Coincidence

A friend from internship, almost 50 years ago now, died of Parkinson’s Disease in May. We landed together six of our twelve months of rotations in the hospital, 36 hours at a time. When I first met Duncan, I was taken aback. He was 6’7” tall and spoke with a strong Southern accent, although I later learned that his father was Dutch, and had settled in Florida after WWII. Duncan drank Ensure in the middle of the night to keep up his calories—not a problem I’ve ever had. My husband was impressed with his basketball history: he played in the NIT tournament for Davidson. His obituary says that he was also a competitive swimmer in high school.

He was the best colleague I could have had. Smart and pragmatic, he also was entirely fair with me and respected my medical opinion, (no mansplaining !) which I can say of very few men. The nurses adored him—a handsome single man who never lost his temper, and recognized their contribution, too. He had a great sense of humor and was always generous: when one of our colleagues needed a night off because his wife was having a baby, Duncan spent two nights in the hospital in a row to cover for him.

After completing our medicine internship, Duncan did a surgical internship at Kaiser SF, in order to maximize his time in the operating room. The surgeons at USCF, who had come to know him, were crushed that he did not stay to do his general surgery with us. Then he moved across the country for his already-planned ENT residency, and settled back home in Tallahassee, where he practiced unit the Parkinson’s forced him to stop

Coincidentally, I just read the new book Harsh Medicine : Why Women Can’t Get Ahead in Science and Health Care, by Jennifer Grandis, MD, an ENT surgeon at UCSF. Grandis writes about academic medicine, which I left after residency, but much of what she reports applies to women doctors in general. Basically, she says having more women in the pipeline does not insure greater representation of women in research and leadership because men actively undermine us at every juncture. This is not news to women who spent their lives in medicine, like me, but it was utterly depressing to learn how little has changed over time.

It made me realize again that colleagues like Duncan, brilliant and thoughtful, may always be rare. How lucky I was to meet him early in my medical career. If I had been stuck with some of the guys I coped with later, I might not have made it through.