04-SEP-B-5

FROM THE HALSTED TO THE HARKENS:

A HOLIDAY WEEKEND IN THE EAST BAY AREA:

FROM THE TOP OF MOUNT DIABLO, TO WALNUT CREEK,

AND A WALK AROUND LAFAYETTE PARK AND RESERVOIR WITH BUFFY

September 12, 2004

            Wonderful!  The shift from Halsted to Harkens has been a transition from good to better, in a meeting with good friends to that of best friends.  It is great to see the Harkens’ new home base in the UCSF/Kaiser/Highland Hospital/East Bay environment and the superb natural scene they have around their Walnut Creek home and the natural California coastal scene nearby.  I got high with a little help from my friends—that is with a borrowed bike I made it up 3,849 feet up on Mount Diablo, the peak that can be seen due East from which the sunrise tips into the windows of the Harkens’ Walnut Creek home on the slope of the foothills that had their huge and open California house backing onto a mule deer-filled ranch owned by a California state senator and the front of the house looking over the foothills open space of the Mount Diablo state park system.  I got up to the Ranger’s Station on Mount Diablo the honest way, on a very fancy highly geared bike with front suspension and disc brakes, and made it up and around Lafayette Park and the water reservoir in a park-like setting to run the new Buffy around. 

 The best of all news is that Laurie is doing really well with the first round of the chemotherapy that she has begun for the breast cancer she had treated in the last month.  The next round of good news, is that the Harkens are happy and productive in the East Bay environment.  We got a chance to share that with a lot of good friends in the Halsted Society who might be otherwise competitive in organizations in which they had lots of ambitions, but here, we realize that most of us are beyond all ambitions except in leaving some form of legacy behind us, so it is a good chance to talk with folks from colleagues who came up along with us earlier in life, and realize what each has achieved and be glad in it.  I am always somewhat provoked to somber thoughts to hear the “Necrology” of the Halsted Society, and realize that several of the group were resident mates of mine, like Andrew Munster, who had invited me to the Medical University of South Carolina, after he had been my senior resident at the Peter Bent Brigham—one of my first formal university visiting professorships—and a big poster I might still have stored up in the attic.

  I sat at the black tie banquet table with Mike Zinner, a former resident mate who was a chief resident at Johns Hopkins when I was already at GWU, and all of those memories were rekindled for him, as I also pointed out that one of his own PBBH residents had called me up and asked me to give their Grand Rounds and help him get prepared as a medical missionary in surgery.  Mike is now the Moseley Professor of Surgery whose chair had been Francis D Moore, my own surgical chief, whose memorial service had been held a couple years ago.   The somewhat grisly details of Franny’s death were made known to me at this visit when I learned that his second wife, the Saltonstall widow, had not attended the memorial service and had planned to be abroad in Europe because of the details of his death which occurred in a very unfortunate scene in the bathroom of their home.  I learned a few details of the people around me who were retiring and enjoying life, like Jay and Margie Grosfield who were shuttling from Indianapolis to Sanibel Island to check on their home there as the second of the three hurricanes to hit Florida this month was bearing down, with Ivan being the most recent and just now recorded as the sixth most powerful storm in history. 

It is sobering to know that the number of colleagues around me is diminishing, as several are retiring, and more are listed in the annual “Necrology” list, now including my senior resident from the Brigham.  I had said earlier that a number of them know what it is that I am primarily doing and that I seem to have a much happier job than most of them.  Mike Zinner’s second marriage is to a psychiatrist named Rony, whose parents seem to have been very wealthy endowing an education center at the Beth Israel hospital which bears his name.  He said she had retired from practice to take care of only one patient, himself, but apparently she had not had a large previous experience with practice in any event.  Next to me were Kim Maull and his new wife Vicky, whom he introduced to me as proudly as he might, since I had known of his earlier wife Molly, who had a stormy bout of depression during which she had killed herself.  Vicky apparently was a trauma nurse and head nurse of the unit at Caraway in Birmingham and had quit practice also when she married him.  So, as I look around, with the possible exception of Alden and Laurie, perhaps they are right in judging me as the one happiest and with the most tranquil life—despite what I had said about Alden and me since the days of playing cowboys and Indians “We do not take our ‘deads.’”

AFTER THE HALSTED MEETING, ACROSS THE San Francisco BAY TO EAST BAY, AND PUMPING UP MOUNT DIABLO TO 3,849 FEET ON ELSA’S FANCY BIKE

I went to a grille in Palo Alto with Laurie and Alden as a team of giants came into the Stanford Park at the time we checked out—these were the Stanford football team, who were going to play ball with Brigham Young University in Stanford that afternoon.  We elected to do our own exercising, so we got over to Oakland and then to Walnut Creek, to the spacious Harken home, which I could now see by daylight.  We got into shorts and tee shirts, and with one of the faculty recovering from a “head bonk” as she puts it—she had been a serious biker, owns a score of racing bikes of various types, and loaned me one that cost a bit more than eh first several cars I had owned—as she is still recovering from a serious head injury from flipping over the handlebars of a fancy bike which Alden now has.  On it he has gone up to the top of Mount Diablo two dozen times—an overall climb of three thousand feet at a maximum of 18% grade.  We did it.  It is a very different experience doing it on a fancy bike with all the fancy gearings and the disc brakes and the front suspension.  It was a good workout, about two hours up and twenty minutes down at 27 miles per hour on the downslope.  We gathered at the Harken home, in which I keep discovering new and bigger rooms, with their huge bargain oriental rug and the very nice décor that Laurie has arranged.  She is making the back yard into a terraced garden in which they will be putting grape arbors above, and a pool on the downside where a fountain now stands, as we went around and fiddled with the automatic sprinkler system and watched Buffy do here only trick so far—retrieving the newspaper up the very steep driveway.  We then had snacks followed by dinner overlooking the sun setting on Mount Diablo we had just pumped our way up.

The leisurely morning was spent walking Buffy around Lafayette reservoir, throwing sticks into the water supply reservoir which is also stocked with fish.  There was even a large flock of turkeys wild along the dry slopes—a very pretty place, with a white raptor hovering overhead in the thermals.  This is great natural history in the California coast. And the Harkens have a very beautiful place from which to watch it all.

We watched a few minutes of the Raiders being beat by a last minute field goal b y Pittsburgh, and that Joe Gibbs Redskins won their season opener against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.  Then we went through very dense traffic alongside BART as Alden drove me to SFO, with an apparent biking event in San Francisco at which Lance Armstrong appeared but did not compete because of tendonitis.  My flight was postponed so my arrival was well after midnight in Dulles, and I had little to do with a flat laptop battery except to see a banal movie and take a brief nap.

It has been yet another “pluperfect event” with the Harkens and the Halsted!