Tales from the Emergency Room (23 page)

Please Remit

One of my favorite stories about my partner occurred when he and his wife contributed to the UJA (United Jewish Appeal), using stocks, having considered their value at the time of the gift. About eight months later, they received a bill from the UJA asking them to remit the difference between the value of the stock that they had contributed and its value later on when the price had dropped. That was the last time they gave to that particular charity!

The Grandbaby

We had been happily awaiting my partner’s first grandbaby. I came into the office one morning and my partner, who was Jewish, motioned me into his office to announce that a new granddaughter had arrived. Her name? Emily Woodall Brown. His comment? “How’s that for a Jewish name?”

A Small Package

For several years, my oldest son and his family lived in Lagos, Nigeria. One of the medicines he and his family needed to take while there was very expensive, unbeknown to Bill since ExxonMobil was paying for it. It had been ordered and he went to pick it up at the large, modern pharmacy in the local supermarket. The pharmacist put this tiny box on the counter and Bill took it to the checkout line. When he saw the price he was astounded, as was, apparently, the customer behind him in the line. This gentleman took one look at the register and the package and said, “What you got there?” This has become the way our family reacts to unusual events. My son-in-law, however, would explain these things as “trickery, all trickery”. This is now another family saying.

The Proposal

One day, I found myself alone in the living room of my girlfriend’s house. Her father was alone in the dining room and her sister and her mother were in the kitchen. I had been on notice that I would have to ask for Peggy’s hand in marriage and I suddenly realized that now must be the time. I went in to Peggy’s father and asked for his blessing. He questioned me about a few things and then said, quite unexpectedly I thought, though I should have been prepared to answer, “How do you propose to support my daughter?” I was dumbfounded. I replied, “I have no intention of supporting your daughter!” (Peggy and I had agreed that she would continue to work in Rochester to support us.) Mr. Cunningham was not pleased although he did give his consent to our marriage, whether conditionally or not we will never know.

The next thing I knew, he and my father arranged to go out to lunch to discuss the pending union of their children. (Prior to this from the time I started college my father sent a $25.00 check every week for me to live on as well as paying the usual college and medical school expenses.) The upshot of the lunch conference was that neither of these gentlemen was prepared to help us financially! And not only that, but after our wedding the weekly support check stopped as did the payment of my medical school expenses save for some inexplicable reason, money for my books.

Undaunted, we had a lovely wedding after a year’s engagement and moved to our garret apartment in Rochester right behind St. Mary’s Hospital which was a teaching venue for me. We had a wonderful time with all the other poor students, annually winning the cheapest apartment competition.

And then, in November, 1959, our first son was born. A week later arrived in the mail a check for $25.00 from my father. That continued until I graduated from medical school.

Eventually, I did have to borrow a small sum of money to pay my tuition, but it did not become a burden as so many educational loans do today.

Apollo 14

Very late one night my bedside phone rang. Of course, I assumed that it was a patient calling so I was surprised to hear one of my best college and medical school friends on the line. He immediately asked what my government clearance was. I had been out of the service for a while but I informed him that it had been “for your eyes only”. (He didn’t really need this information.) My friend is an obstetrician in Houston and we referred to him as “Obstetrician to the Astronauts” because he saw so many of the astronauts’ wives. It seems that Dr. Charles Berry, chief NASA physician, had invited my friend and his wife to watch the Apollo 14 launch and indicated that they could invite another couple to accompany them.

We left quickly for Ft. Lauderdale and arrived at Cape Canaveral the next day. Talk about VIP treatment! We were in the company of such notables as the King and Queen of Spain and Vice President Spiro Agnew. Watching the launch from the VIP stands was beyond exciting. We partied with our friends, Dr. Berry and some of the astronauts. Dr. Berry sent pictures of the moon landing to my children who kept them on their walls for many years. It was a fondly remembered, whirlwind trip for us.

Penis Stories

My good friend George was given to announcing things at inopportune moments, usually while I was driving the car. After his successful radical prostatectomy which had rendered him impotent, he decided to have a penile implant. This turned out to be highly successful as well. While we were riding along one day, he announced out of the blue that he was going to see his urologist the following week. I asked him why that was. It seemed that every time he crossed his legs, right leg over left, he got an erection. Luckily I knew enough about these things to know that the mechanism included a small pump in the scrotum. I asked him if he understood that the doctor was going to tell him to not cross his legs that way and thus produce a cure. He did, but he wanted to make sure anyway.

Once, on the medical ward during my training, a male patient took me aside to ask me what I thought the outcome would be with his soon to be wife because of his large penis. It was indeed large. I was tempted to ask what he thought his new wife’s initial reaction to seeing this appendage might be, but I refrained. Instead, I told him to take things easy, and mentioned a few things that might make things go more smoothly. I knew that eventually she would be able to accommodate him quite well without discomfort. Unfortunately, there was no way I would ever discover the outcome of my advice.

At the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners, the medical staff took turns doing the physical exams on the incoming inmates. The standard procedure was to have the prisoner strip naked and then undergo his exam. One day, a very well endowed prisoner took off his white coveralls and stood just behind and to one side of me while I did his paperwork at my desk. He was facing directly into the entrance to the hallway. I saw one of our surgeons walk past, and then, literally, back up to the entranceway and say, “Is that thing always that big?” The inmate’s answer was one of the best comebacks I have ever heard. He simply said, “No.” It was hard for me to keep a straight face at that point. Thereafter, I always nodded in agreement whenever someone would say that, for the most part, criminals aren’t stupid.

When our third son was born, I decided for reasons unknown to me now, that he should not be circumcised. Our pediatrician called one day shortly after Christopher came home from the hospital to be sure that we had really made this decision. His final attempt at talking me into it was, “I can get you a good Rabbi!” We have always laughed over this. However, several months later it became obvious that our new baby boy had phimosis and required circumcision. Another time I did not have the last laugh.

Ophthalmologists

A good friend of mine, a general surgeon with whom I had done all my post-graduate training, was hit in the eye by a racquetball. At the time, we had both been in practice for several years. He was taken immediately to Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital where his head was immobilized. Then began a long parade of doctors who were interested in his eye, mainly to see if it might be going to survive the injury. It did. Later on because so many doctors had come to examine his eyes, he remarked that he knew that there were specialists for the retina, doctors for the lens and various eye inflammations, but he never suspected that there were separate specialists for the right eye and for the left eye, too.

A Cactus

It seems that I was always at the dentist’s office near my hospital on the west side of Seventh Avenue and the south side of 57th Street. Directly across the Avenue there was an apartment building in which a large cactus could be seen in a window. The top of the plant eventually disappeared above the window, and, to my amazement, reappeared quite some time later in the window of the apartment above. My dentist was able to verify that there was a hole for the cactus to grow through into the apartment above. Many New Yorkers buy adjacent apartments to enlarge their living spaces, so that the cactus owners may have owned the second apartment. It was a constant source of amusement for the patients. I had finished training before the cactus grew into third apartment, if it ever did.

Sal S.

Eventually I got around to seeing Sal S. about my investments. By then I had accumulated enough assets to fit on the smallest piece of paper imaginable. At the same time, I was embarrassed about going to see an “investment guy”. I thought it was awfully amusing as well. So, I arrived in his office in lower Manhattan and was immediately overcome with the decor, lavish but subdued.

And so we met. After some small talk, I produced my miniscule list and asked what I should do about it. Mr. S. could not have been kinder to me, indicating that already I had some monetary worth and he would help me increase that. He called for someone to bring him several investment folders of actual clients of his which he showed to me after carefully seeing to it that I could not discover their names. Several had started with next to nothing and were now, to my way of thinking, “in the chips”. There were several rules I was to follow to achieve a similar result and I did so from then on. Just before one of the mini-crashes in the eighties, I noticed that my portfolio had suddenly become mostly cash. That smart move resulted in far smaller losses for me than for others whom I knew. Now retired, sort of, and living off of those investments, I still keep most of my modest holdings with Mr. S.’s company. Mr. S. died not long ago when he was well into his nineties. I remember him well even though I rarely met him save at occasional social functions

Another very important person in my financial life was Jess B. I had set up a Keogh account with him, the first accountant I ever dealt with. One day he called to remind me to make my contribution, in those days, before March 15
th
. And just how I asked was I supposed to come up with so much cash since at the time I was using all my income just to put food on the table. He insisted that I borrow the funds from the bank, which I did in a state of disbelief. About three years later, I was finally able to fund the account without borrowing anything. When I think of it now, he did me a terrific service, the money I borrowed so many years ago having grown substantially because of its long history of compounded interest. My current advisor, whom I met while attending one of his classes, has become a good friend and excellent financial advisor. Though he lives in Greenwich Village in New York City, he is a member of the Popcorn Club.

The Sale

A long-time friend of mine and an internationally known allergist told me that he was going to make an offer to purchase my practice. He had actually mentioned this several years earlier as we two couples sat at a table on the River Walk in San Antonio. The most appealing part of this idea beyond the fact of our friendship was that he wanted to buy both parts of my practice. I had already been approached about selling the city and the suburban parts separately which I didn’t want to do. In addition, his Manhattan office was one block from my office in Manhattan and he would be using my office in White Plains. Thus, patients would not be inconvenienced by my leaving.

I took Ira’s offer to my accountant, who, unbeknown to me, had overseen several practice sales, to see what he thought of the sale terms. Peggy and I were very nervous about this and became even more so when the accountant took such a long time to comment on the terms. Finally, I blurted out that I would be able to have the prospective buyer come to a meeting with him if necessary. Suddenly he burst out laughing, saying that he was not interested in meeting with Ira since he didn’t want to have to tell him what a good deal he was offering me. Understandably this was a great relief to Peggy and me. Negotiations with my friend went easily after that and the deal was concluded. (When word got out, other doctors began calling to try, without my knowledge, to hire my office staff. The staff all thought it was very funny and Ira had already agreed to continue to have them work for him. I, on the other hand, was not amused.) Besides, I had to convince the new employer that I paid them as well as I did because they were all of great value to the practice. At least one of those people continues to work for the practice twelve years later and another retired after she had worked another seven years after I left. My New York City office manager went to nursing school. These developments pleased me very much and everyone was quite satisfied with the deal.

The Telephone Man

A friend of mine in training and his wife were naturists, in their own home so far as I know. They had just moved to a new apartment when the telephone man came to hook up the phones. They always kept robes near the door to put on when necessary. However, this day their two little boys were playing without clothes in the house. They were shooed quickly into the closet near the front door and the telephone man came in. He searched all over the apartment to find the telephone lines he needed to make the connections but was unable to find them. Finally he said that often they were in a closet. Whereupon he opened the front door closet and out ran two naked little boys! Of course, the doctor’s wife was mortified, but the installer took it all in stride. Later on I learned from a man who had done installation work in homes that the best part of his job was never knowing what was going to happen when he worked in someone else’s house.

The Last Laugh

I told my best friend, Lou, that we were going to have a baby. We already had two boys and a girl—our youngest child at the time was 8 years old. I can still remember how Lou laughed over that. Lou had three girls by then, the youngest about 12 years old. Shortly after our Christopher arrived, Lou told me one day that he and Stella were going to have another baby. Neither one of us could figure out how these things had come about, but, boy, did I have the last laugh, at Lou’s expense this time.