A Lady’s Flight Towards The Land Of Her Dreams
Written by Bill Long on June 14, 2010 – 4:17 am -A woman who lived in the 1940s aspired to become a surgeon even when people strongly rejected that idea. While her dean in medical school did not believe that her ambition could flourish, he still arranged a recommendation for her. During the lady’s first three job interviews, the surgeon she met seemed to suppress their hilarity after reading her recommendation letter until she finally finds out why when the last interviewer read the lines that made him crack to her. The letter stated, To whom it may concern, this woman is large, powerful and tireless. To her amazement, all four surgeons offered her the post! Since this time, the admirers of this woman saw that she has lived up to become greater than these words that defined her.
Her medical service accolades range from establishing a volunteer group to serve in Africa and help lessen diseases and deaths, run a laboratory research team, go with relief organizations all around the third world countries to help their citizens and on top of these she has managed to maintain her private practice where income was never a priority. Recently, she came up with a line of skin care products that aids in skin cancer prevention.
As a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, she cares for anyone who is in a badly burned or injured state, and the worst instances she handled in her career were for the people coming from the suburbs of northern New York city. She is a supreme working mom with the way she raises eight children. The words accomplished, kindhearted, humble, driven, generous and energetic are just few of the terms that fit her, as she had also endured awfully large measures of misfortune which is the death of her two teen boys due to a blood problem known to be very fatal.
She is the middle child of a doctor who also happens to love sculpting. Her mother wished her to be a singer in an opera and she trained her in this but she never felt passion in singing. She depicts her father as a kindhearted doctor who would still care for anybody regardless of whether they can pay or not. She was ever present during her father’s medical rounds and surgical procedures.
She new early on that she was gonna take up medicine. She shares fondly about her father’s reaction being as if her move was a very common move back in those times. It is for such reason that this lady doctor never felt discriminated or disheartened on her abilities when it came to her field. Even back then, she was an odd person. She believes that her time was a breeze compared to what women are faced with today. Male doctors were never intimidated by her. She is out of her confines and does something beyond what people thought she could be.
Animals were her first love. As a young girl, she would stay in Maine during the summer and sleep in tents with a few dogs with her. Paving the way for her transformation was a small all girls school that also helped her find her way and enter into this prestigious medical university found in New York. But then she could not resist taking her crow and two beagle puppies along whenever she goes to school.
Way before she grabbed the distinction of being the very first lady surgeon to finish from this medical college, she already got married to a fellow doctor and had two daughters with him. After this, she focused on her career and became unstoppable. Making her share about her career and how it has developed the way it is now is nearly impossible. This lady surgeon often refuses to elaborate on her excellent contributions but she does let some allusions the hard task of juggling family with career slip out.
With her new husband, a doctor like her, she had five more kids and also adopted his kids from a former marriage. People wanted to know how it was like to grow up with a mother whose day started at 5 in the morning, worked nonstop the whole day and then was in bed reading until 1 in the morning? While the daughters had opposing comments, it was apparent that such an arrangement was not really easy for them. One of her daughters, an oncologist said that what was normal for them was watching her mother in action. She tried not to separate her work from her children. The tragedies other people suffered from became the topic of our dinner time conversation.
Her daughter, the one who was adopted has a critical role to play. As the oldest, much of the burden of raising the younger children fell to her. She was never home and to put her in the role of mother is stretching it. Due to her being so dedicated to her vocation, she almost never had time for us. The standing joke in the family, she said, was that when her mother wasn’t home, the children would always say she was out saving lives. But another daughter speaks of her mother’s sense of fun. Some of the ways by which she surprises her kids is by being at their soccer games with a pompom and a megaphone, or even joining local parades by wheeling in a fire engine!
Among her three sons, two were born with a congenital blood disease called Fanconi’s anemia, which made them go on blood transfusion session repeatedly. Even before the world learned anything about AIDS, these two got this disease from blood transfusions. These two children who were only 13 and 17 died a year apart. Around the time her youngest girl left for college, her husband left her on the eve of their second son’s death. There was suddenly a vast emptiness despite the hustle and bustle of her career.
Everything in her life got destroyed. What pushed her to fly to Africa was seeing her go from full house to being empty handed. She has been meaning to come here ever since she was a young girl. Flying to Kenya, she aimed to understand animal problems further. The hospital that has the worst AIDS cases and highest rate of infant mortality in the world was the next one she visited.
By way of the nonprofit group she founded to work in Eastern Kenya, she will be able to bring in medical equipment, treatments as well as proper medical training. Studying AIDS with her there are the new doctors she takes along her trips. Some robbers mercilessly beat her and her medical student companion up during their last visit to Kenya.
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