Young Doctor

Young Doctor December 20 2009


Ellen: Youth

TO BE YOUNG

For youth everything is new --

A shooting star,

The ocean's glint,

The ache of wanting,

The passion of possession.



It dwindles,

Yet becomes fuller.

Years pass.

Being explodes:

An unexpected harvest.



3/14/01Ellen Scheiner


Rosemary: Reflection

From childhood, you wanted to be a doctor, to help people as your surgeons had helped you. You knew you would never be bored, and that you would find it rewarding to help others in this way. When you came back to the US, with your medical school diploma and Doctorate in Medicine from the University of Lausanne, your mother asked, incredulous, “Are you REALLY a doctor now?” Yes, you were. You were ready to take on the challenges of internship and residency, to take your place as a knowledgeable authority.

You first obtained an internship at King’s County Hospital, the public hospital in Brooklyn, that took all who came seeking treatment – poor women about to give birth, homeless intoxicated men with gaping injuries, the old and ill, including, at later times, both your parents after they had experienced heart attacks. It was a homecoming. You had been born at King’s County and had grown up in Brooklyn.

As a one-handed physician, you had had to invent unique ways to perform surgery, deliver babies, perform physical examinations. One of your later students told me that she still uses the physical examination techniques you taught her while she was an intern studying under you. She said they work better than the standard ones more generally used.

As an Emergency Room physician, you took care of all comers. Often, poor women who had received no prenatal care, showed up in the Emergency Room ready to give birth, and you delivered their babies. You told me proudly that many Hispanic girls in Brooklyn had receive the name “Elena” in honor of you , the one-handed woman doctor who had delivered them.

During this time, you grew in knowledge and in command of your profession. One day, you were walking down the hall wearing your white coat, and stethoscope, and met, coming from the opposite direction, the surgeon who had treated you as a child at the nearby House of St. Giles the Cripple. He saw your paralyzed arm and hand, recognized the Erb’s Paralysis in which he had specialized, and stopped, amazed. “Ellen!”, he exclaimed. You enjoyed a grand reunion, and had a chance to tell him how he had inspired you to become a doctor, too.

After completing your first year’s internship at King’s County, you then spent a year at Bellevue Hospital, before being invited to serve as a resident at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. You had worked as a lab technician for a year at Sloan Kettering before starting your medical training, and after a year at the University of Chicago studying Biochemistry. You had stayed in touch with the Sloan Kettering doctors with whom you had worked, and they mentored you and kept track of when you were ready to be invited back as a member of the medical staff.

At Sloan Kettering, you found your niche in the Physiological service. You served your two years of residency and were offered a position in that department, where you spent your medical career. This was the cradle of the nascent specialty of nephrology. You were one of four doctors who were called on a daily basis to invent miracles, trying to save the lives of dying patients from all over the hospital. The nurses called you daily at 7:15 am, to go over who had almost died during the night and receive your instructions on what mixture of fluids and electrolytes they should receive as infusions to help reestablish a physiological balance in their systems.

As a resident, you were entrusted to teach and mentor interns, one of the regular duties of residents. Medicine has evolved as an elegant system of apprenticeship, reminiscent of the way older siblings teach younger ones in large families. At the end, everyone has learned by being taught and shown in real situations, and then, in turn, by teaching others.

One of your former interns, who, with her Dutch husband, had subsequently become your friend, talked about how they both admired your sophistication, your European worldliness, and, of course , your encyclopedic knowledge of all things, medical or not. You were always “on top of it,” and knew all the answers. “And they were the right answers,” she continued. “You didn’t slouch with Ellen. She took command, but gently. She would ask, considerately, ‘had you thought of this?,’ rather than making you feel ashamed of having missed something. She was miles beyond all the others. She had great discernment. She knew what was and was not worth bothering with, She was also a gourmet, and a sophisticate. She had a great sense of humor and a philosophical point of view; she saw everything with depth and meaning. She was no flatfoot doctor!”

Another of your former interns from those early years reiterated the fact that you knew everything – way more than anyone else. The interns could be confident that they’d been given good information when they went and asked you, and you were always kind and considerate in helping them to understand. You were also kind in general. Patients loved you. You treated them like real people. Apparently you treated everyone this way. The now retired doctor with whom I was talking, who had been your intern said, still amazed, “When I was eating in the cafeteria alone, she’d come and sit with me and be friendly. None of the others did that – they all treated us interns like peons, but not Ellen. Ellen never looked down on anyone. You could already see that she had a deep spiritual sense – she seemed, already, to be a Buddhist.”

Yet, even in your right place in life as a doctor, you suffered deeply. The first former intern said “We never understood the extent to which she was handicapped. In 1989, she told me how her back was twisted, and showed me the x-rays, as if I wouldn’t believe her. She described to me the constant pain her back caused her. We just never realized.”

You also suffered from the need to keep your true nature, your sexual orientation, a secret. You had already been severely punished once when this had been discovered. When you were a first year medical student at Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia, you had had an affair with a fellow student. This was during the McCarthy era, before civil rights existed, and before there was an ethical requirement of confidentiality between a psychologist and patients. The young woman whose lover you had been went to the school psychologist, panicked about what would happen if you two were found out. The psychologist, indeed, went to the Dean, and told about your affair. Both of you were asked to leave at the end of the academic year. Because your grades had been perfect, you were allowed to resign, rather than being expelled. This allowed you to continue studies in Lausanne, without having to repeat that first year.

When the dean had asked you “Who else is involved in doing things like this?”, you had stood firm and told her nothing – a behavior of which you remained proud for the rest of your life. But the experience of being asked to leave stayed with you, and you were terrified, as long as you worked at the hospital, lest someone find out that you were gay. You lived a life of elaborate secrecy, which was painfully difficult, because you couldn’t talk or act freely or honestly with either colleagues or your family.



Ellen: Reflections After a Lesbian Poetry Reading

My generation is the one before yours

As you drank, drugged, defied your way through the sixties,

[One of you told of her all-night bar vigil

Nursing two beers till cock grow,

Learning how the women did it.]

I stayed awake in the Emergency Room,

An exhausted, hypervigilant intern,

Terrified of making a mistake.



Nurses bathed scabrous, smelly old men,

Often for the the first time in eons.

Then we, the sanctified doctors,

Examined them, touched them,

Tried to mend their unfixable wounds.

Sometimes they died in the tub,

As if a carapace of dirt had held them together,

Had contained their lives.



This was my night-time amusement.



Long before your twenty year old souls

Found lesbian bodies to inhabit,

I had been kicked out of a medical school

For loving a woman.

Never free to tell my story,

While you now stand in public,

Reading paeans to wet pussies,

I must yet remain silent.


Rev 1/28/01