APR-B-11
VISITING
PROFESSORSHIP AT SCHNEIDER CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL OF THE LONG ISLAND JEWISH
HOSPITAL
April
16--18, 2003
Welcome
to Great Neck, Long Island, New York. I
am in a very foreign territory, where just the sound of some of the voices is
like fingernails on a blackboard, in a very easily mimicked New Yorky Jewish
“What’s it to you, Get Outta My Face, You’re Wasting My Time” kind of loaded
social interaction. Even ordinary
polite English expressions are provocative accusations, like “Excuse me!”--not
a request, but an order, with the mandatory shifting of your attention to that
of the rushed agenda of another. The
commuter plane on the way up was full of such loud and rather obnoxious
preemptory demands for services that were expected, since I know what I want
and I want it right now.
I
have taken a “town car” limo from Islip Airport in which I had landed near
11:00 PM across the Long Island Expressway to the Inn at Great Neck, listed in
the book of “small elegant luxury hotels”= expensive hideouts, as the cold
weather I had seen on the airport CNN came up the coast and dropped the
temperature fifty degrees--just in time for my weekend run.
I
tried to regroup in this hotel, and worked hard at getting the old laptop Think
Pad to save some of my text descriptions of the last week’s events into some
kind of format that I might be able to email from wherever I might touch down
long enough to try to send it. The text
is only saved in some non-translatable form of hieroglyphics, which cannot be “saved
as” without getting all ten extra pages of the symbols with it, so before I can
send you the stories of the Gainesville visit or the Bull Run run, I may have
to find some kind of reader of these Sanskrit tablets to allow them to be saved
and sent in something closer to English prose.
So,
I am relearning the use of the Think Pad and the programs of a now obsolete era
as I nurse the burning quads and try to restore some useful function to my
lower extremities in New York’s Long Island before I fly out to Boston and go
through the three day weekend party that is the Boston marathon weekend.
REUNION
AFTER 34 YEARS WITH ALBERTO PENA
AND
ROUNDS IN THE SCHNEIDER CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL
I
took a taxi to the LIJ, as it is called here, and checked in to the Schneider
Children’s hospital, which was being built at the time 23 years ago when
Alberto came up as its first and only chief.
He had a grand celebration sometime back when he had completed his
1000th patient with an anorectal malformation, and he did his own kind of
operation for which he has become quite renowned.
I
met him in his office, and we went over my two sons and four grandkids, and
then his four and seven and a half grandkids.
I had met him and his wife Rosalinda when they had come to Boston with a
small boy named Gustavo, who had a biliary atresia, and they had taken good
care of this boy at home, only very late in his life coming to the hospital
with him when he died. This could have
been the low point in anyone’s life, but they had made of it a very positive
experience, and their children subsequently, a couple of whom were born as mine
were also in Boston. We had one brief
holiday, I remember well how precious they were, when we rented the Joshua Slocum’s
“Spray”--the sailboat that had been sailed single handed around the world. We went over all those who had been on the
boat at that time and what had become of them after what we had thought then
might become of them. We reminisced
over our parents and kids; our teachers and our students. We then made rounds in the ICU and saw the
tight ship that Alberto has been running, and then looked out over the huge
addition to the hospital being built and guided by him that he will probably
not be the one to use.
We
went to the Board room where my conference would be held. It was a very unusual day here, and perhaps
its could have been said to be the wrong day to which my visit was moved after
an earlier conflict had shown that he was out of the country at the time I
might be able to come. It turns out, of
course, that the day was a high holy day--Passover--and the Long island Jewish
Hospital is perhaps the one place on earth where I should not try to find a
full house on that day. But, I gave my
talk and had some good questions from the residents who did attend, oddly one
of them from India and another from the Philippines--places that I have been or
will be in a few months each way.
We
then went out to Alberto’s new home and picked up Rosalinda, looking little
different than when we were together a third of a century ago. We went to a Trattoria Diane for an elegant
dinner, and then adjourned to their new home.
We had talked about the renovation of Derwood and they were eager to
show what they had done with their house.
They had a house in Great neck, which had burned when a power cable fell
on it. The insurance settlement had
helped, but they sold it for a profit, and then bought a million dollar house
and renovated it, doing some of the consolidation and special techniques--all
hardwood floors removing carpet, and creating a cathedral ceiling office
library upstairs, and a special place for the memorabilia of his patients and
their travels in the basement.
They
had visited Derwood, in about 1978, and I told them it had been unchanged since
then, but was now about to undergo a major renovation. What they had done to their house and what I
am planning to do to mine, makes mine look like a bargain. I had also visited Rosalinda’s orthopedist
brother in Mexico City on my first visit there, a brother-in-law now retired in
Baja California near la Paz on the Sea of Cortez.
It was a delightful evening with a friend
from the era of both our ambitious youths.
It is amazing to see what we have been able
to accomplish and what we have done with that promise
we seemed to exhibit then, and to say after looking
back--”I certainly could not have predicted all
that, but I gave it a good try, and have experienced
a whole lot as life rolled by.”
We will be in further contact with the further
transitions life may offer.