Pediatrician at ECU Health talks journey from Mexico City to Greenville

GREENVILLE, N.C. (WNCT) — Growing up in Mexico City, Dr. Liliana Gomez felt that in order to become an adult, she needed to move away from home.

“Most people in Mexico don’t move away for college,” she said. “There’s a lot of really great universities very close to where I live, and so people just, you know, go to college, they go to classes, go home, do their homework, meet their friends and so, I think it was something that my family didn’t expect me to do and didn’t expect that I would, you know, actually go through with it.”

Dr. Gomez moved to Massachusetts to attend Harvard University. “It was a difficult transition. I’ve never lived away from home for any significant period of time and not having my family close by,” she said. “Obviously, we talked on the phone all the time, but I did have friends who lived in the Massachusetts area, and they could go home for the weekends and things like that. And for me it was like, well, you’re in a different country, you got to sort of figure it out on your own.”

After finding her footing at Harvard, she went to medical school at Wake Forest University. “It was a little more similar to Mexico. Massachusetts is beautiful, but it’s very cold and I just enjoy the food and I felt that the culture was a little bit more similar to what I was used to in Mexico,” she said.

“I was lucky to get into med school as a foreigner, which is not easy to do,” she said. “And I think it’s getting a little bit harder. It’s obviously, medicine is more competitive every day.”

After finishing school, she started her career at ECU Health where she is now the Chief of Pediatric Nephrology. “I always thought that if I did medicine, I wanted to do pediatrics. There’s something about just childhood resilience and hope, because, you know, people, when they find out that I’m a pediatrician, they’re like, Oh my God, it must be so difficult working with kids and it must be so sad,” she said. “But, I feel like it’s entirely the opposite. I think kids, sometimes just get it in a way that adults don’t.”

“I think it helps when the patient population can see that there’s people like them that look like them, that are giving their care,” she said. “It also helps that I speak fluent Spanish and it helps connect to our Hispanic patients a lot quicker.”

For Gomez, it’s not just about where you come from. “I really do think it helps for young people to see, yeah, I mean, anybody can be a doctor,” she said. “You don’t have to have, you know, have anything else that special. You just have to have the drive and the will. And I think that’s a good thing.”

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