Assume the Position: Memoirs of an Obstetrician Gynecologist (6 page)

     Two years ahead of me, my brother graduated first in his high school class and was the first kid from my hometown to go to Princeton University.   I was proud of him for his accomplishments.  He was an avid reader of almost anything he could get his hands on and an excellent student. He was also a good basketball player known locally as ‘Big Luke’ named after his idol Jerry Lucas.  He had long arms and legs, and sharp elbows.  Over the years I learned to defend myself with my elbows, since I got a few of his in my chest and face over the years.  Taller than me, he played a great forward on our high school basketball team.

      Over the next two years I had a number of occasions to visit him at Princeton. It seemed like a logical place for me to seek admission as well.  The school had a great reputation, a lovely campus, and it would be fun being on the same campus with him for two years.  One could actually get on the train in Lewistown, as I did many times, ride four hours through central Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, the capital city, on through the suburbs of Philadelphia, then Center City Philly, North Philadelphia, Trenton, New Jersey, and disembark at Princeton Junction. It was my favorite mode of transportation. From there the ‘Dinky’, a two car shuttle, would ramble for the next five minutes to deposit me right in the middle of campus facing the impressive gothic designed Blair Arch.   With its massive stone steps cascading downwards from the arch to other quadrangles, dorms, and the university store, its archways would often echo with the song and sounds of a Capella student singing groups.  A short stroll away was the Princeton Inn with Albert Einstein’s residence nearby, all surrounded by the beautiful Princeton golf course.  Walkways meandered through campus to Nassau Street, the main street through Princeton, New Jersey. One wound past stately Nassau Hall, formerly the capital building of the United States in Revolutionary war days, fronted by a gorgeous quadrangle filled with ancient, tall trees with black squirrels running up and down the trunks and limbs.    The campus was impressive, idyllic and unlike any other I had seen.  The buildings were huge, mostly Gothic in design, and stately architectural masterpieces.

(The Princeton University campus.)

In autumn the color of the changing leaves on the magnificent trees were breathtaking. Manicured lawns were covered with red and golden brown fallen autumn leaves surrounding the Henry Moore Sculpture near the ornate University Chapel with its stained glass windows, located across the mall from the huge Firestone Library. The crisp smell of autumn was everywhere.  Students in orange and black Princeton Tiger colors strolled through archways and paths scurrying from class to class.  Planted by Edith Wilson, wife of former university president T. Woodrow Wilson, the amazing, formal, lovely, and ornate Prospect Gardens, located behind the president’s house were most impressive. There were spectacular green clay tennis courts filled with students and faculty challenging each other.  The University Tiger band played ‘Old Nassau’ as it marched through the campus.  Crowds of alumni and students at the Saturday football games gave the campus a fall buzz of excitement and energy. 

     I stayed with my brother in the dorms, attended a few classes, and simply put was hooked on the place.  The only challenge was to maintain the grades and scores to accomplish admission.  Something like only 20% of my high school graduating class went to college, most staying in town to work in the local mill and factories. It was hardly a ‘feeder’ school for Princeton or any Ivy League campus.  The odds of getting accepted into Princeton were pretty slim anyhow, but especially coming from our high school.   So I had two more years to work at it and that is what I did. My mind was set. I wanted a good liberal arts education from the best school that would accept me.  And I wanted out of Lewistown.  As wonderful a community as it was in which to be raised and excel, it was too small, too isolated, and too rural for me.  I knew there was a large world out there to which I hadn’t yet been exposed. For me a Princeton education would be the ticket to find it.

     Aside from academics, local high school sports played a big part in my life. I had a lot of mental and physical energy that needed to be expended on a daily basis. Athletics was the vehicle for me; four years of high school basketball, summer baseball leagues, and two years of tennis which was a new high school sport for me. The green clay courts at Princeton had a special appeal to me.  I had never played on clay before, and I longed for the chance. I used to watch the Aussie greats Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall on TV in those long, grueling grand slam matches that went on forever in the days before tie- breakers.  They were out there by themselves, with no coach to discuss how to change the momentum of a game flowing in the other direction.  They often had to converse with themselves, to find new ways out of a hole, and change momentum so that things would turn in their favor.  There was no one else to rely on other than one’s self, which had a special appeal to me.  As much as I enjoyed team sports, something about one on one head to head competition and self-reliance appealed to me.

     Football was the team sport that challenged me most in high school and taught me valuable lessons for the rest of my life. Football was king where I came from in central Pennsylvania.  Friday nights the stadium lights would come on, the whole town would show up for the 10 game season, good hard cider was everywhere in the stands on cool autumn evenings, and the local fans and sport pages were full of football news.  There was much about football practice that I hated, and much that I loved. Two-hour practice sessions three times a day in the summer heat before the season started were grueling. If one got hurt the coaches made us  ‘run it off’ and take laps around the field, even if the leg was dragging, the thigh bruised, or the knee swollen.  Medical help was rarely accessible.  Water was sprayed on the dusty field rather than in our mouths during water breaks in the midst of the summer heat. It was at times both sadistic and brutal, difficult emotions for a young adolescent to fathom, and not something any of us could ever discuss with a coach.  Salt tablets were handed out before team showers because we were all in danger of depleting ourselves of electrolytes from the sweat in the hot sun with three a day practices during summer before school began.

     My junior year our team went 0-9-1.  One tie, and a winless season, was all we had to show for our efforts. We were the talk of the town as was our coach, a former Marine and my high school biology teacher, an all around upstanding human being.   All the sweat, tears, and hard work we put in seemed wasted.  My coach picked me as a captain that year.  It wasn’t easy being captain on a winless team. Not surprisingly, the next year someone else was chosen to be captain.  I was benched for the first four games of my senior year.  During one practice game I let a receiver get behind me for a long touchdown, a fatal flaw for a defensive safety.   I had to earn my way back to the starting team.   I unintentionally injured our best running back during practice one day, a brute of a guy with monstrous thighs.  The coaches were impressed by the jarring hit I placed on him, but there were just times ‘you gotta do what you gotta do’ to reach a goal.  After that I went on to lead our team in interceptions in the remaining six games.  We won 9 games and lost one that year, the largest sports turn around ever in our neck of the woods, the heart of football in Central Pennsylvania. We won several league championships in central and western Pennsylvania.  No team from my hometown has had a championship since then, almost 50 years later.  Football rivalries are strange things. Mental toughness, tenacity, loss, loyalty, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, honesty, friendship, camaraderie, victory all had their roots in football for me, and to this day the lessons learned help me in my daily struggles and challenges. One of the many simple lessons I learned was never to run away from a head on challenge coming full force directly at you.  Tackle it, and then move on!

     When I, too, graduated as class valedictorian two years behind my brother, after four years of hard work and focus, I was asked to deliver the valedictory address at the stadium filled with parents, relatives, townsfolk, friends and neighbors.  It gave me a sense of much needed comfort to do so on the field of some of my athletic endeavors.   My speech focused on  “The Individual”.  Delivered from memory because my English teacher would not permit it any other way, the speech focused on individual rights, freedoms and the lifelong pursuit of them, a theme that I took to heart for the rest of my life.  Years later, every time I opened a door to an examination room in my office without knowing who or what personal situation I was going to find behind the door, I knew that I was going to respect the individual waiting for me on the exam table. That was a given. 

     So I followed my brother’s footstep two years later to Princeton.  The unofficial motto of the University over the centuries was  ‘Princeton in the Nation’s Service’.  Past alumni who took that to heart were James Madison, Woodrow Wilson, John Kennedy (yes he started his freshman year here), Adlai Stevenson, James Baker, Laurence Rockefeller, Meg Whitman, Jeff Bezos, Bill Bradley, William Frist, and Samuel Alito, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, three Supreme Court Justices now sitting on the “Princeton Court’, not to mention Michelle Obama.

     I had no idea as a freshman where I fit in this idyllic New Jersey campus.  What I did know was that freshman year there was a language requirement among others. My first day in freshman German class, a language I had already studied for four years, we were all asked to stand and say something in German.  I muttered through something simple about who I was and where I came from then I sat down.  Next was a guy who unbeknownst to me at the time would wind up as class valedictorian four years later.  He discussed Einstein’s theory of Relativity in German.  I instinctively knew I was in trouble since I didn’t understand it in English, and lacked the ability to express it in German. I gave my self some credit though; it was obvious I was no longer going to be at the top of my class, a good thing to know from day one.

      Medicine was a thought in my head even as a freshman but in those days one had to major in the sciences to get in the hallowed doors of competitive medical schools. There were way too many other subjects that interested me to spend four years in a great liberal arts college majoring in the sciences.  I suspected I could do well if I applied myself, but did not have a true intrinsic interest in pursuing science for four years to the exclusion of everything else. After an aptitude test administered at my request while in college, I remember three results:  I scored equally well for professions requiring male and female traits; medicine would be a good choice for someone with those traits; I should not ever consider being an accountant since they had never seen anyone score so low in that field.

     The 60’s and 70’s were the Vietnam era years.  The campus was in turmoil and the hotbed of anti government thoughts on the one hand, with staunch defense on the part of the conservatives on campus.  There was so much free speech and radicalism both on the right and left that I felt like my head was constantly swiveling. But I appreciated the accepting manner in which people were peacefully allowed to express their thoughts, no matter how extreme.  It seemed like everything on TV was about war, even though no one was threatening our country.  For me the wiser choice was to spend tax money to correct the social ills visible all around us if the government would just open its eyes; medical and mental health care, teen pregnancy, poor infant mortality rates, poverty, lack of higher education and lack of food for many, improvement of aging infrastructure, entitlements for the aging, and social welfare programs.  War made no sense to me, nor did arms peddling and war profiteering that enriched the few and powerful.

     The nation’s military draft lottery system was initiated during my college years because the military couldn’t get enough bodies to enlist to replace the body bags filled with dead and injured coming home on a daily basis. Perhaps one of my happiest days was when I won the only lottery in my life that was important to win, my birthday date being drawn out of the hat as number 296.  It appeared the military only needed to get into the 250’s to fill the body quota to fight an unpopular war.  While some friends were drafted from college, others went to Canada.  It was an unsettling time in the country and for me. For me, all this turmoil boiled down to what I saw I could do as an individual to affect as many lives as I could in a positive way that would make me feel good about myself and others.  Medicine encompassed what I was good at academically, but more importantly I felt an emotional attachment.  It was pretty simple.  Helping others help themselves by providing people with the best possible healthcare, then sending them into the world to do their own thing; for me this was rewarding and a noble goal in life.  It was clear to me that without one’s health, it was impossible to achieve or function at home, school, the workplace, in the family, or in society.   I studied all the prerequisites needed to apply to medical school:  calculus, biology, general and organic chemistry, physics.   Unlike my classmates I refused to major in the sciences.  I reasoned that I had plenty of time in medical school for those, and wanted to branch out while still in college to take advantage of all that Princeton had to offer.  I chose Sociology as a major and enrolled in a special program of Science in Human Affairs, which enabled me to explore the History of Medicine, technology and medicine, among other topics.   Certainly no one, least of all my medical school advisor, encouraged me on this path. I was just exercising my headstrong independence. I needed first to understand what made people tick before I felt I could help them.  Sociology and psychology were my vehicles for understanding the human mind and body and social structures.  I studied poverty, education, sexual deviations, marriage, social psychology, the family unit, other cultures and societies with their ills and good fortunes.  I read great works in the Humanities, studied English and literature, and the History of Medicine.  In my mind this was the way to learn about human beings and what made us tick.  The medicine would come later.