Homegrown: Dr. Firouzi gives back to his community

MOSES LAKE — A lot of young people, when they go off to college from a small town, never return. But some do. Dr. Kameron Firouzi is one of them.

“When I was figuring out my passions in terms of what I wanted to do career-wise, I always wanted to come back and give back,” Firouzi said. “There were (times) throughout my life with my mom when I felt like the community rallied around me and my family, so I always felt a little bit of a tie.”

Firouzi was born and raised in Moses Lake, he said, and graduated in 2008 from Moses Lake Christian Academy.

“Growing up, I always said I wanted to be a doctor,” he said. “(My) fourth-grade teacher (recently) showed me a note that I wrote in fourth grade that said I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up.”

His wife Ashley graduated from MLCA the same year, he said; the two were high school sweethearts and married after college.

“I was like, ‘I could go anywhere for med school, and I could do a ton of traveling. Do you want to sign up for this as my wife rather than my girlfriend?’” Firouzi said.

Firouzi did his undergraduate and medical school at the University of Washington, where he was accepted into the Targeted Rural and Underserved Track, or TRUST, program.

“The goal with that is to get kids who are passionate about rural medicine to get back into rural communities,” Firouzi said. “A lot of my clinicals, my third and fourth year of medical school, I was able to do them here in Moses Lake, adding to that fuel to get back to this community. And I ended up doing exactly what they wanted.”

But not right away. Firouzi did his residency at Maricopa County Hospital in downtown Phoenix.

“It was pretty underserved, pretty high-risk,” he said. “Good training from that standpoint.”

Firouzi’s specialty is obstetrics and gynecology, which he said he loves because there’s a lot of variety.

“On Wednesdays, I get to do robotic surgery," he said. “Throughout the week I’m doing clinic, but in clinic I’m doing procedures. At any moment I can get called over to the hospital to do a delivery or an emergency. It gives me the ability to jump wherever.”

OB/GYN is an uncommon specialty for male doctors these days; only about 6-8% of practicing gynecologists are men, according to the medical website AdvanceStudy.org.

“There were two males in my 40-person residency program,” he said.

Working with a male gynecologist doesn’t seem strange at all, said Firouzi’s midwife, Lizzie Bonaudies.

“I feel like it’s more common,” Bonaudies said. “I’ve only worked with male OB/GYNs, and I think it’s great.”

After the four-year residency program was over, Firouzi did private practice in Phoenix for another three years.

“I loved the area and we had a good group of friends, but my family still lived here,” he said. “Moses Lake was always interested in me coming back; it just took me an extra three years after residency. We had our daughter and we decided it was probably a good time to come home.”

The timing worked out well in another respect; Firouzi had trained in Phoenix with da Vinci surgical robots, and Samaritan Hospital had just acquired one.

“Now I’m two and a half years in and we have two brand-new da Vinci robots and a brand-new hospital. I really couldn’t ask for more.”