An excerpt from Face2FaceAfrica -
Meet the Haitian woman who became Canada’s first Black female interventional cardiologist
BY Dollita Okine
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Photos: Alexandra Bastiany
Alexandra Bastiany, Canada’s first Black woman interventional cardiologist, was raised in Montreal by a Haitian mother who pursued a career in nursing and a father who worked as a chemist. Thus, Bastiany’s ambition to become a doctor has been present since she was a young child.
She told Heart and Stroke, “Both my parents had defied the odds by attending college and university and becoming young professionals in a foreign country. I was determined to follow in their footsteps and achieve my dreams, despite how the world perceived me, and independently of what society expected from me. I was determined to rise above the statistics and the stereotypes. I must also say, I love a challenge.”
But even as a teenager, she was inspired by the intricacies of “such a simple organ” called the heart and understood that practicing cardiology was what she wanted to do.
“During my first year in medical school, I fell in love with the heart, but I did not think cardiology was for me until I learned about interventional cardiology (this is a practice that works on the arteries in the heart to remove blockages using non-invasive procedures, through the wrists or groin),” she said.
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