ABOUT
Background
I was raised in privilege. A gift from those before me. So I began - male, white, Protestant, middle class, English speaking, cisgendered, without handicaps - mental or physical. I accept no guilt for this because it was not of my doing. This placement allowed me to accomplish what I did in spite of adversity and furthermore, it gave me options.
I was born to an engineering student and when he graduated he was hired by the oil industry and we moved away from family.
Calgary, Canada was a booming city because of the oil business. There was full employment and the postwar baby boom was occurring and there were masses of kids in the new neighborhoods, all having moved from around North America and the world: Texas, Ontario, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Poland, Italy, France, England, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Oklahoma. We were all immigrants in a sense.
It was a different social standard then. It was hands off parenting but children were expected to produce: school grades, athletics and chores. It was a consistent message, and all my friends had the same standards and our parents held our feet to the fire. If one did a dependable job then good things followed. But if one made a mistake, or worse, goofed off, everyone knew about it and the sarcasm flowed from all directions. There was only 2 ways to do a job, the right way and every other way. We were raised with grit.
From the age of 14 years old I had summer jobs: a full service gas station attendant, a roughneck on a drilling rig, a coal mine on the timbering crew, a rigger, chokerman/chaser at a camp job in the woods, a big-city garbage man. The summer jobs formed me. I emerged with independence, resilience, endurance, dependability and courage. But at the end of the summer I knew what I didn’t want to do for the rest of my life so it reinforced perseveration and I went back to school. These summer jobs defined me.
It was expected one would pay his own university tuition and books, as did my father and this father before him. I hit town after the camp jobs like a drunk sailor, paid my tuition and books and then went out with very cheap girls for the rest of the year.
I graduated, and the summer I was 20, I worked in the tar sands in Ft. McMurray. Somehow, I didn’t realize how many meetings engineers went to in a day, and so went to grad school that fall because I do not like drawn out meetings. I got into an MD-PhD program and finished medical school in Edmonton. General surgery interested me and I was matched with an internship in the murder capital of North America.
It took me 6 weeks to figure out I could not live on the adrenaline high of surgery and the emergency room and so looked for something more genteel. The Ophthalmology residents always had clean uniforms, seemed well rested and got to finish the movie when they were on-call at the hospital. I finished my Eye residency and did a fellowship year in Vancouver, Canada before setting up private practice in Bellingham, Washington. After 481 months, I find myself here.