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Few people are able to combine their passion with their work, particularly when that job is highly specialized. But, Lafayette physician Joan Wojak has managed to do just that - by finding a niche which merges her love of horses with her practice in interventional neuroradiology. In her precious spare time, this busy doctor volunteers for the Acadiana Therapeutic Riding Association (ATRO), which provides equine-assisted therapy and therapeutic riding for patients with disabilities.

With her Cossack heritage, Wojak was destined to become a rider. Both of her grandfathers were horseman. "Behind the Mongolians, the Cossacks are probably the second best natural native horsemen in the world," she explains. Dr. Wojak, who hails from Long Island, New York, sought greener pastures after finishing her neurosurgery residency at NYU. Tired of the fast pace of Manhattan, she jumped at the opportunity to complete a radiology residency at LSU in New Orleans. After completing a fellowship in interventional neuroradiology, Wojak was offered a job in Lafayette.

"I came out and visited, and just fell in love with the place," she reflects fondly. "It just seemed to be a really nice place to live. The people are friendly, and it's a small enough community that you tend to know the doctors that you work with. Being that it's a small community, you are working with people who are your friends. And to me, that's just a much more pleasant working environment than being an anonymous name."

At the time that Wojak started practicing interventional neuroradiology in 1996, it was a "very young, rapidly developing field." Even today, there are only about 200 doctors in the country who specialize in this area. In Louisiana, just a handful exist, including Wojak and her partner, Dr. Buckley Terpenning. "Just to be able to treat diseases from inside the blood vessels rather from outside, and not have to subject patients to a big operation, was tremendously appealing to me," Wojak says. "And it had a lot of new technology and was real cutting-edge, and that really interested me. So, that's how I ended up picking that field."

As to her other passion, horses, Wojak enjoys them so much that she formed a business buying young jumping prospects, which she then develops and sells. For her personal riding and showing, she has a Hanoverian warmblood, Sky; a Dutch warmblood, Useful, and a Palomino quarter horse, Sonny. Sky placed at the national level, while Sonny placed in the top ten at the world championships.

Sonny is Wojak's "pet." She boasts about him like a proud parent. "He's like an overgrown Labrador retriever," she laughs. "He's entertaining, he's intelligent, and he's engaging. He turns off the electric fence, opens gates, takes his blankets off, turns on the water trough, drinks Coca Cola out of the can - and he's just full of hilarity. You never know what he's going to do next."

Wojak combines her love for horses and her medical training to work with ATRO during the week. Currently, the program provides therapeutic riding for about 25 to 30 patients with physical, mental or emotional disabilities. "It's been found to be beneficial in children with cerebral palsy, and it's been shown to be beneficial in children with disorders such as autism," Wojak says.

For patients with physical problems, the volunteers perform equine-assisted physical therapy, such as stretching exercises and games that induce grip coordination. The patients with cognitive disabilities engage in activities "like riding from one point in the ring to the other by letters of the alphabet," Wojak explains.

Wojak is proud of the work that she does with ATRO. "To watch the progress that these children make, and to watch the impact that it has not only on the children, but on their families, is the best reward you can possibly have," she says. "And to be able to share my passion with horses with these children and help them to benefit from what I see in them is very rewarding."

As to her other passion, practicing medicine, Wojak says that she gets a lot of personal satisfaction from that as well. "The most rewarding part of my practice is seeing my patients be able to go back to enjoy their lives, and maybe even go back to doing more than they were doing before," she says. "It's wonderful having the patients that I have here in the community, because they stay put and you get followup. To be able to see that beneficial effect is the most rewarding thing. It helps to reinforce the fact that everything we do in medicine really boils down to helping to maintain or improve the quality of life of your patients."

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