A brush with death made a doctor out of me
“To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born,” - David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Actually, to start before I was even thought of, my parents were a love match that defied the conventions of their time and the desires of my mother’s family.
My mother was an architect, one of the first women architects in Canada. When she started at McGill in 1949, the university still had quotas for Jewish students. My mother was told at her interview that McGill is a Protestant institution, and we have no obligation to accept students of other faiths. Yet she was accepted, and was, when she started, the only woman in the Faculty of Engineering. Her professors used to start their lectures, “Gentleman, and Malca.”
Early in her studies my mother was dating a man who was not only a medical student, but the son of a famous Yiddish poet. He was someone who my grandmother thought was highly desirable, and she strongly encouraged the match. However, when the young Dr. Stern did ask my mother to marry him, he followed up that request by assuring her that “no wife of mine would ever work.” He added that she could indulge in her architectural inclinations by decorating their home. Well, that was the end of him! This left an opening for my father to swoop in from the sidelines, with his brooding good looks, immense physical strength, his passion and his warmth and caring. He was in many ways the exact opposite of her previous beau. He was a poor boy from the wrong side of Parc Avenue with only a high school education, despite his love of learning, and he literally worked with garbage. Nowadays we would call him an industrial recycler, but all my grandmother could see was that he was a man with dirty hands and a beat up old truck. What he had going for him was his passionate love and respect for my mother and a willingness to not only “allow” her to work but he made a commitment to pay for her last two years of school after they married.
My Bubby never forgave him. Throughout their long marriage, despite his many kindnesses to her, she regarded him as a usurper, “the pig who grabbed the best apple.” While that hurt my mother, she prevailed and married him.
I believe I was conceived on the night of my mother’s graduation. My birth was a difficult one. The labour was long and hard, 36 hours of back labour, occiput posterior position, hours of pushing and a high forceps delivery. When my father, after three days of anxiety outside the doors of the delivery room, was presented with my poor, bruised, pinheaded self he was convinced that I would be irredeemably brain damaged. I sometimes wonder if this birth story led to my lifelong commitment to the good birth.
As I grew into a painfully shy, painfully thin child, it turned out that he was almost right. Around the middle of grade two my teachers realized that I could not read. Up until then, the “Dick and Jane” readers we were using were easy enough to memorize. The teachers would read them aloud, then we were set the task of reading them back and decoding the simple words. I just remembered the pictures and the set of words associated with them. By the end of grade two it became obvious that I was not really reading and my parents, already anxious about me, set out to search for a solution. This whole issue was exacerbated by the fact that I was going to Jewish People’s School and was learning four languages at the same time, two written from left to right and two from right to left.
I was diagnosed with dyslexia, minimal brain damage and what we would now call ADHD.
Luckily, one of my parents’ close friends was an optometrist who was a pioneer in the field of ADHD treatment. While he had some wacky ideas about eye movement training (we watched lots of movies on rotating screens), I did get the tutoring I needed to crack the reading code. Suddenly I could read. Once I started, reading became my passion. I hung out at the children’s library at the YMHA, where under the guidance of their wonderful children’s librarian I took out seven books every two weeks and devoured them.
My next challenge was math. In high school I struggled. I did not do advanced math because I was convinced that I would never use it. When I decided to go into psychology, I discovered that I needed to take pre-calculus in order to do statistics in CEGEP. After the final exam the instructor called me into his office and asked me why I was taking this course. “I need it to do statistics.” I told him.
“You’re not going into science?” He asked me, “or taking any more math?”
“Oh no, sir” I assured him, “only stats!” He generously gave me the lowest possible passing grade. Three years later I did calculus. I hadn’t intentionally lied, it was just that my life changed.
In 1973, like many other young people, I was living in a commune, barely eking out a living working as an artist’s model. My ex-boyfriend and I got back together and decided to travel across Canada in a VW van that he had outfitted as a camper. I wanted to make sure that I would not get pregnant during this escapade, so I had the brand new, fashionable, Dalkon Shield IUD installed.
We set off on our adventure. Soon my right arm turned mahogany brown from hanging out the window of the van as we drove. We camped, we visited, we picked up hitchhikers.
We were already in Alberta when I started getting sick. I was having a lot of cramps and discomfort. When we were in Banff I started bleeding heavily. I went to a clinic, and an old male doctor examined me. He was not disturbed at all when I gasped in pain at the pelvic exam and gave me birth control pills containing four milligrams of estrogen to stop the bleeding. This intervention only added nausea and vomiting to my symptoms.
“I am so sick!” I said to my boyfriend, “I need to go to a women’s centre!” My boyfriend, terrified that something really bad was happening, loaded me into the van and we drove through the night. In Vancouver, we went to the women’s centre and the doctor there examined me and sent me right to the emergency room. The IUD was removed in an operating room, because they were afraid of something horrible happening to me that they did not explain. They pumped me full of a cocktail of antibiotics and informed me that I could have died and that I might never be able to have children. Thank goodness my four successful pregnancies eventually proved that prediction false. It was a year or two later when the scandal of the Dalkon Shield became public. The U.S. FDA revealed that the company which produced it had falsified the data that showed the IUD was associated with infection, infertility and death.
I then flew home. I had to move back into my parents’ house and, after spending a few weeks recovering, I felt worn out and depressed. My boyfriend and I realized that our attempt to restart our earlier relationship was not going to work. We broke up again for all the same reasons we broke up in the first place. I moped around the house reading trashy novels and sleeping many hours a day.
One morning, my friend Squeaky, from the Women’s Centre, called me. “How are you?” she asked me. After listening to my litany of complaints, she said, “Well that’s enough kvetching, you’re bored now! Not to mention boring. Come with me to work at the Youth Clinic as a volunteer, it’s better than feeling sorry for yourself.”
So, the next week I started volunteering at the clinic, I liked it so much that this was the beginning of my thinking about doing medicine, and then, of course, I had to take calculus. This time I passed.
