Television portrays women doctors as sacrificing their personal lives for their careers. Miriam Shamer Daly's life was far different than the doctor's portrayed on TV. She married a classmate as a 23-year-old medical school student, practiced medicine and had four children, all of whom earned at least one graduate degree.

On television, each episode involves new patients whom the doctor meets for the first time. Practicing medicine for 44 years, Dr. Daly sometimes met her patients as toddlers, delivered their babies, and knew them as grandparents or even great-grandparents. In her small town, she might see a child in her office in the morning, see them again at the supermarket in the afternoon and then run into the parents again at an evening school event.

If you think it is heart-wrenching on TV when an ambulance brings a child into an emergency room that cannot be saved, imagine the feeling when you have taken care of that child his or her whole life. Imagine what it is like when you've known the whole family and most of them don't survive an accident.

Doctor Daly's stories are amazing, and they are all true.