MAY-C-4
A
COOL CLOUDY WEEKEND AT HOME WITH DOMESTIC CHORES
AND SORTING OF SCORES OF PICTURES,
AND THE GWU COMMENCEMENT:
BOTH MY OWN AND THE HOODING CEREMONIES
OF MY MEDICAL STUDENT ADVISEES
May 17—18, 2003
It may have
been a cool rainy—anything but the glorious warm
springtime day one might reasonably expect from
this time of year—but it was a great weekend nonetheless. I spent much of it closed in at Derwood—unable
to get out and mow the lawn to make it look less
like I lived in an abandoned and therefore neglected
hermitage—and during that time when I was not pulling
on the starter cord of the recalcitrant lawn mower
which refused to start, I was sorting pictures of
the experience in Africa and preparing to see a
number of my medical student colleagues in their
formal send-off through GWUMC Commencement ceremonies.
FOR GWU AND GWUMC
There were
two graduations in Washington DC yesterday---GWU
and GWUMC—and I was involved in both. In the first one,
I graduated! I found my name listed
in the program as having been awarded the M. Phil.
degree in Human Sciences effective January 2003.
This marks my FOURTH GW Master's degree!
Since the debacle three years ago, when the national park Service canceled the traditional GWU mass graduation ceremony on the Ellipse of the DC Mall due to a lightning storm, and there was no “Plan B” option for a back-up for the grannies who had come from China or the Iranian uncles who had obtained visas to see their precious nephew sent to America to lift the family through an expensive education climaxed in this ceremony, there was an entire DC Convention Center rented for Plan B on this occasion. But rain was not considered life-threatening, so they went ahead with Plan A—and the ceremony was held in the sodden grass of the Ellipse under leaden skies spitting rain. The honorary degrees were awarded to contributors and Mark Warner, GW Grad and Governor of Virginia gave the address. I took the bus down to the Ellipse and took a couple of pictures of the wet seats where I should have been, but left to come back to the office and clean the mud off my shoes which had buried the spike heels of many of the proud parents.
The “Main Event”
for me and a number of the GWUMC faculty and students
was held in the Smith Center. I was listed for
the official duties of “Hooding” three of my protégés,
and therefore had carried my academic regalia to
the faculty dressing room in the Smith Center where
IO had formerly come to prepare to run the DC Mall.
MY RUNNING PARTNER,
FELLOW SURGEON,
AND COMMENCEMENT
SPEAKER,
SENATE MAJORITY
LEADER,
BILL FRIST
To my surprise,
the Commencement Speaker was my old friend and close
compadre, Senate majority leader Bill Frist.
He and I have operated in the same African
mission stations and he and I have run several marathons
together, with a photo I had promised him of the
Marine Corps marathon last year in which I had encouraged
him at the half way point.
I went to his more highly secured room in
advance of the ceremonies where he introduced me
to his wife Karen and his personal aide Tom Craig
who will be setting up later appointments with me.
We swapped cards and photographs, and then
prepared to process.
I went with
the group of faculty the students had selected to
“hood” them, as they had been identified as the
most significant teachers in their lives, or—in
my case additionally—the person who had got them
into GW medical school in the first instance. I processed among
old friends, and sat center stage between Jim Blatt
and Peter Hotez, so we had a good time during the
rambunctious acknowledgment on the part of very
proud families. Both Bill Frist and
Ambassador Rios were awarded Presidential Medals—the
subject of a later reception for each—and I had
a chance to speak with each of them as we enjoyed
the ceremonies.
By a coincidence,
each of my “hoodees” had surnames beginning with
“S”. Almost
none of the student graduates had names like Smith
or Jones, and a single white male twenty year-old
is an endangered species in GW medical school, which
is majority female, more experienced, and largely
Asian. I hooded Seema, who had first met me when
I had been at a reception for the Voice of America
six years ago with Habeeb Ghatala and she had been
the Indian dance performer. She expressed the hope
of coming to GW medical school, and I helped in
that effort. She
got married last year in a “Monsoon Wedding” in
which her husband came in on a white horse—in the
rain—to which I was invited but for which I was—of
all places—in India at the time.
She had made her first return to India after
her freshman year and brought back the marble inlay
of the Taj Mahal that stands on my desk.
Next was a
true GW product, Shahbanam Shahbadi, who has identified
with me since I could understand her Islamic heritage,
and her Iranian family had attended the Match Day
ceremony and insisted on taking a portrait of us
together—which I handed her on stage.
My last “hoodee”
was John Sutter. John is the former
Social Worker whose first patient he had ever seen
was a small boy with an easily diagnosable case
of pneumonia which I had helped him diagnose as
the nomadic father had carried him to us over several
days of mountain climbing on the shores of Lake
Tso Morari where our Himalayan Health Medical Camp
was situated. I helped John do his first ever operation,
this time in Embangweni last year, in removing an
African Melanoma and applying a split thickness
skin graft. And
I made it possible for him to see his last patient,
since we had both just returned form a second trip
to Embangweni Hospital in Malawi—making John a three-time
veteran of my foreign medical missions and with
the majority of his clinical experience coming form
the international missions he has made with me. It was a pleasure
to be introduced to his father Robert and mother
Valerie and sister and roommate.
I had a real
epiphany outside the Smith Center after the recessional.
A pair of proud parents came over to see
me, and each looked familiar to me. The husband I had
recognized as a former patient and he may have seemed
like an apparition, since I did not know he was
still living. I
had done a radical adrenalectomy on him when I had
met him as a very worried pharmacology employee
of the FDA, who had this large mass show up on CAT
scan, said by others to have been inoperable.
It might have appeared so, especially on
imaging, but I had considered that there was no
other chance for him.
He agreed, and I did an extended en bloc
resection of his retroperitoneum, removing a fibrosarcoma
of the adrenal already spread outside the capsule,
and we informed him that I had done the best I could,
but that it did not look good for his longer term
prognosis. That was 14 years ago, and here he is
attending his daughter’s graduation as an MD!
That daughter
turns out to be Laju Satchithanandam—my advisee
for the past four years! I had never put the two of them together—but
if ever there were a paradigm of the clinician teacher,
here in two generations was the product of my dual
career!
Laju had first
come to my office with John Sutter prepared to do
a foreign mission with me, but something had always
blocked her completing it, including parents from
Sri Lanka who had wanted her to go there rather
than what they had viewed as war-torn India. So, she had been often
booked for several trips and with many visits and
phone calls, had eventually canceled out of each,
although her parents were very trusting of the leader
Dr. Geelhoed! Now, I learned how
it is that they had seemed to know and trust me—first
with is life, but reluctantly with that of their
daughter in what they viewed as a volatile Kashmiri
conflict—whereas I had just returned form a first
hand view of the uncharacteristic violence in Sri
Lanka, a gentle and beautiful land with a formerly
peaceful population of divergent interests in Buddhists
and Tamil Tiger Hindus inflaming the Capital and
the northern provinces.
So, the “world
comes to GW” and, as my colleagues never tire of
pointing out, I, as GW, am most often, going out
to that world, so world-wide coincidences and familiarities
in linkages are more likely to occur.
That was the
subject of the reception for the students and families,
which I had first attended with lots of pictures
and farewells, and then at the Presidential Medal
receptions, with the Senator and Mrs. Bill Frist
and Ambassador (of Panama) Rios and family. It might be possible
to make a special foreign mission with Bill Frist
as well as get his help in the Global Health Institute
that I have been discussing with Peter Hotez, and
this week we will go to visit and discuss this further.
So, my professional
career at (or, as some might say, in orbit around)
GW has some glowing moments of nostalgia when a
brief pause is possible to consider the very diverse
associations now extending over several generations.
It was five years ago when I had been on
the platform to see the graduation of Joe McCormack’s
daughter—Joe I had as my medical student at GW,
and now I was graduating his daughter born in his
residency here—and I had helped her get in to GW
Medical school in response to Joe’s plea for help. On a momentous single
day in her life, she got married and got the letter
from GW of her last minute acceptance to medical
school. This
year I have heard about a possible third-generation
professional application coming along, after already
having experienced several second generations.
Last year I had missed the
graduation of Elizabeth Yellen whom I would have
hooded, as her mother Alison Brooks had been my
anthropology thesis advisor, and she was one of
those I had helped get into GW medical school and
also helped her pick off the most prized residency
of this last year’s Match Day.
She had been with me in Embangweni just before
the match, and I was already off in India at the
time of her graduation, but we had a “Malawi-show-and-tell”
program before I left in which I could celebrate
my “hooding equivalent” for her. Now, in the international
missions and advisees pipeline, I have scores more
students that will be coming through, and today
I must write three letters of recommendation—two
for students who were with me as pre-medical applicants
in India now applying to medical school and one
for another two-time veteran and superb physician,
Kevin Bergman, for residency applications.
Now, on a more
realistically somber note, I add that of the faculty
who were emeritized yesterday, two of them graduated
from medical school in the same year I did, and
three of them came to the faculty after I had already
been in it for several years. So, as I am celebrating
the professional brotherhood (and in the case of
my own protégés, the sisterhood),
“…at my back I always
hear, Time’s winged chariot hurrying near….”