1975 to 1979, 23 years old to 27 years old, Medical School

It’s a dream thinking back to those years.  All I did was study yet I don’t remember the lectures and studies so well. I believe I could if I focussed .They’re just beyond the veil.  The first two years of academic medicine 23 to 25 are mostly a blur.

I believe I was married then.  The wedding doesn’t even sit still in my mind. Just glimpses beyond the veil. Maureen was so slender. She had this magnificent white gown that so became her. The perfect bride. The bridesmaid, her identical twin Susan, and Debbie were beautiful.  Jon and Fern were great.  The song and their singing and guitar amazing.   I remember I had tails to my tuxedo. We danced Viennese Waltz after. Straus. I remember a photograph of us dancing and we really are spectacular. Viennese Waltz is.  It was all so elegant. My parents were happy.  They liked Maureen.  There was dancing. Somewhere there’s an album of photos.  Photos and mementos stir the memory but I don’t really want the stirred memory .I’m just curious today what surfaces.

I remember the summer we drove out to Banff with Glen and his wife. I don’t know when that was.  A year later I’d be an intern I believe. Hiking in the Rockies was a glorious week of comarderie and charm. We had wine skins and climbed all day to the top of mountains, day hikes, then we’d descend at night, faster going down.  We had tents and made big fires and barecued hot dogs and steaks.  There were barbecued marshmallows too.  We drank red wine. I had my pipe. We sat about at night in the glow of the fire.  Happy with the exercise. Our friendship, camping, the day hiking.  Then we drove home.

Maureen taught me to drive when I was 25. We got an old Pontiac or Buick from a family member of hers, some aunt, a very cheap old car but in good condition.  My father had been unable to teach me to drive .That’s a whole story in itself but Maureeen was encouraging. Gentle, intelligent, encouraging. She was a natural teacher. A truly inspiring loving person. I am forever thankful for the formula her father taught her for backing into a parking place. Pull along side the forward vehicle.  Turning the wheel of the car backing up watching the driver mirror, stop when you see the inside light of the vehicle behind then go 1 or 2 feet further then spin the wheel the opposite direction.  It’s snug. An amazing gift. Her father taught her brother and the sisters.  My father was a great driver, especially long distance. He didn’t know how he parked perfectly, never unpacked it. Maureen did.  I’ve used that little ‘trick’ ever since.  I can park a car anywhere. Not a trailer or something else, that was my father’s forte. I don’t have it.  My brother was a safe driver. I wasn’t.  I survived my driving. I drove a lot. Everything.  Fearlessly.

I remember making love to Baiba one night coming home from the theatre, at Portage and Main.  I was in a parka and she was in a long fur coat.  We leaned against a building. The wind was blowing. This is the coldest place in the world. 60 degrees below zero windchill.  Leaned back against the wall and pulled me towards her opening her coat and lifting her skirt. We made love standing with her moaning into my ear. The great policeman in his beaver coat came around the corner walking his beat.

‘Everything okay there? » I just froze

« Yes sir, Baiba called back her voice silken and smooth and so sensuously aroused

Alright then. » he answered embarrassment tinging his voice as he hurried along.

We completed the act , tidied ourselves up, bundled against the cold, carried on

It’s memories like that which remain and come to mind when I’m with a different wife or girl. It’s like I’m visitting Texas and I think of France.  I can’t share these thoughts. ‘What are you thinking? » Well I was having a good time and another moment came to mind.’

I’ve been so punished for my thoughts. I’ve been told over and over again how wrong I am.  I’ve been told countless times what not to say.  I’m still being told to be quiet and shut up by the young now. I admit I thought there’d come a time when we’d be ‘okay’. But I sometimes long for death to get beyond the constant criticism, usually in the tones, the haughty judgemental expressions, the rolling eyes, the turning away.  Never okay. Never good enough.  Always a social blunder. Meanwhile the judgemental have rarely the experience or training but ‘just know you’re wrong’.  Now it’s more and more junior doctors or people in generally speaking authoritatively about things they know diddly squat about.  I usually ask them now how many cases of whatever they’re going about they’ve done or seen.  The ignorant are always the most certain. Meanwhile I’m always self questioning and double checking and even when I get it right wonder if I’ll be able to do it again.  I thank God a lot. 

I know I’m not alone. I know these ‘perfect’ people might not even know how ‘loud’ they are when they are critical of everyone around them.  I’m sensitive that way.  It took me years to ignore it and just carry on.  I see a lot of ‘sensitive’ people who are wielding their sensitivity like a weapon but rather just trying to squeeze by.  

Women, like my second wife, and many of those since, have been secretly ‘hostile’.  My last wife was outrightly covertly aggressive.  A drug addict crazy lady who actually tried to kill me and would have if I hadn’t had a sixth sense for  imminent danger.  I usually have to assume that I ‘had it coming’.  Though often I really don’t know and a lot of people like to « save up revenge, it’s best served cold. » I’m usually operating in the here and now. 

I remember the sex after my second wedding suddenly over night mostly going stale. It wasn’t me. We joke among men and say what is the greatest sexual turn off for a woman?  Wedding cake.  That would be the case then. Not my first marriage.  But the second marriage this ‘respectability’ suddenly took hold. She began to act like her mother. Of course when I pointed this out it was the worst thing to do. But I just couldn’t understand where the carefree teenager had disappeared too. Work took it’s toll no doubt but I’d learn from Dr. Talbot years later how common it is for professional women to take their husbands for granted. Female doctors were the worst for putting their husbands as least important. Not just women but a lot of people have this tick box thing going, okay married, tick, next house, tick, next cruise tick etc.  My father said I didn’t do the maintenance on my cars and I believe he meant relationships.  I’m not alone. We’re a throw a way society.  We consume and use people and things up.  

On vacations, camping in tents, or in hotel or motel rooms there’d be a rewakening of the passion but it ‘s absence was  literally palpable to me .  A switch had  turned.  Sometimes it would turn on again.  But it was never the same.  I also remember she was totally against oral sex and yet I was hours and days and years between her legs  while she tried to orgasm.  Before marriage every night. She always orgasmed then. After marriage suddenly I was slave to her desire.  Marriage and for the first time I  had to beg.  « You know I think I’m better looking than you,’ she’d say. « I think more men would want me than women would want you. ‘ she’d say. I’d agree but it was a odd way of thinking to me.  

The patients I saw as escorts told me ‘we’d be out of work if married women had sex with their husbands. ». My favourite joke was how ‘Church ladies are the worst. They eat and become obese.. Their men drink and the men come to us for sex. ». 

I wonder if my mind is true in this regard.   It’s true that when I’m on the peaks I can see all the valleys but when I ‘m in the valley I can see little of the peaks but feel the gloom and darkness all around me.  I believe that we had great sex and a great marriage for years. It wouldn’t be till after medical school I became critical. That’s why I wonder about my memory. Because we divorced, like everyone who divorces. I suffer from ‘retrospective falsification »

I’ve had patients bring in their wedding albums and insist they never loved, they were the wrong person, they faked the smiles at the wedding.  The fact is we marry the greatest and best love we know today. It’s like buying a car. We might see a Ferrari sport car or a diesel truck but end with a Honda Civic because it’s the right choice after all the considerations.  She was right for me. We grew apart.  We changed.  Perhaps with proper maintenance or time I could have got ‘feeling back’ but I lost it. I’ve been the wife in two marriages to doctors.  I’ve cooked, cleaned, and made twice the money and still begged in the bed room. I had resentments. Increasingly all I’d hear is how bad men were.  It wears.  I was doing as good a job as I could, being as good a man as I could but I was never good enough.  I’d learn later a lot about alcoholics and alcoholic families.  I began as the untreated al anon and later fit the other group better. The ‘family’ disease model was good.  I liked women from alcoholic families, bad girls. My own family wasn’t like that. I was the black sheep there.  

I understand now why Christians encourage the marriage of other Christians. I was continuing to pray and meditate and she was until the end of our marriage not interested in anything spiritual. « Girls just want to have fun’ was her anthem while at work she was amazing. A truly gifted doctor.  Off work a fun seeking. And I was dull and serious and intellectual and full of myself a lot back then. Perhaps still am. It’s hard to see yourself but I realize I’m not a lot of fun because I’d often be in on these political battlefields.

Like Meditobans.  Some Jewish aetheists with classic Marxist design had usurped the student paper and were publishing monthly diatribes against us all. Really bizarre. Their parents were wealthy and they were in medical school and totally into consumerism but doing that ‘dress like refugee’ gig and acting like they cared for the poor and actually published stuff like ‘stop the running dog capitalists’.  It was all that was in the paper. I objected so I took it over. Got on the board. Took a vote, Did a survey and became the editor. Everyone hated these assholes but no one did anything about it. Mostly people tolerated a lot of shit and now years later I admire them for their tolerance and gastrointestinal fortitude. Everyone was thankful for my stopping the propaganda pillage and getting a variety of students to write about what was interesting to them.  The paper became ‘democratic’.  But these communist aetheist nutbars would be rich see no hypocrisy in themselves or their ardent causes.  My friends and I would on about this and Maureen was just wanting to have fun and worried someone would be offended and why can’t you just get along, let things go.

There was dance some guys at the lake threw. Everyone was going on about how great these guys were putting together this dance for everyone. They were playing the victim. Getting laid by self sacrificing their time. But my soon to be brother in law was an accountant. I’d organized dances and coffeehouses so did the math.  These ‘golden boys ‘ were making thousands off their friends .It was their ‘business’ and I would have not got involved but they want to play like they were a charity.  Now I know this is the great scam.So many are doing it.  Let’s pick a cause and make a fortune off it. My favourite enemy. I’m like a dog and a postman when I see this happening. So there it was. I checked out my calculations with my soon to be brother in law and he said yea they’re taking thousands for themselves.

So at the next meeting I asked what happened to the thousands made each year in thes ‘for profit’ endeavours. I thought it was great. I didn’t mind but if it was a ‘charity’ shouldn’t it go back into something not the organizers pockets and how was the distributions.

The next day a guy ran me off the road in his black pick up truck. I was bicycling to work 20 miles a day.

I was getting my bike out of the ditch, my knee scraped and bleeding, staggering up onto the road. This guy was swinging a black jack and began hitting his hand with it above me.  I’m looking up at him. At a distinct disadvantage. I figured he would take me without the billy club but with it I was likely to lose.

He said to me, « We’ve got a good thing going here each summer. We throw this dance. We make thousands of dollars and split it among ourselves and because we’re such good guys we get fucked by the young ladies. Then you come along and think you’re going to fuck this up. What do you think is going to happen to you. You ride a bicycle to and from work each day along these empty stretches of road.  You can have an accident really easy. »

He got back into his truck.  Drove away. 

I told my friends about the encounter.  It wasn’t worth it. I’d encounter these scenarios routinely.  Years later I’d see activist thinking they were challenging the system. I’d ask, « Has anyone threatened your life. Have you been shot at or knifed. ». No they’d say. I’d say ‘then you’re working for the man. ». They’d never understand .  Useful idiots.

Wives don’t care. Girls just want to have fun.  I was ‘heavy’ back when I was learning the way it was. Also getting in trouble with the ‘man’ still believing things could change not believing the lies.  I don’t think I was easy to live with not that a female doctor is easy to live with on the best of days.  

I’d find in later years I liked to get away from professionals . I liked being in countries where people didn’t speak English. I relaxed when I didn’t have to think.  I was always questioning and being questioned married.  There’s an expression, stop pulling the plant up to look at the roots.  « Live and let live wasn’t an expression I understood back then.  

These years of studying with her were overall such joy yet I  lost that joy in the later bomb of divorce that took the good feelings in a large crater , like a nuclear explosion that goes out from the centre and kills with the blast and the radiation. I know I loved these years studying. I know we loved being together. 

Now see,  I tweaked a memory out of the darkness. Here it is. 

We had this old apartment by the Red River. It was quaint and had terrific character. We loved it.  We were so happy there. We bought furniture. We nested. Our friends came for dinner parties. Dinner parties are what I remember best with Maureen. We had these great friends and had great yuppie dinner parties. They began in that first apartment. Planning meals and shopping and following recipes and having the meal and then discussions and sometimes dancing after but more often sitting around listening to music, sipping wine.  I remember with great fondness the importance of the stereos and the album collections and choosing the right selection of music. Ambience. 

What was so memorable about our first apartment t  was our gay neighbours had their bed above our dining room table. More than once they’d become amorous during a party and we’d laugh and have drinks in the living room.  The funniest night was the first time this occurred when her family were visitting. Her mother was quite shocked. 

« Oh, my! » she said when the chandelier began to bounce..  « I thought only two men lived upstairs. ». 

« They do. ». Maureen said.

« Oh, my. » her mother replied.  « They are very loud. »

They really were and the dinner table was silent till the moans and squeals came to an end.  

As usual Maureen’s father ignored everything. He was a quiet alcoholic man whose wife spoke.  When I’d see the Mrs. Boughet of English humor I ‘d think this did a great job of depicting him. He had a sly wit and my father and I enjoyed him when he was away from his wife.  A thoroughly beaten down man. Apparently he’d been loud and violent when younger but now he was the other kind of drunk, after the wars.  Self effacing.  

The same thing occurred when my parents were over and Dad said nothing but mom kind of clicked her lips and teeth.   She had this ‘click’ that rarely appeared. It required severe aggravation to bring it out. Not a’tsshss’ but rather a ‘clisstthsi’.  She shook her head.  I was glad the neighbours were having a quickie.  It didn’t go on that long. Other times it really did go on and on.  

We took coffee and tea into  the living room.

Fred Penner the famoous Winnipeg children’s folk singer who’d go on to have his own tv show lived next door. I knew him from the folk music days and would always enjoy greeting each other ,coming and going, taking out garbage, brief chats.  

As a medical student I had a certain cache. As two medical students we actually had social status. I’d not see this as a doctor and know that I was envied by some and others thought being a doctor came with high social approval. What they didn’t see is that as many took advantage of doctors and treated them abysmally.  It was such a curse that most of us avoided sharing we were doctors in Canada. In the US being a doctor was out and out admired but in Canada it was treated like we’d ‘lucked out’ and not that we had worked and saved and got A’s. 

 There was this existing class system in Canada, the blue collar and the white collar. As middle class we were seen as getting everything on a silver spoon. In fact that simply wasn’t the case for half the class. It was also apparent that people liked to go to the bar and watch tv and do the least work and didn’t get into medical school because they lacked smarts, smarts certainly helped, but most were relatively lazy. We’d all seen this in sports when those who excelled simply put in the hours and time. They had to have the basic ingredients but so many did. What differentiated the top notch was the work. But in Canada the mediocre felt entitled to the rewards of the great and the ‘tall poppy syndrome prevailed’. This lot made themselves taller by cutting off the heads of others.

Yet in medical school there was an edge. People were competing to get in. I was one of a hundred applicants for my spot. I felt it. Maureen and I were ‘different’ in a good way.  Being a medical students was socially approved.  We were well thought of together. 

The owner of the apartment complex was an ass. Later ‘rent evictions’ would become the norm of ‘clever businessmen’.  They were uncommon back then. We were late a day  getting back from vacation and didn’t get the lease renewal in by one day.  He evicted us so he could raise the rent.  Young married couple, in medical school, the best of tenants. And for a few shackles this ass evicts us and wouldn’t accept any explanation. We even offered to pay a higher price. But he was intransigent. He’d already rented the place. Moving in the middle of medical school was a huge issue. 

Now this is a very fond memory. The place had the most picturesque hand carved bannister leading into the apartment.  We were just leaving when the new tenants , a rock and roll band, drunk and stoned arrived. They had a piano. They couldn’t negotiate the turn on the stairs with the bannister. So one big bearded guy simply got an axe from their truck and chopped it down. He  then chopped a bigger hole in their door.   Now the  piano  got through. We loved that we got to see that.  Loud loud music rocked the place as we drove by in the year to come, police cars flashing lights, it even got into the papers. A regular zoo.  Whatever the landlord made evicting us he lost 10 times over. 

We laughed at the ‘rent eviction’. But we didn’t find a nice place. We had no time.  There was no room for breaks in the study year. This wrench had been thrown into a very tight schedule so we took the first place we could get and lasted there a matter of months. It was a 5th story walk up without character and just a box. I hated it and later would do everything to avoid being in such a cage again. There is so little one can do to make a box appealing.  Apartments can be so great with an off side wall or some architectural consideration. But this was just a box.

I remember it because we moved with friends. It was always friends back then.  We were always moving each other. We all had heavy brick bookshelves but it was the books. Boxes and boxes of books. All over the world there are professional men with back problems from those years when we moved each other’s textbooks and other books.  The library was sacrosanct.  

To get a work crew you offered food and wine. The move would last hours on a Saturday but the trouble was that last load after a bottle of wine.  Well on this occasion, I just figured carpets and bedding could be thrown out the window on the lawn.  It worked well. All the unbreakable stuff that was left for that last move went out the Fifth story window. My male friends and I who’d done hours of heavy lifting thought this was genius and fun. Maureen was not impressed , screaming about the neighbours and worried that some damage to sheets ‘might’ have occurred.

 I’ve been condemned all my life for things that ‘might have occured’.  The world is full of insane people who criticize others on the basis of their psychotic fears about what ‘could occur’.  Nothing occured. Everything was fine. Nothing was broken.I talked nicely to the police who were called by some terrible biddy neighbour who hadn’t liked the noise we’d made moving, feet pounding up and down stairs carrying tons of books but the mattress towels and sheets and carpets and clothing flying out the window had done her in. The Police were satisfied with our explanation. As men we all held our backs and laughed .

I remember too that I took flexeril for the first time the next day and proceeded to drive through a red light completely unaware and would have remained so but for my passenger, who said, ‘you’ve gone through red light, and we’re going through another.’

I never drove on flexeril again, warned everyone about the effects of driving on benzos and flexeril.  I get tunnel vision and lost interest in the bigger picture.  I simply didn’t see the red lights. I was focused on the road and where I was going.  Now that memory is there. But so many are not.  

We rented a house after that horrid apartment building. The house was perfect. It would lead to us buying our first house. The rental house had been so enjoyable.  We loved the back yard. We loved not having neighbours inches away on the other side of a wall. 

This was all going on while we did medical school, studying together, after classes on weekdays and for a requisite number of hours on weekends. In third and fourth years we’d start not seeing each other as clinical rotations  took us apart.

1977 was the year that Saturday Night Fever came out.  My friend who went on to own the Arthur Murrays franchise called me up. He was always trying to get me to work. If I could get away from my medical clinics I’d swing by the studio and sell some dance lessons. It was a skill and I was highly successful at it.  He’d also get us commercial work. We had done the Englebert Humperdinck record. He’d needed four dancers dancing Viennese waltz in the back ground and we each got $100 for an hour of work.  I’d brought Maureen insisting she could dance well enough to do the role. It was her first television commercial.  We’d love seeing it come on the tv at night and us hardly recognisable in the background of « Les Bicyclettes’. » She was beautiful.  

Now Saturday Night Fever was just opening and he wanted me to come see the opening because he’d caught a glimpse of the dance in a preview.

 »It’s the best dancing I’ve ever seen on film since Fred Astaire and  Ginger Rodgers. It’s a new dance and it’s going to be big. ». I still love to see Travolta dance. 

So there I was Saturday morning, not studying, but watching Saturday Night Live at the theatre with my dance friend.  We watched it three times. We did the routine in the aisle. By the third time we had it down. In that moment I became ‘Disco Doc’.  Arthur Murray’s got the jump on everyone selling ‘disco dance ‘ lessons way ahead of the curve.

It would be a sensation.

I taught Maureen and sure enough when we went out to the night club the next Friday it was like dancing years with Baiba all over again. Everyone cleared the floor and watched us dance.  All our drinks were paid for.   The actual disco moves were counter intuitive so not easy to get. Looked far easier than they were at the time. Truly original.  Martha Graham dance. People then just couldn’t seem to pick it up unless they were already professional. But even then it was counterintuitive  like hula dancing.  The difficulty at first gave it  it’s powerful appeal. Once you ‘got it’ in the ‘aha’ moment it was there forever.  

I’d get asked to teach everyone to do the disco routine and after a night teaching a couples of our friends got the idea to run a class for medical students charging $10 a night. I needed the money. 10 couples and 5 to 10 classes in the next weeks with rent to the hall and Maureen helping. I think we paid off her stethesecope with the proceeds. Everyone was happy and years later the medical school classes would want me to teach them waltz so they could have a proper graduation ceremony. The result  really was West Point military grade graduations thanks to my teaching the basics to everyone. 

The medical students were all the first doing disco in town. It was great to be a part of the times. 

Beer and Skits was a great competition between the Medical school  years.  The third and fourth years always won.  So some of the guys approached me to help us win. I wrote a script called ‘Scar Wars. ».Star Wars came out in 77.  Our rock musician got together a veritable orchestra and wrote a series of spectacular songs.  Almost all of the class would be involved in some way in the production by the time it went ont. 

The pornographer approached me with his camera and wanted to take pictures of the staff and plug them into pornographic films he’d made. The trouble was getting the staff standing, talking and bending in positions which he could splice into his films. He was a professional. It was felt that I could convince the staff to do things for my script.  I didn’t mention the pornographic film.  We just went around one day with my friend and his highly professional movie camera and I convinced the staff to do ‘things’.  

Dr. Naimark was kind enough to jump off his desk and this became a scene where he was jumping into a bed of naked women. The best though was the emergency doctor, our favourite guy who was very New York with three gold chains around his neck.  Now I knew nothing of how these shots would be used but my friend wanted him sitting and leaning forward, leaning back and leaning forward. The film ended with this number.  He was spliced into a shot between a big breasted naked woman’s legs performing cunninglingus.  

It was a great show. I played C-3PO my body painted in gold .  Three of the blond beauties in our class, these guys who had gained overnight popularité as the Doc Hollywood characters wanted to do a disco dance half naked so I taught them the dance and they performed. They’d been doing these strip tease dances for the nurse parties and had their whole pop star following. They were really good and really  hilarious.  It was a great bar scene.

There had been ananatomy professor who did a very fun documentary type discussion of the history of ‘nudity’ in the beer and skits over the year, on stage with his pointer and pictures of previous beer and skits. He described the progression from the quarter moon to the half moon.   It turned out the class before us had had a dozen students’ half moon’ on stage, pulling their pants down to show half their butts.   I simply said if someone was willing to do a ‘full moon’ on stage we’d definitely ‘win’ that round.  The top female student, very reminiscent of Sheldon’s girlfriend on The Big Bang Theory, very serious and not given to frivolity surprised us all and stepped up to take one for the team.  With half nude disco dancing, a full moon, great costumes including mine, actual professional choreography, I did the stage movement and had all that training, and this amazing rock orchestra, well we simply blew the competition away and were an unforgettable sensation that raised the level of Beer and Skits for years to come.  

I just loved all the humor my colleagues showed and seeing the amazing talents that no one knew about. Our quiet paediatrician to become was a serious violinist.  The three blonds dancing stole the show but the ‘full moon’ was the show capper.  I was pleased.  I liked writing the Scar Wars script. I liked my little C-3PO part and I liked directing such smart talented people. I just had to say what I wanted and everyone did it. No explanation, no herding cats.  People just performed the best and it was this organic success. The porn film was a piece de resistance , a great roast of the staff.  It was so much fun.

It’s so sad that that was probably one of the last years laughter was allowed in a Canadian medical school. Overnight the front line staff, the doctors and nurses, were pushed aside along with the patients as a whole.  The lawyers and bean counters moved in. It was all about administration. The politically correct took over. William Osler had been a great prankster and we’d do funny stuff in following years. I’d write humor for medical journals but the lights were going out.  I always thought about McLean’s song, « The day the music died » and equated that with the ‘fun’.  

I’d go on to write a national article about the administrators being the only one’s who liked the hospitals because the doctors, nurses and patients were taken down in the years to come. I saw the movie with the evil and the hobbit fighting the evil and the the colour and flowers being burnt out of the countryside. That’s what happened in the hospitals and medical school. The life was snuffed out and the music died.  People who had no substance began to ‘act a part’ and put all the emphasis on appearances. Gag orders and white washing would follow.  

But that was not then. Dr. Arnie Namark knew a good ship was a happy ship.  

I was there when it was fun. I have told younger doctors about those days and they simply can’t believe it. 

Being Disco Doc I was approached on my clinical rotation to teach the nurses ‘disco’ all the time. I’d show an individual occasionally but mostly we were too busy. Twice though I gave in.  We were waiting around in the OR for deliveries to arrive on helicopter from the north .  We had time. It was 3 am and the nurses insisted I teach them disco. To get room, we all gowned up and me with 6 nurses used the sterile theatre to do disco.  It’s a memory I will carry happily to the grave. All of us in masks and booties and gowns dancing disco. Staying Alive. The attending arrived with the patients and was so impressed that we were all there and ‘waiting’.  The delivery went off without a hitch.

The other most memorable time is in ICU.  Again 3 am .  The ICU had six resperiators and they were lined down each side. At least 4 had people comatose or semi comatose. The space between was all we needed for the 4 nurses and me to do disco line dancing .  In the back ground is the humfing huffing of respirators and me calling out the steps. It’s another macabre happy memory I keep tucked away in my mind. Staying alive.  

Medical school really was fun.  Maureen was a beautiful companion and we felt like we were in the centre of the universe with only up to come. 

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.