It is a simple sentence, but it represents a hard-won philosophy. In a field that often privileges technical knowledge and diagnostic accuracy, Foster insists on a different hierarchy of values. Being right about a diagnosis or a treatment protocol matters less, in her view, than being present to the human being in front of you, attuned to their fears and needs, willing to meet them where they are rather than where clinical protocols suggest they should be.
This philosophy informs the advice she gives to students entering the field of Gerontology, particularly those interested in dementia care. "Know what person-centered care looks like," she tells them. The phrase has become something of a buzzword in healthcare circles, but for Foster it carries specific weight. Person-centered care means seeing past the diagnosis to the individual, understanding that the person with dementia is not defined by their cognitive losses but remains a whole human being with preferences, history, and dignity. It means involving family members not as obstacles to efficient care but as essential partners who know the patient in ways no clinician ever could. It means recognizing that what looks like resistance or difficulty might actually be a person trying to maintain some control over a life that is becoming increasingly bewildering.
Foster now works in consulting, bringing her combined personal and professional insights to others navigating the complex landscape of dementia care. She has seen firsthand how inadequate many healthcare systems are when it comes to understanding the cultural and generational contexts that shape how people experience illness and aging. When she considers the future of healthcare, what she hopes for most is comprehensive "cultural and age sensitivity training for all" healthcare providers. It is a modest-sounding goal, but one that would require a fundamental reorientation of how we train medical professionals. It would mean acknowledging that a seventy-year-old African American woman in Richmond brings a different set of experiences, expectations, and communication styles than a seventy-year-old white man in Seattle, and that effective care depends on understanding those differences.
For the next generation of healthcare professionals, Foster sees an opportunity to build these competencies from the ground up, to create systems that are responsive to the full diversity of patients they will serve. She believes young people entering the field now have a chance to insist on an approach to medicine that does not separate technical skill from cultural humility, that recognizes expertise as something built not just through study but through genuine curiosity about the lives of patients.
Foster's own journey illustrates both the necessity and the difficulty of this kind of transformation. She moved from the adrenaline of the delivery room to the slow, grinding challenges of dementia care. She went from being a student absorbing clinical knowledge to being a family member desperately needing more than clinical knowledge could provide. She learned that being far away from someone you love when they are losing themselves is its own kind of education, one that no degree program could have prepared her for. And she emerged from that experience with a clearer sense of what healthcare needs to become: less focused on the need to be right, more committed to the harder, humbler work of being present.
In Richmond, Foster continues this work, consulting with families and organizations trying to improve dementia care. She brings to each conversation the memory of that high school afternoon in the delivery room, the exhilaration of new life. But she brings also the harder wisdom gained from watching her grandmother's mind slowly dim, from being too far away to hold her hand, from learning that sometimes the most important thing a healthcare professional can offer is not a solution but a compassionate witness to suffering. It is not the career she imagined as a teenager, but it is the one she has built, piece by piece, loss by loss, insight by insight. And it is work that matters, perhaps now more than ever, as our population ages and more families find themselves navigating the bewildering landscape of memory loss, trying to care well for people they love even as those people slip away.