MAY-B-9

HADLEY ABERNATHY IS APPLYING TO MEDICAL SCHOOLS,
AND REQUESTS---AND I COMPLY WITH REQUEST
FOR ENDORSEMENT IN HER APPLICATION

Yes-I-love-you-very-much-and-would-never-forgive-you-if-you-did-not-give-me-the-opportunity-to-write-the-letter-attached-to-be-sure-you-get-into-the-medical-school-of-your-choosing-and-can't-you-make-it-this-one-so-I-can-keep-a-close-eye-on-your-progress?

I am watching you, you wench!  And, it took a long distance connection to be sure that you were finally  in the application mode!  I am glad that I just happened to send an email to John Sutter, which is how I blew your cover.

I am heading off next week to "The 'Boat" to run the SBM on my sixth outing for that race.  Virginia is going to meet me in Denver, and I am trying to talk her into the half marathon, which she would be eager to try except for the misgivings about altitude.  For that reason, I thought we should set out a day or two early, and we will pick up the tags for all the group, and possibly go soak in the Strawberry Farm hot springs while breathing thinner air for a day or two before the run.  Will there be any Abernathys around town?

I will return to Denver only a fortnight (as you folk with your Briticisms are fond of saying) to rendezvous with Gene and Sarah and drive up to Dayton Wyoming to run the Big Horn Ultra.  Along the way, I hope to stop in at San Antonio to visit my son Michael and his wife Judy, only a month before the arrival of my own big news of the year 2001---Twin Grandsons will make their appearance just about at the time I am climbing Stok Kangri on return from  Tso Morari in Ladakh--the site where we had our long walk in the evening as I was hobbling on the ice climbing staff, talking about your future.  I hope that this letter and the applications it is joining may be part of a big change for that future in the direction you deserve!

Write to Amy Nicole Hayes  (Anicoleh@hotmail.com) and ask her for the cover story copy from Ferrum College about her application process and the result of her Ladakh mission and its consequence in her being here at the GWUMC as a freshman medical student on a very last-minute basis!  The article might make a good "enclosure" with your own application materials!  I had done a TV interview on Amy for the local Ferrum College in how it is that we can determine in advance in the application process who it is that is destined to become a caring, compassionate and competent physician--and how it is that I can sense that in another individual--you know, like you!

I would be delighted to personalize the letter in directing it to a specific person in a particular school, but thought I would get this off with dispatch to be part of the process early.

I am happy to be supporting you in your continuing funding from the brisk sales of the "Surgical Secrets" in which I have had a chapter or two--you and I seem to be pre-destined to meet in the airports of the world, if not in spots as familiar to me as London or Ladakh!

Cheers in your travels!  Luv ya!

GWG

>>> "Hadley Abernathy" <Hadley_Abernathy@asl.org> 05/24/01 10:05AM >>>

YES!  I will email you as soon as I get my act together enough to write

you a sweet, I-love-you-so-much-and-don't-you-love-me-too-p.s.-will-you-write-me-a-letter-of-recommendation-letter
letter. :) 
I have yet to open your last email and sit down to read it.  At the moment, I'm running late to middle school golf practice.  I've been running in London and breathing in smog... but I do love it here!  Promise to give you the update.  Will you consider writing me a letter?  Pretty please? :)
Off to a wedding in LA next weekend, then a job interview at Stanford, then back to London to grade all my finals and write reports in aboutthree days time!  I'm begining to sound like you! :)
Take good care.  Speak to you soon!
Hadley

Dear Colleague members of the Admissions Committee:      May 24, 2001

I am writing this letter in support of the medical school application of Hadley Abernathy.  I want you to know how much I enjoy this opportunity, and volunteered to do so even before Hadley had requested my support.  It is a natural response from many of us who enjoy "backing a winner."  But more than that, you may not immediately gather from her application materials, assembled with characteristic modesty,  the true diversity and dimensions of Hadley's character that predestine her to be a superb physician.  let me help you understand that from my own appreciation of her talent and potential.

I have known Hadley for many years, although only got to know her well in the last year.  I was a colleague of her father, a surgeon in the community of Steamboat Springs Colorado where he lived and worked, and was well respected personally and professionally.  Because of his interest in teaching, he became associated with the chairman, Dr. Alden Harken, and vice-chairman, Dr. E. Eugene Moore, of the Department of Surgery of the University of Colorado Health Science Center, both close friends of mine, through whom I had first met the family.  I got to know of his daughters Hadley and Charlie as world-class skiers (a birthright of any young person growing up in Steamboat Springs, the Olympian spawning grounds) and athletes, and ran with each of them.

I became a correspondent advisor of Hadley's following the untimely death of her father, and strongly urged her to consider medicine, given her skills and interests.  She enjoyed teaching, and following graduation from Stanford had set out in pursuit of teaching positions in Hawaii, San Francisco and London, excelling in each of these different environments, enjoying the challenges most when among diverse cultures represented in these settings  When I was organizing a medical mission to a new field in Ladakh with the Himalayan Health Exchange, I was asked to hand-pick a group of students with high potential and Hadley was my first choice.

I thoroughly enjoyed my experience of shared learning with Hadley and the other team members among whom she was a natural leader.  I had paired her in sequence with my protégée medical student advisees in organizing our outpatient clinics and in doing patient screening both in medical camps at in an inpatient setting in Lady Willingdon Hospital in Manali India.  In each such environment, she performed at a very high level, and was eager to learn more as she developed problem-solving  clinical skills--a natural outgrowth of her innate interest in people through caring for them, combined with her teacher's instincts for what worked with youth.  I will furnish photographs of Hadley in action in the medical camps in interviewing patients through interpreters, teaching personal hygiene lessons to students in distributing toothbrushes and toothpaste. in the unique settings of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, or a dilapidated schoolroom alongside Tso Morari, one of the highest altitude lakes on earth.

It is from this setting that I would like to tell you of my closest impressions of Hadley, since I had taken a long walk with her (at a slow pace, in my instance, from a foot I had fractured earlier in the day in pushing the Jeep-like Tatas across streams flooded with Himalayan snowmelt.)  We had heard the blaring horns and gongs of the installation ceremony of the young Rimpoche we had witnessed earlier in the day, and walked along the Himalayan Range with this sight and sound background, discussing her future and planning for it.

Hadley has all the ingredients of a superb physician--but more.  She has a genuine need to help, across age barriers and cultural divides, across economic and language barriers.  She is not just willing, but eager, to go more than half way toward anyone disadvantaged by illness or poverty.  She is well aware of the heritage she carries forward from her father and many friends in the caring professions, and is not likely to follow this tradition but lead it into new and better directions.  I would find it an honor to be a colleague of hers.

I know Hadley well.  I endorse her application without reservation.   I might be permitted one selfish request: I would hope that she might apply to my own medical school so that I might enjoy watching her further development in the profession from closer range!

 I would count it an honor to be called upon to expand upon these opinions of mine (contact points in the page following) and others who have worked with her and with me,  based in many evidences of her ideal qualifications to be the physician I know she will be.  She will be a credit to the profession for which she is ideally suited.       

Yours truly,

Glenn W. Geelhoed, MD

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