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.

Westcoast Mémorial Ride for Dad 2019

The West Coast Ride for Dad to raise money for Prostate Cancer Research has been going for 10 years. I’ve been in a half dozen or more. Laura has come on more than one. Gilbert has ridden with me several times.  We’ve met Dave and Emory his dog on one run and another we and the pups headed out together. I enjoyed an early one when the pastor from our West Coast Biker Church said the prayer at the opening service. He’d been the one to introduce me to Third Days’ music.

It was great this year to have more sponsors. Trêv Deely has always been terrific but this year Honda stepped up too.  There’s a wide variety of bikes in the ride.  Prostate cancer is the greatest cancer killer for men.  Research is improving survivor rates yearly.  Dad survived prostate cancer.  These rides go on all across Canada and are the principle source of funding for prostate cancer research, millions of dollars raised. 

I loved seeing Murray again this year.  He rides a Harley and we always seem to meet at Harley events.  Then it’s long periods between seeing each other. A really great guy. 

Usually the military is there and they shoot off the gun. The gun and military were there but for some reason they couldn’t shoot off the gun. The fire department had their traditional ladder starting area. The police were present and lead the ride. The bag piper was from the Vancouver Police band.  She was fantastic. There was a wonderful woman with a great voice who sang O Canada. A survivor from prostate cancer spoke briefly. The opening ceremony in front of Trev Deely is always short and sweet. Everyone wants to get on the ride.

The prayer ended, « Help me Lord, to keep the rubber down and the shiny side up. »

We climbed on our bikes and headed out in staggered lines.

The ride on the highway was awesome.  Lee Valley was the first destination.  I love their precision tools.  

After Gaglardi High School I enjoyed the ride to Stave Lake. We ended up at the University of the Frazer Valley near Abbotsford. I was beat and enjoyed the hamburger. I only had 2 x 3 for the poker run, not a winning hand.  I got another t shirt.  I lost my flag on the ride home going high speed back to Vancouver. 

I was glad to head back and join Laura, Gilbert and George.  I had a nap. I was that tired I needed a nap. When I got up my whole body ached.  .  Great cause. Great ride. Great time. 

Save the BC Men. Thanks to all the organizers. Thanks to Lee Valley, Honda, University of the Frazer Valley, and especially Trev Deely. 

Carrie Underwood Cry Pretty Tour Vancouver 2019

Laura and I loved the Carrie Underwood Concert.

The warm up bands Runaway June and Maddie and Tae were really good.  They both had number one hits. The Runaway June threesome were like a young Dixie Chicks in a way but uniquely themselves.  Great music. Such fun and vitality. So young. Then Maddie and Tae were great with duets and just so energized. They described doing what they loved with their best friend.  

Then Carrie Underwood exploded onto the stage.  What an incredible voice! What a beautiful woman! What a spectacular entertainer!  I’d heard her sing a duet with Vince Gill How Great Thou Art and fell in love with the purity of her voice. The song is an all time favourite. My mentor Bernie played it for me once on his banjo when I needed a little inspiration.  

Laura and I were so glad we came. Good seats in Roger’s Arena.  With Go Canucks Go banners I had that feeling of being back in the high school gymnasium.  There’s that home town queen quality to Carrie accentuated by being in a space where I normally attend hockey games.  Carrie would be right at home having had the good sense to marry a hockey player. 

A tremendous use of the stage space with she and musicians circling the whole space or cutting across or being lifted on high. Alice Cooper might have been consulted on the effects.  I loved the lights and fire crackers and bubbling dry ice.   I loved the banjos and violins in the band too.   

The whole night was new country and had me thinking of Linda Rondstadt, Olivia Newton John or Crosby Stills Nash and Young.  New Country Rock. More bang less twang.
I loved her song with  ' the man upstairs’.  One or two god reference songs and the rest standard country female fair, guys doing them wrong, girls crying. But a really impressive number for the memorial.  Fast paced. Awesome.  I loved that she showed a family album up on the screen, her and husband and kids. I loved too that she said she didn’t like the  all the drinking songs in country and that they wanted to be more uplifting. Thats really my problem with JR Country. Always some guy in a bar meeting some girl in skinny jeans and getting drunk.  It only differs from radio rock in that the urban rock crowd are drinking and doing dugs while the country songs are about drinking and going to jail. I prefer pick up trucks and dogs.  But Carrie’s music and show had real class.  I loved the life she celebrated.  Her songs have real depth. 

I loved when she brought on all the other girls from Runaway June and Maddie and Tae and together they did tributes of the leading country singers who’d gone before to pave the way for all of them.  I loved the Dolly Parton cover but when they sang Shania Twain the arena erupted with cheers and applause.  Canadians love their stars.  

It was a magnificent performance.

At intermission before Carrie Underwood and her band had  come on. I'd gone out into the circular lobby.   I was impressed by all the incredibly beautiful young women in boots and short short jean skirts. The guys who were there were smug and smart.  This was the highest density of beautiful young women I’d seen outside a church.  The guys at monster truck rallies shouldn’t be surprised they’re single.  

Laura loved the costumes.  “Feminine,” she said.  ‘Not afraid to be a woman and glamorous too.”  

She is beautiful and talented but the voice really was worth hearing.  The whole show was a sensation. Thank you Carrie Underwood and all.

21 -22 years old. University of Winnipeg, Pre Med and Medical School

At University of Winnipeg I’d done Arts taking Classics, English honors Shakespeare, English, Literature of the Bible, Existential writers,  Theatre, Philosophy, Economics, History of Art, History of Science. Then I’d loved Biology and having surprised myself with straight A’s thought I’d keep my options open by doing a year of Science.  I just loved to learn at this time. I wasn’t even yet aiming at being a doctor. I had this idea of a Renaissance man and was beginning  to think of a day time Science career and Arts in my evening. I loved the lab. I felt I needed a lab and I’d not be able to have one of those in my basement but I could always work with a pen and paper and a camera on my own. I was very much into fountain pens at the time. 

I’d also go through a phase of macrame. All these little hand things. I enjoyed working with my hands. I enjoyed the tiny machinery of the fountain pain. I enjoyed all the paraphernalia of my pipe. I had a collection of pipes and once a real tobacco store opened, enjoyed creating my own blend of tobacco with just the right flavours and a touch of Latikea for taste and smell. I liked sitting in the cloud and the pipe as manly portable incense. I always had restless hands and loved having something to fiddle with. In the woods I liked to whittle. I really should have stuck with knitting.  I may take it up again.  My mother was always busy with her hands Knitting, crocheting, darning. She never watched tv without a basket of work beside her.

IKEA targettes me and my generation because our apartments were always made up of assembled furniture. I just saw a fellow carrying a large brick and asked him if he was building a book case or making a stand for his stereo.  Younger, he’d no clue what I was talking about. He’d not ‘selected’ boards and bricks with loving care to get the right industrial rough classic ‘look’.  As students these little touches, Saturday afternoon with varnish or shellack were memorable events.  

Once Biology had ‘caught’ me I wanted to ‘try’ the pre med classes.  I redid my high school math, chemistry and physics in a few week summer accelerated course that University of Winnipeg offered mostly ‘bad boys and girls. ‘ and some ‘adults’ like me who were upgrading for some reason.  One of my class mates wanted to be an electrician, most had failed gr 12 or not completed it.  I was just there mostly for curiosity and wondering if I had the capacity to succeed.  

I didn’t doubt myself in arts.  But sciences concerned me. Until I had this spiritual experience in the chapel and aced the MCAT I’d really think that I might get a research lab job working with electron microscopes which I loved or become a play wright.  I was muddling along as my life was always doing.  I’d read ‘slouching towards bethelehem’ about the ‘beast’ and thought of myself as maudlin and mozying in the right direction but not doing a particularly good job of it. I always admired those around me who were on the ‘straight and narrow’. 

 My brother was a natural in sciences, a genius really, and my father was an engineer. I’d been their second assistant on countless car and motor repairs but never number one. In surgery I was the favoured assistant but not particularly interested in being number one. In hockey’s I’d loved playing defence but wasn’t interested in centre.  It seemed to be a theme in my life, that I wanted to be on the right team but didn’t need to step on anyone to be there and really would rather walk away from a fight if I could. 

I’d actually take an IQ test worried because I thought I was too stupid and score in the 140 plus, the screening test simply indicating if I was capable.  It was reassuring.  I’ve never thought of myself as particular that good in anything as I always knew people who were so much superior. I never considered how so many others were not but focused on those who I knew were great.  Hence I’d laugh one day out loud when I’d hear the term for my kind as ‘egomaniac with an inferiority complex ».  

In deed in arts I had this sense that I was perhaps the best with often only one other in the class I thought was ‘interesting’.  In the sciences it would be a teacher or someone telling me I was the best when I thought there was some mistake. In the philosophy class there’d be 50 who started but only 6 of us who completed the course and this one fellow, long haired dog, with a woe begone beard, we’d play chess and debate together, and I remember thinking perhaps for the first time, this fellow has a ‘first rate mind’.  We’d study Logic together and I liked it because it was mathematical.

I’d been taking music lessons and singing on my own once a week with this beautiful blind man who would say ‘you once had a fine voice but you’ve probably already ruined it » .... »you could have been a singer but if you practice you might still be able to do the singing an actor needs. ». When I’d taken theatre I’d decided I needed training in ‘voice’.  Actors and actresses do this.  It’s their thing.  Most people don’t know all that’s going on in the background but the successful ones are doing as I did, all these classes, often paid for on their own, usually with some gifted teacher who takes on a few students and commonly works out of their home.  I wanted to sing like Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan but he wanted me to learn like Pavarotti.

I sang this old English song « In spring time’. Over and over and over again.  

I also joined the University of Winnipeg Madrigal Choir.  I wasn’t in the league of some but didn’t embarrass myself or others.  Except once.   Like dance, song was always looking for men.  Low bar. The women had a lot more competition and took the matter much more seriously as a group. I enjoyed hanging out with the guys trying to read music and stay in the same key.  I wasn’t good alone. Once when the tenors and baritones didn’t show up and there was me and over there the bass and in front of me the soprano and the alto I just sung along.  The very haughty soprano diva stopped in the middle and turned to me and said rather loudly, « I can sing the soprano alone thank you. ». Without support I’d wandered off with the loudest voice. I tended to do that so the director especially after that put me in with a better sort of character. That day he moved me in to the bass section till we had more tenors and baritones  to protect me from possible disfigurement by the long painted nailed clawed Sopranos.  

We actually performed to great applause on many occasions.  I learned to love madrigal and harmony.

I continued to meditate a couple of hours a day and weekly when I could gather with my fellow meditators at the Self Realization Fellowship meditation evenings. We’d meet before dawn on the most memorable occasional Sundays and méditate as the sun came up and depart when the sun went down.  I must have peed but I don’t remember any breaks. Someone had a house with lots of glass and windows in St. Vital I believe, out near the beginning of the country. It was beautiful in Winnipeg then with the snow all around and the silence of the near rural countryside. 

I didn’t drive. I did bicycle. I was bicycling everywhere.  It was extraordinarily unusual to be using the bicycle as a ‘commuter’.  Winnipeg and Canada in general hadn’t embraced the bicycle except as a children’s toy, a summer fun thing and for adults as racists.  Having bicycled across Europe and seen how Europeans used the bicycle as their principle means of transport I just did the same.  I’d bicycle to the University of Manitoba from down town and literally never think of distance as I might today when I considered bicycling somewhere. I did think of the time but enjoyed it as a time for prayer. I’ve always prayed in motion or made up poems or sung songs. I’d hate the down time of transport and years later always have the latest medical audiotapes playing in my car for decades when I commuted.  I remember too when I was in medical school that there was a Swiss doctor and myself who were the only ones who chained our bikes in the largest bicycle lot.  Today that rack has expanded ten fold and never has enough room for bicycles. I was certainly way out ahead of the trend on the bicycle front in Canada which not unusually was behind Europe in this way. 

Dancers, actors, don’t generally have to considèr ‘exercise’.  There simply was very little obesity around me in those days. Hughie, my gay actor friend was obese but he really was the exception. Later obesity became very apparent especially as people got older, more sedate, the desk job because supreme and excuses abounded.

We played intramural sports during our medical school.  I remember being on the indoor hockey team and the touch football team. The trick for pre med and medical students was to get enough out, especially depending on rotations, to have a team to compete with other faculties. We were collectively abysmal as a team though individually we had some outstanding athletes. In football we had the former quarterback of the University of Manitoba Bison. I think his name was Richard. He called me ‘butter fingers’ because I couldn’t hold onto a ball he passed perfectly.  That’s how I became a defensive end and applied all my psychological skills to verbal abuse of my easily terrified counterpart.  

I was called ‘Wild Bill’ most of my life and especially in these years.  Nicknames were an important badge of honor among men. I rather liked mine over the years.  Wild Bill and Crazy Bill were sometime used interchangeably.  I was known for my daring and had no doubt that if I’d been a student in Heidelberg I’d be early to wear a scar. Being a gymnast and a dancer and mostly having acted I was the one who’d suddenly do a handspring, break out in a tap dance or sing Amen with gusto.  I was also doing Dacor before it got it’s fancy name.  We’d go out as groups for pints and after a few race for the last bus, a bunch of college guys swinging around bus poles vaulting parking meters and running over the tops of sheds.  

With meditating I didn’t need to sleep as much.  I’d get 6 hours generally and later in medical school that was a lot. But I’d meditate 2 hours and meditation was a superior form of mental relaxation. In later years I would have these ‘down times’, ‘unplanned’ , ‘rest periods’ . I’d have whole afternoons and sometimes days ‘without anything to do’.  I’d spent decades before this with every moment of my life planned and applied.  Evening going to a movie was considered because it was rationed in a way. Our time was so precious that we’d only see one movie while others might see 20.  For years the tv would reside in the closet.  It was a glorious life of learning and relationships.

I’d fall in love again. I really was at the time I met her like a ‘top gun’ pilot. The courtship had that kind of flavour too.  

I’d sat alone in the divorce. The judge was kindly and compassionate. I was very lonely getting the papers completed.  That would take time. The official separation and then the divorce.

But 6 month later I’d see these three beautiful girls in the common area.  There was something about the sun. These two identical twin Scandinavia long blond haired sisters with their best friend.  She was so beautiful.  A model. A Blondie to Baiba’s Veronica.  Tall and slim,  The Nicole Kidman to my former Anglina Jolie. These are terrible cliche Hollywood comparisons but they’re true in an Andy Warhol world. I loved the girls in sciences. I loved their dedication and sharp minds.  I’d been surrounded by dancers and actresses , models and perfect bodies, and now really enjoyed these girls I could discuss chemistry with. She was a year behind me. She’d spent a year in Europe as an au pair. It was a traumatic time. 

I thought « I’m going to date her’ and then slowly and with certainty and confidence I began my campaign.  She was the most beautiful girl in the school. Her sister and their friend Debbie were the brightest. Yet she was a party girl. They all were. They stood out at the ‘mixers’, laughing and drinking and just being the centre of attention. I was this guy in a suit doing all the weird stuff.  They called me the ‘geek’ which I thought amusing because I aspired to that but didn’t think of myself yet as academic. 

I loved the movies of the day. I really identified with Peter O’Toole’ especially in Laurence of Arabia but my mind was so often talking like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. Then I’d switch to Bruce Willis and always have a touch of Jack Nicholson but I mostly wanted to be Sean Connery and often ended up feeling I came across like Robbin Williams. I’d loved Mork.  

Now here was this girl who was the queen of the secular world. Not spiritual. Not church going.  I’d still be going to church when I could with my family and spending evenings meditating when I became closer to her. I was so different and she was so truly mainstream.  I guess that was it’s own attraction. In the world of sciences there was a tremendous conformity and fear that simply wasn’t apart of the theatre world. It would be even more with those who went onto law and bureaucracy. This conformity and imitation of adulthood was so overwhelming after the world of dance, the world of English eccentricity and the appreciation for genius. Increasingly I felt everyone was trying to ‘fit in’.  There wasn’t much time for socialization.   But it was stifled in a way new to me with a whole lot of group dynamic and social games.  

I remember a guy angry with me because I was talking with a girl he ‘wanted’. I’d not seen this since junior high school but a lot of the science types had delayed maturity in odd ways. Years later men and women would still be living at home with a single mother or having a sister take care of them.   There was all this animal behaviour among these undersocialized guys who were really into power, money and getting scores.  I knew a Chinese guy who really was an idiot savant aspergér type that without his mother would likely have died.   I’d not encountered this set before. 

We out and out competed for leads in theatre and dance and somehow knew our place but here there was all this back room competition, sly and sneaky. I’d be studying for the A and almost always get the top mark. I had this one girl in physics who was furious and actually threw a temper tantrum in class when she saw I had the only A+ and she had the second in the class A.  She bashed about desks and made a scene.  This would become more common as these weird competitions occurred between people. It wasn’t that I was completely outside of it. I liked ‘winning’ but I was competing against myself mostly, loved the learning, and the score didn’t matter.  

I’d once ask a professor out of curiosity why he gave me a B when he told me I was the smartest student and he’d ever doctor he’d ever known. It was the only time I ever questioned a grade and only did because of the incongruity.   He broke down and told me that his colleague had approached him and insisted he fail me. 

I’d corrected his colleague who had the greatest ego and least skill but bureaucratic superiority and refused to stay in the department if I had have any contact with him. He was this perculiar bureaucratic sort who lacking intelligence and skill got himself into a position and used his position to work out his inadequacies. He probably killed people but took great exception when I stopped his stupidity. He was that weird sort who would rather be right and let a student fail or a patient die rather than admit to being wrong.

 I’d find these sorts could achieve high success in toxic bureaurcracies. At the time I didn’t want anything to do with the loser and told the department head I was checking out rather than have to associate with him.  I went to another hospital and got the highest score in the department straight A’s except this one B. When he told me that he’d been threatened by this political doctor to fail me and only could bring himself to give me a B, I thanked him for his honesty. He begged me to take an A+ after that but I said ‘whatever’ and walked away. He’d give me the A + and become an enemy of the loser. It was all about character and I was learning mountains in psychiatry but long had a blind spot for  sociopaths and psychopaths that thrived in static bureaurocracies moving upward with the group, the stagnant waters being pushed forward and cleaning up a bit but still taking the dregs with them.  

 I’d left classes where I was the A+ to go to better teachers where I began as a B.  I’d seen that I was the top dancer in a Winnipeg competition only to lose in Montreal and then in London not even feel adequate to dance that first night we were only with other champions and teachers.  My friend Keith Carter was the greatest gymnast in Canada but became 20th or so in the world Olympic competitions. I’d spend the rest of my life with Big fish in little pond people and all their meaness and ego issues.  I just knew from an early age that I might be the best in this room but all I needed to do was go to the next town to find someone better. I thought the University was supposed to be the Un-I place because I saw that the top doctor couldn’t be the top chemist as well. It was only in the reductionism of the bureaucracy that the ‘who’s up, who’s down’ of King Lear could prevail. People at the top general admired each other whereas envy dominated those at the bottom. 

Training with Doreen Key, the world champion Latin teacher, I’d had a revelation.  I was good. I was 19 and I was thoroughly enjoying the learning. But the couple that followed me were her students for years and they were 16. I’d had to ‘unlearn’ a whole lot of bad teaching and here were these kids who had 4 years on me and had no ‘bad habits’. Watching them dance was a dream.   I simply knew then that I’d not win the Olympics. Dance was set to become an Olympic sport and I vaguely had been headed in that direction.

But I met this older fellow I played chess with in a little village in Germany. We’d been served by a very pleasnt waiter who was his friend.  I had said something about what a nice waiter he was and this man had told me 

‘He’s not the waiter. He’s the chess master’.

‘Huy?’ I’d grunted wondering whether to move my queen or knight.

‘In Europe we look at people as having a vocation and an avocation and then as having jobs.  In Europe the vocation was the best work.  If a person felt born to be a baker he’d hope to be the village baker. For centuries guilds and families passed on their learning to their children.  Each village needed a baker. The best baker would have that vocation. But there was often another whose ‘heart’s blood’ was to be a baker.  Only he wasn’t as good as the first baker. He’d bake as an ‘avocation’. It was his passion but to feed his family he’d take a job as a street cleaner or a construction worker. There was always pride in work. Any work that served the community was good work.  Men lived to care for their families and if they had a vocation they pursued this for excellence. If the first baker died then this baker would take his place. A bit like a ships captain and first mate. »

‘Like hobbies?’ I’d said moving the knight.

‘No a hobby is a word from the company town. When the aetheist communists and the heartless corporations came with the Industrial Age and post Industrial Age the village and guilds and family all were assaulted.  Marx was an idiot but the union movement was necessary because these owners weren’t part of the community like the old Lords and Ladies. They ‘d been like family with all the different natures of family. Tolstoy was a good example of a good father and there were always those kinds. They made that era last for hundred of years. There’s so much abuse and rewriting of history today by enemies of the truth.  But our waiter there, he’s not seen as a waiter here. He’s the grand chess master.  He was the top chess player in all of Germany and competed beyond. He still plays chess. I’ve learned all my best moves from him. Checkmate. »

I’d go on to learn years later that the company town reduced everything but the work of the mine or whatever else was to child’s play. Hences the word ‘hobby’. The destruction of the family by the communists. The State and Individual was paralleled by the « Job’ and « Hobbies’.  All that was important was the job and the job made money and to these people, the new sociopaths, the one who died with the most money one.  Silly really.  Like the communist leader with all his ribbons on his chest like the Boy Scout badges. Not earned like the best of soldiers but given by friends in power.   

Now I’d be among these people who were seeing the ‘a’ as the ‘dollar’ or ‘status’ and frankly I wasn’t immune. It amused me and I did the work and got the ‘A’s’ but it wasn’t ‘real’ in a way.  My friend Glen was the real doctor. His family was that medical guild family. He was the scientist. He was much smarter than me but more often than not I’d get the higher grade.

I’d so enjoy the movie Paper Chase about the gamesmanship of law school.  

I’d do things others wouldn’t think of and simply knew what the teachers wanted or what was necessary for an exam. I was also efficient because I was trying to keep up this whole other life and making money was a serious demand since I had to pay the rent. Our Jewish friend’s parents would give him a sports car when he got into medical school. A number of the girls were given trips to Hawaii by their parents for getting into medical school. I just spent another summer teaching drama and dance and more and more doing executive typing jobs. I’d learned dictaphone typing in England and there was a demand for this in Winnipeg. I worked for business start ups that would go onto be international concerns .  I liked that I met Nygaard back in those days because I was typing his advertising. It was always fun to live long enough to see the outcomes. The Mercantile Bank of England executive I typed for would always be in the news in years to come and there was Nygaard who went on to great success. They were different back then, driven and true workaholics and their devotion to their work and dreams paid off.  They both grasped the idea of excellence and it showed in all they did.  At least to me the lowly office help, that’s what stood out.

I was even doing fencing back then taking classes with the view still to be an actor and wanting to be ready for a pirate scene. Also I really did enjoy fencing.  

I was doing tv commercials dancing for easy money at this time and going down to the US on weekends to do dance shows, all for the easy money. With the demands on time getting a $100 for an hour of a commercial whereas I’d have to work a day teaching dancing to get that. I moved over into sales at Ken Matthews because selling dance lessons paid the most with commissions.  I’d go in for an evening and that week I’d convince some woman or a couple to spend thousands on joining the studio and doing a year of dancing. The main competitor it always seemed was that they were considering taking a trip. Well for all I knew the dance studio and a year of lessons and parties and social involvement paid more than a week cruise but the price was the same and  needing the money mostly for text books I won them over. I loved commissions.  But then I needed books. I loved books.  

Once I set my eyes on Maureen I’d have to work even harder so I had more money to take her out.  Women were then and have always have been expensive for men and we didn’t care if we put out half our income and men gave all their income to their families until the lies flourished around feminism, that social construct of ‘cultural communism’ the ‘divide and conquer’ that pitted people against another, and reduced everything to binary, first the rich and the poor, then the man and the woman.  It was an industry. It was intrinsically evil but back then that was just the way and long after the wealth of Canada moved to women collectively as the wives of the workaholic men died ten years earlier the feminists still cherry picked their data. 

 And men continued to pay for dates. And women continued to ‘marry up’.  But that was a future concern. At this time I was just struggling to find time for study and time for work.  I’d learned from my father and brother to pay the rent first so usually went without food.  I managed. I loved the university events so often because of the free food.  Food for guys back then was really like filling a car with gas. We were in constant motion and kept needing to fill the tank. Yet we had money for coffee and tobacco.  

I enjoyed that year being single and solely focussed on study but would not mind at all being waylaid by Cupid yet again. Maureen would become the love of my life.  We’d come together as much for the traumas of our pasts as the successes of our present. I always thought that her sister’s friend Debbie a dedicated student like me kept the sister on track while I was the one who motivated Maureen. She would always want to knock off study, go to a movie, take the evening off and I was always the bad guy who was ‘no fun’ and took us to the library where I’d do my 50 minutes on and 10 minutes off. She’d been the last to get into medical school whereas I’d been the first. She was a year behind her sister and together we’d stick with Glen and a few of my friends and together we excelled. In retrospect that was my usefulness , I helped her get her exams and her speciality .I’d do that again. I helped two women become specialist doctors eventually.  As likely they’d have succeeded without me as I would have without them.

I almost failed first year medical school because I was distracted by all of Maureen’s family problems. I missed one exam and there was no margin for error in medical school. It didn’t matter I was A in everything, in pathology I failed. I was distracted by her drama and had this psychopathic teacher who insisted we all buy this huge book for this one course. Each of the teachers put inordinate demands on the students for their course but this guy was the worst and was repeatedly cited by the school with many complaints against him about his piling on masses of reading no one could do . 

Because I was distracted and in love and not hanging with my study friends I missed the memo that his ‘book’ was ‘bullshit’ there was a little study book that could be read in a night. I’d been reading this 3000 page book and it turned out that was because he had a chapter in this old book which increased his sales.  I simply couldn’t read the 3000 pages and didn’t know the test subject based on the last 100 pages. The other book was so far superior and the class learned this from their families and knew about this idiot.  

Maureen’s  father was a dying alcoholic and the older brother would die also of alcoholism.  Hard drinking men in the car business.  Functional alcoholics heavy nightly hard liguer drinkers.  The other older brother was an aloof intellectual who’d go on to succeed as a journalist and always be the apple of the mother’s eye. The mother was a hyperchondriac nurse  with asthma and whenever the attention at a dinner party wavered from her she’d have some attack and suddenly she was centre of attention again..  She’d hate me when years later as a physician she fall  on the ground one too many times with ‘I’m having a heart attack.  I can’t move. I’m paralyzed. ‘ I’d grown incredibly tired of this mad woman sucking the life blood from my wife who would be sick for days after some visits because this untreated Al Anon, the alcoholic wife was constantly in drama while Maureen was constatnly pulled from her studies to attend to the latest emergency.  Her sister would marry into a strong and good Christian family and her husband and she would move away. The time when Maureen was left  alone with the mother I remember as  the « nightmare years. » I would forever identify with any ‘mother in law’ joke a comedian came up with and generally feel I could trump him.  Not surprisingly though seemingly impossible  my next mother in law was worse.  

On that occasion I stood up and walked into the kitchen leaving the mother flailing about on the floor.  ‘Are you calling an ambulance the girls following me into the kitchen,  asked me’

‘No’ I said.  

‘But my mother’s dying . ‘ Maureen said.

And I would utter the line I’d repeat years to come.

‘Your mother has been dying  and in crisis as long as I have known her.’

‘But she’s on the floor dying right now.’ Maureen cried. 

The first rule of medicine was observation and I’d observed as I would a hundred times again how she’d fallen.  She had wafted to the ground like every heroine in a black and white move. I’d oberserved the breathing and the strength of the her demands’.

« Just wait.’ I said. 

‘We have to do something, »  Maureen cried increasingly anxious. .’  Susan was more separated, not suffering the ‘folie a dieux’ I’d come to know so well.

‘If she is having a heart attack or dying who is best to save her? » The mother was getting angry and her complaints were increasing and taking on a particular edge so I was in no fear that she was going to pass away quietly while we conferenced in the kitchen. She was never known as a quiet woman. 

‘You’ the sisters agreed. I’d done a year of surgery at this point and months of intensive care. No one doubted my skills. I’d been asked to join all the faculties not just because I was a good academic but I’d shined as a clinician.  I had that thing that academics and bureaucrats didn’t. I was what was called a ‘real doctor’ and it was already well noted. There were a lot of us in any class. The girls were too . They’d become the greatest of clinicians themselves and I’d say this lesson that night contributed a lot to their achievement.  It meant however that I achieved a life long enemy which would  lead to the end of my marriage. Not that I would ever need any help screwing up a relationship.

« You’ the girls said in unison to me as I heard the mother beginning to stumble about in the other room, no doubt straightening her skirt. 

« Well then wait. She’ll be coming through that door in 10. 9. 8. 7. 6 ....and she appeared.  On cue and  very angry’.

« I was dying on the floor and you weren’t going to save me. » She screamed at her daughters and shouted at me . « You call yourself doctors. . You’ll never be doctors.  I could have died and you did nothing. » Then staring with the hate in her eyes aflame she looked straight at me and «   Mr. Doctor. I’m a nurse and you’re never be a doctor. ». The fact I was a doctor already. «  . Leaving a mother to die on the floor. » she said disgusted. 

Susan said, « you were never dying , mother’.

She was the one who spoke.  The flaming eyes turned on her

Her mother’s eyes shot bullets, bazookas, grenade launchers, missile portals, nuclear weapon source.  She’d would throw on her court and stalk out the door demanding that some one ‘take me home. ». 

 She’d live many years to come but I’d never have to face another episode of drama at my dinner table.   I’d go onto be a psychiatrist and this lady would smile to my face but I’d always watch where the knives were and never turn my back on her again.  She truly loved her loved ones but like all untreated al anon’s her resentments were never forgotten. She was unforgiving.  A great mother and a great nurse but a most impressive enemy of the sort that Vikings were.  You’d always want her on your side in a fight but she was truly the ‘mother in law from hell’

Of course to everyone else she was a saint.  I ‘d go onto psychiatry and be fascinated by family therapy and the ‘identified’ patient and study the alcoholic family system probably because of my own experience with her and seeing my marriage dissolve which I’d argue ‘would drive anyone to drink’.  Family therapists en mass went onto divorce. It was a true occupational hazard. We need our secrets and training and working as a psychiatrist would be like the mental and emotional equivalent of the experience of surgeons. One plastic surgeon confided in me. I can’t see anyone without thinking of asymmetry and wanting to fix something. I’m always wanting to take off an unsightly mole and wondering why some beautiful woman with an ugly nose wouldn’t do something about it.’

Personally I’d become bombarded constinuously with all this social and psychological material. These layers and deceits and character flaws and the defences and coping strategies.  We’d laugh and say that nurses entered psychiatry because they knew they were crazy and wanted free therapy whereas psychiatrists were only allowed in psychiatry after extensive vetting and showing proof we were relatively sane. Then the job would drive us all nuts, if only by association.  After working intimately with the dangerously insane, schizophrenics, drug addicts, prostitutes, bipolars, and pedophiles I’d be changed. Our society walls off the deviants and yet everyone has it’s own insaneity to a lesser degree in their families.  I loved that Einstein didn’t wear socks. I’d loved the book Drama of the Gifted Child. I’d love seeing how individuals, families and societies learned to cope. I loved adaptation and evolution.  The alcoholic and the insane person was never alone but always part of a system. I loved system theory.  I was also enjoying drinking more in medical school where drinking was de rigor.  We used to joke and say you didn’t have an alcohol problem if you didn’t drink more than your doctor. The lawyers, accountants and engineers were the greatest drinkers and frankly while a group of fraternities wanted me to join I didn’t like any of them because there was so much drunkenness.

I had such a serious streak then. I was meditating and praying and reading spiritual texts while consumed with chemistry and medicine.  

But there I’ve got myself way a head of my story.  Maureen was the most beautiful girl in the world, gentle, kind, caring, dedicated, brilliant and just a joy to be with. Everyone loved her.  We became the ‘beautiful couple’ the true success story and then I didn’t know, the ‘envy of the trolls’.  But being part of this world of the Yuppie was truly fun for me at the time. We were young successful adults on their way upward to being suburbanites with great friends, and a great future and great years ahead of us. 

20 yo University of Winnipeg

I really loved University of Winnipeg.  Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the importance of the ‘right size’ and ‘right fit’ of a college. If I’d gone to nearby University of Manitoba or even Stanford or Cambridge or Oxford I would not have experienced what I experienced at University of Winnipeg.  The class size was truly important.  The very best aspect though was the professors.  They really cared about me individually as a student.

I interviewed my professors. I rejected only one after the interview. I was paying a lot of money for a year learning from them so I wanted to know they were worth it.  I had a list of a half dozen questions. I made an appointment.  I met with them and told them my purpose.  All but one welcomed it. All said they’d never experienced this before but all but one passed with flying colours.  The one who failed was arrogant and didn’t comprehend the idea of ‘hard earned’ money and the buyers desire to ensure his investment. Today I’d just think of him as a privileged socialist who thought others should pay for him. Marx was like that a royal kafetch who was supported by his Jewish friends and bit the hands that fed him.  

I was still teaching dancing at Ken Matthews Dance Studio. I was meditating and praying and would begin meditating 2 hours a day minimum for the next decade or so.  

I was grieving my marriage, feeling such an utter failure. I missed Baiba but I’d moved out of her parents basement into the walk up bachelor apartment beside the university. I really liked the Murphy bed that came out of the wall. I had a crock pot and an electric frying pan. I began my love affair with cooking.  

Paul Simon’s song, « I am a rock I am an I am an island. I have my books...I have my poetry to protect me....I touch no one and no one touches me ‘ was my theme song of the period.

I lived in the library.

I met these great guys, other guys who lived in the library.  Glen Benoit would become my friend and inspiration. He was younger. The son of a famous Winnipeg opthalmologist.  He wanted to be a doctor from childhood. He was dedicated. We both lived in the study carrel.  We’d met because of our matching routines. I’d sit in the confines of the study carrel, no distraction, the little white desk sensory deprivation chamber.  Every hour for 10 minutes I’d get up and have a cup of coffee. Usually the horrid machine fare.  I’d meet Glen and we’d chat. He liked Cat Stevens and introduced me to the album Tea for the Tillerman.  I thought he was young and loved his focus. 

 I wore a black suit and tie to school. I was going from classes to teach dancing.  People thought me unusual. I was a »Manon Black » before this was cool. 

I was supposed to get a white lab coat.  I was doing my own laundry.  I concluded that white was going to get dirty much faster and instead bought a blue mechanics long lab coat. I was the only one dressed dark. The reason for the white is that you can see spills.  I couldn’t see the spills but after I washed my lab coat, not something I made a habit of, one could see the holes where the unseen acid and other solutions spills ate through the fabric.

Glen was my partner in Chemistry lab.  I was an ‘arts’ student when I did my second year of sciences.  I’m confused about the time line and the separation and divorce. The university years flow one after another but their connection with my other life seems less clear.

I remember blowing up the lab that summer.  I think the lab instructors name  was Mrs. Tascona.  I had several fires and explosions and was told that if I had one more explosion she would have to ask me to leave.  I had difficulty with the precision that the ‘science’ students took for granted. I would forever affer know what too many lawyers, politicians, bureaucrats and other potential bullies in the arts crowds  lacked because I had this same trait when I began my science studies.  Arts doesn’t have a ‘lab’.  I thought of myself as an ‘ideas’ man. I took pride in being called an ‘intellectual’. I loved my ‘big mind’.  What I didn’t appreciate was the connection between the inner world and outer world.  I lived in my head.  I put less value on application.  I missed that part where the rubber meets the road. 

In the lab that’s where that all occurs. My mechanic friends and engineering friends would have ideas and then have to ‘operationalize’ them.  For people who haven’t got their hands ‘dirty’ this is all anathema to them. We are living in a world where most people want to give orders and want to be thinkers. The women seem the worst. They simply don’t want to learn from getting their hands ‘dirty’ but they do think they can be administrators.

It’s in the detail. I’d learn more about reality and life in the lab and later in surgery than I’d learn from countless books full of ideas and schemes by people who hadn’t done anything.

I didn’t appreciate the importance of a ‘point’.  That little indicator on the measure.  So I filled a spoon with 1 ml when it was supposed to be .1 ml.  It exploded, fortunately in the gas chamber which I’d not completely closed since closing it enough was okay. The instructions were precise. I’d done it imprecisely my way.  The lab had filled with smoke to the level of 4 feet below the ceiling. It had to be evacuated until the fans could get rid of the smoke. The lab was off from the main school. Good planning.

I’d approached my my other lab  partner and asked if he’d be my lab partner. He would turn out to be the very best lab partner because he was amazing at doing technical things but couldn’t comprehend the process of presentation and recording.  We were a straight A team. But as a joke he’d sometimes leave out a « . » in our combined lab work with the result I had another explosion having used 10 times the chemical indicated. He was a joker.  No one died.  His skill in chemistry and labs in general resulted in his becoming  a technician.  I would go onto be the doctor but seeing his comfort with the translation of ideas into reality was a life lesson. I happened to be good at translating what had occurred and recording. Glen my other lab partner was good at everything. 

Glen was beside me on the day of another explosion. The other classmates considered him heroic. There had no takers for the space beside me. By now my lab coat was holed with chemical spills and half burnt. I looked more like a homeless person than a chemistry student. 

 There’s this unusual experiment where we made nitro glycerin in the lab. We had this nifty buzon burners and all that evil scientist paraphernalia .I’d mixed up the ingredients in my usual less than precise way. But I had this concoction going without realizing the amount of heat was another variable that needed careful monitoring. It said in the lab notes that under no condition was the liquid to boil away and become dry as then it would explode.

I saw that the liquid had magically disappeared.  I pointed that out to Glen who was standing beside me.  He turned off his bunson burner and backed carefully away as if I’d just pointed out an STD.  I called to the courageous lab instructor and said, « Pardon me. I seem to have boiled off my liquid. ». 

I don’t know why I just didn’t turn off the flame. The decision to do that took a second or two or more because I was distracted by the mass exodus of students with Mrs. Tascona encouraging this at the doorway. 

I watched as she herded everyone including Glen out of the lab.  There I was alone in front of this major beaker of what obvious was nitro glycerin and nitroglycerin alone.  

I had a brilliant idea. I carefully lifted the still hot beaker and put it under my desk and moved away. The explosion lifted the desk and charred the insides of the wood but otherwise caused no damage.  

« Quick under the desk, » Glen would say another time when I got the experiment a bit off and he being much more scientifically astute recognized what was about to happen. Again a loud noise. The desk lifting.  Class and teacher staring at me. 

« If you have had another  explosion. I can’t let you complete the lab.  I can’t put the rest of the students lives at any more risk. ». 

The pressure was exordinate but I did complete that lab and learned the terrible importance of detail.  What I thought and what I did needed a congruence and care that simply was methodical and not that orgasmic intuitive inspirational bit that is so addictive and appealing in the arts.

A marine colonel would say it was the polishing of boots that made the soldier. My Queen’s counsel friend would say the best lawyer learned to dot every ‘i’.  My surgical mentor Dr. Ross would one day say, « it’s how you handle the tissue’.  

I learned attention to detail in  Mrs. Tascona Chemistry lab. In future contract I’m sure she insisted on danger pay and was sure to keep up her life insurance.  I learned  that little things really counted.

I will forever remember our great long suffering lab teacher on the back of Glen’s motorcycle screaming as he drove her to the bar where we gathered at the end of course. We all raised our glasses to chemistry with a whole new appreciation. For most of us this skill would be turned to  making of better wine and beer or bathtub hallucinogens. .  Chemistry became everything for me. I loved considering the ingredients of everything.  

All the while I was making stews and soups and studying recipes and trying to discern the ingredients and herbs and spices in everything I ate.  The two went hand and hand together. I could even smell some of the chemicals and would later smell disease long before some of my colleagues rationally concluded what was wrong with the patient.  It was like I had this whole other sense open up for me and it had all begun with the periodic table. 

 Now I was thinking in three dimensional spaces. In biochemistry we’d consider the combinations of carbons and other elements in three d and I’d see these shapes dancing in the air visualizing them. I’d speak to a composer and he’d tell me he saw the music that way. I ‘d seen music when I’d dropped acid but he said it was the clefts and lines of script like ticker tape and each of the instruments in these great sheets he’d read in the hall as he directed and his ears listened. I was like that then for chemistry.  It was a marvellous love affair.

At night I’d dance.  I had these regular students and I’d get to know their lives and we’d translate the idea of dance into their bodies and their forms and choreograph these routines that flowed about the rooms and got them awards. I’d choreograph show dances for tv and local shows, great and beautiful presentations of groups of young bodies laughing in form. It was a wonderful time. I felt my senses were alive in a way I’d not known.

I was loving learning in classes. I had these friends at school and the friends in the dance. I actually read text books as I walked at fast pace from the university to the dance studio. Between classes I’d been memorizing mathematic equations.

I’d buy my first Texas instrument computer calculator. Life would become so easy. I’d never been adept with the slide rule. That loss of a ‘point’ could occur so easily with those mechanical devices that needed an intuitive understanding of the desired end to really make them work. I didn’t have this in math. I was always surprised and fascinated by the conclusions I got to these equations that had taken hundreds of years of genius to find. The Texas instrument calculator was a god send. I wore it with pride dangling from my belt buckle. I had a white plastic pocket protector and my pencil and my pen. My hair was cut short and I wore the black slacks, white shirt and often took the tie off so it didin’t get in the solutions. Then in the afternoon like Superman I’d switch back to Clark Kent and go off to teach dancing secure in the knowledge I  could make explosives.  Each technique and process gave me a skill that would be the basis of mastery of all that we took for granted in the 20th century.  Once you can make the basics its not a whole lot different to use these ingredients to move forward. 

I talked not that long ago with a fellow doing gene splitting and we reflected on the simplicity of it and how the new machines were making it so much easier.  

The computer moved us completely into a ‘multi factorial’ analysis that revolutionized our understanding of disease all the while too many people left to ideological teachers remained trapped in cause and effect and binary reductionism. The awe and wonder comes with science.

My love and appreciation of God grew daily in my study just as I’d been in wonder looking at the drop of pond water in that little microscope I’d been given by my parents so many years before.

University of Winnipeg was this wonderful playground for me. Every night I’d be three or 4 hours in the study carrels. On the weekend I’d study 8 to 10 hours each on Saturday and Sunday. Glen would want a ‘change’ and I’d get on the back of his motorcycle and we’d ride to a different library where we’d sit in a different study carrel and study for hours expriencing the different coffee from a different terrible from different coffee machine.  He’d call that a ‘vacation’. He was a funny guy. His brother Archie was older and would go on to be an anesthetist. I’d get to know him and like him him too through the years of medical school. The Benoits were a great family and I appreciated seeing them alone and together and seeing how family transmitted the really important intimate details. I’d meet his mother a beautiful deeply loving woman and his father who had that surgical intellect with the confidence of experience and constant reliability.  It was a great honor to be a friend. I’d be forever thankful.

In medical school I’d come up against these weird blocks. One was kidney. I couldn’t wrap my brain around the idea of ion exchange. It was a puzzle. Once you got it you couldn’t understand how you ever missed it but it was a reall impediment to my school and understanding. A couple of critical times Glen sat with me and went over it again and again until I had that ‘aha moment’.  We had formed a study group by then. A half dozen of us who’d mainly met in that University of Winnipeg library who’d go onto University of Manitoba medical school and stay together and work together whenever we could. It was great comraderie and truly amazing people.

I’d enter medical school with straight A grades in Arts and Science. Even in medical school I ‘d continue to take courses with Dr .Ridd, studying Kierkegaard and Kafka. Dr. Ridd was a Christian existentialist. He’d have a group us us sitting around a coffee shop after class considering the meaning and purpose of life and reflecting on Ecclesiastes and the Trial.  Then I’d be dissecting the dead in the daytime and dancing to Van Morison the next evening. 

But that’s getting ahead of myself. When I entered medical school I had straight A’s in Arts and Sciences. I joined with a hundred other people whose lowest mark had been one B in one year. We were considered a very smart class. There were 15 other Straight A’s several master students and some PhD’s. For the first time since I’d been in the gifted class in school I felt among my own. I had the same comraderie as the dance world but here the pace was incredible. There was no time for parties.  No time for a ‘break’. We were always on.  It was exhilarating. I loved the overload and the wonder. I loved the learning. I was ecstatic and having one ‘aha’ moment after another.

Long after I left University of Winnipeg I’d return and study in the stacks and carrels.  I’d  love the smell and feel of the library.  The teachers were so inspirational.  My classics professor just for one was a wizard. They were all gods and goddesses to me. These amazing people who shared their arcane knowledge. Gnostics who opened their minds and hearts to us.  Of course Dr. Ridd was my favourite self effacing hero, a basketball player who loved his family and loved students, loved God and loved learning.  I am truly blessed in this life.

I’d still have dinners with my family. My brother and Adell had begun on their amazing love affair. I’d look with wonder at their lives as we all were moving forward crossing these great expanses of wilderness and park lands taking the various bits of pavement.  I’d left the unbeaten paths and the roads less travelled and was really enjoying the speed that came with the well trodden path. I was  loving and appreciating the selection of learning my professors deemed critical.

 This was especially true in philosophy where my professsor had contributed to the insaniety defence decisions and I’d years before my time study the originals of the laws that I’d one day work intimately with.  The university I’d once thought had nothing to offer now gave me so much and condensed so much learning. I was simply in love. I wasn’t standing but I was crawling up the backs of millions who had gone before me to find out the very fabric of modern society. It was incredible.  

I’d leave University of Winnipeg which would always remain a true university to me, like Oxford,  to go to the University of Manitoba which would only be part university but mostly technical school.  I’d love the latter in time too.  I simply loved learning. That humility and stupidity then the learning and mastery , repeated over and over again.