04-MAY-B-7

FOLLOWING THE “LOVEFEST” OF STUDENTS AND THEIR PARENTS FROM GWUMC COMMENCEMENT, COMES GOOD NEWS FROM KEVIN AND HIS HUMANISM IN MEDICINE AWARD DONATED,

AND ANTHONY COPPOLINO FROM OP SMILE AND HIS AT-LAST GWUMC ACCEPTANCE PHONE CALL,

AND THE DEVASTATING NEWS OF SAMMY GORMAN AND JIGMET, AS MARK NAYLOR SETTLES IN AT DERWOOD AND I WORK ON DETAILS OF REPAIRS THIRD TIME EACH OF WATER HEATER AND A-4 O2 SENSOR

May 17—18, 2004

The glow of the senior medical students—now first year residents, enjoying their last brief break before scrambling to find a place to live and moving in at their new obligations—has hardly faded as two very large bits of news have come in.

First, as always, the good news. Kevin Bergman is leaving the morning following the graduation to go to Israel with his father. His father had been so proud of him as I escorted him back from India on his first ever clinical experience as a freshman medical student who turned into a doctor on the basis of that experience, a change visible to his father. He had driven us to GW back from Dulles on arrival from Ladakh and beamed at me, and I assured him I would see him shortly at graduation, and how short that time seemed! It had been the same with Amy whom I had remembered vividly as a wannabe medical student and an eager repeat applicant when we first met with a sister who had also been with her here at graduation and the whole family once again reunited at the happy event.

Kevin’s classmates voted him the winner of the humanism in Medicine Award, a very fitting and well deserved honor from his peers. Kevin has made three foreign trips with me, to Ladakh, Malawi, and to Somaliland, and now, he is on his way to a family medicine program. The Award carries a cash prize. To see what Kevin, the incurable Mensch, has done with his prize, see May-B-9

Now for the bad news. I had met with Sam Gorman and Jigmet, as you may recall, on my way to the Tahoe conference that Alden Harken convened, and then left from there to Taiwan. I had called Sam, and she made a rapid overnight trip to see me at their ski house in Tahoe to reunite with me, and so I could congratulate her and Jigmet (“Jimmy”) on their marriage here before they go back to Ladakh this summer, and there go through the next elaborate celebration of the marriage with Jimmy’s father the medical director of the Ladakh province. From their quick visit with me in Tahoe, they were going to go on to a rural elective in Colorado to complete her requirements for graduation from osteopathy school, and she did not match in a residency in order to spend much of the next year with jimmy in India.

Kevin had called me as I was driving up to the Eastern Shore from Norfolk to report what he had not wanted to put in an email message. When I opened the emails only briefly at Operation Smile for the single session I had with them with access to a computer, I saw he had mentioned bad news had happened to Sam.

After I had seen them, they loaded their big dogs into the Subaru 4WD and took off for the Colorado rural medicine elective. Shortly after arrival there, they had gone out for a walk in the mountains in the spring snow. Two guys ahead of them crossed a chute that looked a bit dicey but, they followed.

An avalanche hit and swept Jimmy away. They searched for several hours and did find him, but he was dead, killed almost immediately by the avalanche. The irony is that he comes from the Himalayas and lived in the coldest highest driest part of the world of permanent year-round habitation and he came to rural Colorado to be swept away by an avalanche and killed. So, the family rallied around Sam and all went to India, not for the joyous wedding celebration that had been scheduled for a few months later, but for a funeral. Sam is still a few weeks short because of dropping the rural Colorado rotation, and will go to Cuba for an elective before going to India later this summer. Ironically, she will be going and I will not, since it seems that I am off the Himalayan Health team—probably a good thing in the long view but an abrupt severance as far as the HHE team had not notified me, with still two bags in storage for my use that should b e brought over from Simla (and rather often were not) and I have a Nikon lens in the Kashmiri merchant’s shop in Leh to be retrieved.

So, the joys of the celebrations around this commencement season are mingled now with the incredible reversals I never would have anticipated with the people involved being very unlikely victims. I had written a note to Sam and talked with her father Mike at his home, and sent her a picture I had taken of her and Jimmy at the Tahoe home just weeks before the accidental death. So it is that life reminds us how fragile this steady state can be

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