23 yo University of Manitoba Medical School

I was excited getting accepted into the University of Manitoba Medical School. I didn’t apply to any other medical schools. My brother was University of Manitoba Science and Agricultural.  It was a good fit.  I was the years of 1975 to 1979.  I graduated medical school in 1979.  In 1975 I was 23

A group of us from University of Winnipeg were accepted.

Because I failed the pathology class I’d take the summer job in Tuxedo doing the summer parks program and teaching creative dramatics and improvisation. I had to study. I got an apartment down the street from the University of Manitoba Medical School by the Winnipeg General Hospital. I had one block to walk. It was a basement suite which a lovely older couple rented me

I was dating Maureen at this point. All the love songs were about her and all I could do was write poetry for her and take endless pictures of her beauty. She was having family problems that first year but would get into medical school the next year. She, her twin sister and Debbie would overlap with my study group which was Glen and Archie and Richard and Gary and our surgeon to be friend whose name slips me at the moment.  

I’d spend 4 years with these 100 medical students and come to know and really like them all.  There was only a 2 or 3 I’d question their competence and attitude.  We all were dedicated and committed and I saw the most aloof be thoroughly empathic. I really was impressed with our group. Our class was a ‘smart’ class and produced a lot of high ranking specialists. Maureen’s class was  more family practice oriented.

All of us were good back then. The deviation would come with practice, family, work and burn out.Today I think of 40 to 60 % of my classmates having developed burn out. We were the best of the best and took all that was thrown at us but later the work took it’s toll.  Many went to the US. Some even left the field. Some went onto radiology and research and left all clinical work. Many made world famous contributions in their fields.  We were the rock stars. It felt good to be ‘chosen’ and to have that sense that we were entering the big leagues.  NASA move over.  

No one loves the academic load at first. Richard who had his Master in Biochemistry said at the end of the first year, « they expect us to know all of what I learned in a master’s program in months. ». « It’s worse said one of the class science phd’s they expect us to learn the equivalent of 5 phd’s in 2 years.  We’re being tested on what I did my dissertation on. ».

 It was hard.  We met the challenge.  We were tired and we studied all the time. People don’t realize the sheer hours of work that medical students do.  I’d work in class or lab 8 to noon. If we ate it was a half hour while asking each other questions. Then from 1230 to 5 30 or 6 we were in that many more classes. Actual formal training 9 - 10 hours a day 5 days a week then we’d study from 6 to 11 pm and start the next day again, 8 hours on Saturday and 8 hours Sunday study.

We each had our study carrel which smelt like us.  It’s where we lived.  I remember joking with the guys and falling asleep on my books and everyone at some time having the imprints of desks on their faces.  We had volumes of reading. My favourite prank was crawling silently along the overhead pipes till I was directly above our most stills friend. I dropped from above feeling planting loudly on his desk as I scream « aha! ». He’d fall backwards in shock and roll head over heels out of his chair. We all laughed then went back to study.

I used a yellow marker and if I had time to reread underlined. We had our different strategies. I tried making notes but this was too slow. I did make poems that contained the tough exam questions embedded in them.
Even when a half dozen of us would give our blood fluids for cash each week we’d turn it into a study session and quizz each other.

Simon became my friend. He played piano, sang Rogers and Hamersmith songs and recited Albert and the Lion.  He was hilarious and brilliant.  He’d marry a shrew and go to Montreal to become an anesthetist and be a good boy, his wife thought I was a bad influence. I was. I lit Simons first cigar in my backyard before his good wife plucked out of his lips, stomped it on the ground and glowered at me. 

We were, different and bright and eccentric.  

Almost everyone had surprising skills in other areas, like the pornographer who went onto be a plastic surgeon. Or the rock and roll star who became the country GP. Or a half dozen classical musicians.  My classmates were really ‘neat’ people, fascinating, brilliant. I read the Economist back then and discussed the Manchester Weekly with Gary.  Lots of kids were just out of 2 years of pre med after school and starting to blossom, dating and leaving their parents homes. It was incredible to watch some of them literally go from boys and girls to men and women. Medical School changed all of us. You don’t deliver a baby or sit with a dying child with leukaemia and not grow emotionally and spiritually.  We were touched. We cried .We laughed a lot. We grew together.  A hundred students We became closest  close to about 10.  

I remember being hit in the face  by a flying penis in the gross lab.  The Jewish kid at the next table just went berserk and cut off the penis and flung it. I just happened to be in the way. It wasn’t intentionally directed at me. But today I am the only person I know who has been hit in face by a flying penis that was Bobbited from a corpse before Bobbit was even known. That maybe why I like the detachable penis song.   The student was carried out of the class and the whole matter hushed up. No one was going to donate their dead bodies if the medical students were going to mutilate the genitalia.  Even now I wonder about saying it. But everything has changed and many people have died.  The back story on this young man is he’d walked in and seen his naked grand mother whose funeral he’d just attended. She was  lying their naked on the gurney ready for dissection.  He didn’t take it well obviously. I can’t remember if he was away for weeks or a year. I restored the penis to the corpse and we carried on dissecting the axilla.  

We smelt of gross lab for 3 months. Sickening smell that got into every pore. It never left us. in our clothes and the food we ate. In outside it smelt like gross lab.

We each had a box of bones that formed a skeleton.  I had one. I think others had theirs. I was still bussing then. On the Portage bus carrying my box of bones I put the box on it’s side at the back of the bus. The bus stopped suddenly and the skull literally jumped out of the box and made it’s escape rolling down the aisle and almost out the front door . Before it did  I trapped it.p with my foot like I would a soccer ball. I walked back the the back of the bus all eyes on me carrying my skull. At the back I collected  he other bones that had spilled out but not travelled so far.

I loved my stethoscope. I loved my pocket ophthal- otoscope. I loved my tuning fork. I loved my Merck Manual. There were all these little things that gave me the joy my first Texas Instruments calculator had given me.  The stethoscope was sweet. My mother gave me a Gray’s Anatomy. An ex wife, also a doctor would steal both the stethoscope and the Gray’s Anatomy.  She knew quality but despite having money had never thought to put money into her tools. I loved good tools.  Not just Snap On but any tools. I loved my stethoscope. It had cost me hundreds of dollars and I’d done a commercial on television and skipped a day of study to get the money to buy that stethescope. Because it was good and I was a good listener I’d hear many a murmur, save dozens of lives in years to come. It was especially good for little children. I was blessed to have that tool. It served me well.

The Merck Manual was big and clumsy but fit in the pocket of my short white lab coat so could go with me on rotations.  I looked up everything, double checked everything. 

We’d make rounds with a staff person that first year. But the first two years were mostly academic with the increasing clinical ‘teases’ . We wouldn’t become even junior interns till our third year.

I’d aced my exam at the end of the summer, thanks to Glen and Archie, Susan and Terry. They’d all at different times asked me questions and discussed my studies. I’d had a choice to take the pathology exam again or do the whole of first year again. I chose the latter figureing if I was going to study it would do me well to review everything. It really did. In second year I was at the top of the class and stayed in the top 10 till the end of the year. AT times I made it into the top five but clinically was where I’d excel.  The older guys in general pulled out of the ranks in the ‘clinical years’ while some of the students simply lacked ‘people skills’ or maturity that would take more years to develop.  

But that’s all we did was study.

I remember making a chicken for Maureen. I’d invited her for dinner and it slid off the plate onto the floor when I was cutting it. Lots of laughter.  That was at the University of Winnipeg apartment because I’d had the Murphy bed and used a card table with some sort of table cloth for the ‘fine dining’ in my apartment.  We’d date for months after before we became an item.  I even believe on one date, during the inaugural platonic times her sister Susan filled in. They did that. Fooled the guys. I asked but never knew for sure.  In the first months they were that identical that it was really hard to tell them apart. But after a few dates and having coffee together they became distinctly different. Susan would also get a parks job and get stronger shoulders which always differentiated her for me at a distance.  Up close I didn’t even think of them as identical after our first weeks of friendship. They were so different but so similiar.  Greg Downey was our Top Gun Tom Cruise. He was always at the front, leading the pack, the one to watch. I think he was eventually accepted At Harvard, maybe cardiology.

I really was in love again.

Like Dr. Zhivago. In love with two women. I loved that movie and struggled with that. I’d loved Baiba and loved loved Maureen heart and soul. 

I felt sullied by divorce. As a Christian I was less than now. I was also aware that a ‘divorced man’ couldn’t be the partner in a clinic or a variety of other associations. The same never held true for women since women in the workplace en mass was being written as it went.  30% of the medical school class was female back in the 30’s whereas my class was 50% women. There were women surgeons in the Civil War and women doctors came long before women in other professions and other fields.  Having women in medicine was great. I loved working with men and women and learning from men and women, my best teachers being like the best of the best always, beyond gender.

Susan and Debbie began as classmates but each would take time off and end up graduating with Maureen in the year after mine. I always thought Maureen had the advantage that studying with me I could give her a heads up and recommend what she needed to watch out for. I’d struggled that first year. 50% of the medical school class had family who were doctors so it was easier.. Medicine is it’s own language. Some of it latin but mostly it’s a whole new vocabulary. The students whose family were doctors had a serious advantage.  Maureen had the benefit of myself, Susan and Debbie.  She was really smart and intuitive herself and just became a better and better student and like me excelled in clinical work. She was also loved. Everyone liked the sisters because they were incredible. Really great people and great doctors. Growing up in their bizarre family they somehow thanks to each other and the confidence a great sister gives they were confident and socially excelled. They were incredibly funny too.

I remember a dinner party I had in my basement room when I asked everyone to bring a play or skit to do. I think that’s the first time we heard Simon recite Albert and The Lion to gales of laughter. Susan and Maureen meanwhile did the funniest skit of two twins in the womb arguing about who would go first and « stop elbowing. » They acted it out too with bodies entwined around each other awkwardly. The sisters really were funny and serious too.

I’d eventually marry Maureen and say that it was the marriage from heaven and the divorce from hell. Heaven was great.  We studied together from day one, great buddies. She was incredibly sexy early years, insatiable. 

Part of the divorce loss was the shared experience. My parents married more than 50 years would have all that shared experience to reminisce about and remember. I felt like the hard drive of 10 years was lost when I left Maureen or she left me. I never knew because I’d made a decision to do something to get women to leave me or not want me because they were even more angry when I just walked out. They seemed to feel better if they thought they threw me out. So back before college I came up with that idea and winning formula.  Maureen was perfect and would be. A wonderful beautiful girl with her trauma and nightmares and crying in the sleep. And her family.  I always thought we might have worked it out if not for her mother so the poor lady was considered poorly by me as the ‘mother in law from hell’ for years even after she died. I didn’t know she had for a decade  and I spoke poorly without class, ill of the dead, when she wasn’t there to defend herself and my next mother in law, truly the mother in law from hell would raise Maureen’s mother’s status to merely the mother in law from purgatory.  

I love that meme that said if you lined up your ex’s you could get a really good plot of your mental illness. 

In the summer we’d canoe. Maureen was a Sports illustrated bikini cover in those wonderful summers of skinny dipping and canoeing and camping.  I loved the campfires under the dark inky blue sky, the smell of pine and woodsmoke, moon rising overhead.  During the days I’d spend   hours in gratitude watching the elegance of her paddling.  I loved to watch her come out of the water too like Venus stepping off a shell. She was beyond 10. She was what Bo Derek wanted to be. 

I also taught her dancing. She was a great student and soon because a gold level dancer. We’d dance at the Latvian dinners polka danceing with Paul and his mother and younger sister and Vecsmamin. My family hadn’t like the alcoholic in-laws but my first ex’s family loved Maureen, nurse Maija becoming good friends with doctor Maureen. Great times together.

 These were my yuppie years with yuppie friends and it all began with medical school. A whole change of life and direction.  I was going to be a surgeon and go to Africa and be a missionary doctor. That was my dream. I’d been so uplifted reading of Livingstone.  We dreamed together and studied together and partied together and grew older together but wouldn’t grow old together. 

When I came into the medical school for my first class I’d get a coffee with cream and sugar from the kiosk and a really big apple bun with lots of syrupy icing. I’d eat this in the first class drinking the coffee and looking around at a hundred other students in that great new cement theatre with orange and autumn coloured seats. It was incredible.

 Between classes we’d play ping pong in the common area. I actually got pretty good but there were those who got great.  Class after class after class.  A piece of pizza on the run for lunch.  A hour for dinner , home made, then 3 or 4 hours study at night. A big event was taking a Friday or Saturday night off for a movie or the ballet or to go dancing. I had a one night off rule so Maureen and I did great a break. Then later it would be a day cross country skiing and snow shoeing and summer canoeing on a weekend , often carrying books which we actually did read and grilling each other on whatever it was we were trying to memorize.  We all talked medicine.  We lived and breathed medicine. 

We all told stories about our profs and classmates but we didn’t know what was going on in the world and we didn’t know the ‘events’ of the ‘news’ most of the time. I’d read Science magazine and Nature and if something was mentioned their I’d maybe know. We’ read the Medical Post which gave us ‘medical news’ but when I hear songs of the late 70’s or see fashions or watched the ‘70’s’ show in tv years later I had no idea what they were going on about. I’d been on  another planet called medical school. The first year was the entrance to a tunnel that I popped out of 4 years later. Reading the economist when I could or National Geographic in the friends downstairs toilet were the rare glimpse outside the medicine bubble.

The next summer I’d work for Hydro at the lake and after that I couldn’t work.  I had to devote all my energy to study. I had to give blood for money and got clinical bits and pieces to pay the rent.  I was thankful my mother brought me food.  Paying for books was always an issue and I’d come up with novel ways that gave me lots of money briefly since I never had time.  Maureen was doing the same. At least a half of the medical school class were poor relative to the other half and we were just getting by, no fat, lean and mean and struggling. But the rich kids or those whose family supported them weren’t getting all the awards. Some but not all. Medical school was total meritocracy.  You did the work, you got the grade.  No soft rides and none of the teachers were colluding to carry anyone. Someone got sick we helped them but since everyone was full out working at the max always we could only carry each other for a week or two. The poor person whose problems lasted longer completed the next year because the pace was constant. There was no ‘catching up’ beyond one or two weeks.  No one could.  It was merciless.  But exhilarating.  I loved the pace and when the clinical work began I just thrilled be be of service and loved all the skills and helping and being meaningful and feeling such a part of .  It was years later that University of Toronto medical students when failed got lawyers and bought their medical degrees. We were decades before that when you had to do the work.

I was writing and directing the Beer and Skits performances two of the years as well as writing and eventually editing the Meditoban student journal then writing in the University of Manitoba Journal and the University of Manitoba Medical Journal.  I somehow found the time too to take a course with Dr. Carl Ridd one night a week, one semester,missing some, but getting through a semester. That was in first or second year. Third and fourth year was just clinics, studies and exams.  Total immersion.

1974-1975.  I dont’ know what happened . It’s a kind of blur.  I’ll think more and maybe some highlights will appear.  Certainly the first rectal exam remains memorable.  Things like that.  An old demented guy and 10 of us one after another doing a rectal for the first time. If he wasn’t gay before we began he was likely considering it after our rotation.  We’d listen to each others’ hearts and do countless reflex and neurological and gastroenterological exams on each other.  No one disrobed.  It was just a whole lot of leaning. I wrote a great exam song when there was still humor in Canada. It went national. 

To excellent we’d  dissected the extra white lab rat we’d killed in second year pre med. We drew the line at killing an unsuspecting stranger to get more gross lab time.  We were that keen too. Netter’s books were what we lived for.  I read Harrison’s cover to cover  and Schwartz surgery cover to cover And anatomy and physiology texts were devoured. I loved physiology except kidney.  More biochemistry and more pharmacology.  I don’t remember psychiatry much in medical school. I was going to be a surgeon and psychiatry didn’t appeal to me back then. It took being a family physician and a fly in doctor in the north to make me aware of how central psychiatry was.  Back then I liked cutting things. I excelled with needles, arterial gasses, spinal taps. I did so many.

 In the clinical rotations I’d begin to find things people missed. It was a recurring coup and so enjoyable. A few of us were gifted that way. Sherlock Homes. I had an East Indian Internist who I so admired. We’d play the game of what’s the diagnosis when people were checking in. We'd lay bets with him and then check the admission record.  He was always right and taught us, his disciples,  the clinical ‘signs’. The English doctors were into the Degown and Degown Signs of medicine and I loved that. The tests were confirmative but weren’t that exciting. Diagnosis was so fascinating because of the history and the exams.  It was especially fun to pick up a tell tale clue at a distance. That’s what we did as medical students. When we’d get into the 3rd year we’d run all over the hospital seeing the clubbed nails, the flap of liver disease, the detached retina, different named signs, and telling other students what we’d admitted so they could see the signs.  It was like bird watching on steroids. I loved bird watching. I loved seeing the whole history of a disease in a person’s body. 

But here were a hundred friends all nuts like me.  The interns and residents were even more obsessed with the learning game. I feel sorry for anyone who comes into the hospital with a ‘fascinoma’ because they’re literally be seen before their departure by at least a hundred clinicians or more. The nurses were even doing this sometimes too .as a psychiatrist I’d see pretty well every syndrome ever named and count myself blessed.

The greatest teacher was the patient. I think William Oiler said that. Years later a College of Physicians Assistant Registrar would say ‘the doctor doesn’t learn from the patient , the patient is there to learn. They must listen. Never forget you’re the officer and the patient is like the enlisted man . You’re there to tell them what they need to know. You don’t learn from them. ».

Years  later I’d meet these hiarchal sorts who kind of goose stepped in their minds and bought into the bureaurcratic model and rejected the clinical learning model. They never understood the ‘prince among princes’ idea. Arrangeant men and women in deep denial often alcoholic or sex addicted they’d take pleasure in administration. It was hard to imagine why they’d ever been doctors. They missed the point or lost the idea of profession and guild selling out for sahckels and a pension. 

 I never did. I loved learning and every patient was a great and personal unique story. I learned to tease out the truth mostly with hypnosis training and learning more ‘sign’s and watching the pupil dilation and the colour of skin as the answer were true or false. I became a human lie detector and also just a great treasure hunter. Eventually pscyhiatrist would be that.  This great hunt for the culprits in the human drama. Psychiatry had the very best Easter eggs and all of us knew it as the three dimension chess game, the glass bead game, the swimming in the unconscious. Before the reductionists, those drug pushers for the multi nationals redefine the brilliant field in junior neurology. I never lost the awe of psychotherapy though loved psychopharmacology resisting the push and pull to be a glorified pharmacist for profit and aloofness, 

A person would say I’m depressed and the pharmacist psychiatrist would shut them up with the psychological equivalent of a pain killer whereas I’d learned in surgery never take away the pain till you were sure of the diagnosis because the pain pointed you to what was really wrong.  So psychiatry as speciality of medicine became an extension of all I began to learn in medical school. I really was blessed to be among the greats. 

Dr. Arnold Naimark was the Dean of Medicine and never was there a greater dean and more brilliant learned man. A mensch among mensch. All that Osler would have loved and admired.  He built the University of Manitoba medical school in my day bringing in the greatest teachers, researchers and clinicians like a coach tries to pull together the best hockey team or a director producer makes the best movie. We as students were surrounded by the greatest casts of characters and the best of the best teachers. 

Later  when I’d join the faculty I’d learn their foibles but all of them remained the greatest doctors and teachers to me.  What I needed as a medical student I got in spades at University of Manitoba. Later I’d do my American medical exams and ace those years later and all of what I’d learn I’d put to the test alone in some place in that awful fight for the life of the patient thanking my teachers for all they’d equipped me with. Even now I cry thinking of those nights I’d keep some child, man or woman alve knowing that I only could because I remembered what someone had taken the time to teach me. It was such an honor and a privilege to learn medicine at University of Manitoba among the best of the best. 

My classmates would go on to Harvard, Cambridge, Texas.  I’d be accepted to Stanford but go onto UBC to teach because I wanted the wilderness and north and Canada  more than America,and the city , and the greatest of universities.  I’d broken up with a beautiful American girl then so with increasing skill I exittted stage right with alacrity. Rerun north young man. My car broke down in Vancouver or I might have taken the other job in Virginia.

I was once 23. I was once a first year medical student. All I feel today is wonder and awe looking back at the stranger who was then.  .  

We’d had this study group that continued on at University of Manitoba. Other than Glen we were an odd group with Richard our Master’s in Biochemistry student, this great guy who had been a pornographer before medical school, a former education student.  Mostly the ‘mature group’ though we didn’t act it.  Archie, Glen’s older brother would join us.  We’d enjoy later when we had rotations together. Now we tended to sit together and join labs together.

In gross lab everyone got a cadaver. Some of these folk were the ones I’d cut up a corpse with.  Archie would marry Terry.  I’d marry Maureen. Glen would marry his true love. We were young doctors in love but much more discrete and romantic than the later tv shows. We really were the Dr. Kildare s and lots of our teacher were Marcus Welby. 

I’d arrange a table in the finest old restaurant, white tablecloth and Dom Perignon champagne. I’d go down on one one and propose to Maureen and she’d accept. With the help of her family and friends I’d bought her a diamond and white gold engagement ring. It was a perfect moment that comes back to me over and over again as a counter balance to the nightmares of being held hostage, guns in my face patients bleeding out, planes crashing with me in them. Those dreams were later. This image of hope and beauty would remain as a light in the darkest of nights. I love a song by Newsboys,’it may be dark in the night but light comes in the morning. » That image is one of my holy of holies. Maureen really was that beautiful.