Assume the Position: Memoirs of an Obstetrician Gynecologist by Richard Houck MD Read Free Book Online Page A

commitment to a lifelong dream had been met.   I withdrew all other applications in deference to those who might have been kept on a waiting list as I once was. I could ‘feel’ for those who might have been in the same position as I was less than one year earlier   I was going to be a doctor and would spend the next 8 years of my life in City of Brotherly love.
     
         Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital, as it was then known, now known as Drexel University Medical School, was located on Broad and Vine streets in downtown Center City Philadelphia.  It had a very strong clinical reputation, a 150 year history, and an excellent basic medical science and clinical medicine faculty. I was one of an unusual class of young and old, men and women, from all walks of life, including a nun, engineers, basic scientists, even one of our PH.D faculty members in Physiology going back to get his MD degree.  My first year was immersion in all the basic medical sciences; anatomy, histology, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, biochemistry, genetics.  The second year we were immediately thrown into the clinical aspects of medicine on the wards of the hospital where the underprivileged and uninsured were cared for in row after row of beds in long hospital wards.   We assisted surgeons at surgeries, learned how to remain sterile when entering an operating room and how to take a medical history and perform a physical exam. Night call in the hospital was mandatory.  We performed “scut” work at night, which meant starting IV’s, putting in catheters, drawing blood and performing arterial sticks for blood gases. 
     
         During my subsequent clinical rotations through the medical specialties, I was most interested in Obstetrics and Gynecology and Psychiatry.  I had done two clinical rotations in OB GYN, one at Reading Hospital in Reading, Pennsylvania, an affiliate of Hahnemann Hospital; the other at King’s County Hospital, the county seat of Brooklyn, New York.  This hospital was what was affectionately called a zoo.  Babies were born in the hallways, in the elevators, all over the place and for some strange reason usually in silence.  It was a cultural thing for these women many of whom were Haitian.  But what a great six weeks I had. I was hooked. This was for me.  Although I enjoyed immensely the intellectual challenge of psychiatry, for me it was too passive.  I needed movement and activity, surgery, constant active challenges.  I needed to work with my hands and fingers and move with my feet. OB GYN was all of this and more.
     
         OB-GYN patients were for the most part young and otherwise healthy and happy.  The outcomes were usually good, or at least expected to be, and not depressing as much of medicine can be. The specialty had wide variety including reproductive medicine, obstetrics, infertility, gynecology and gynecologic surgery, office care, oncology, endocrinology, contraception, and counseling.  The physician was placed in the middle of people’s lives. It was an exciting, emotional, and interesting time and place to be.
     
         Aside from medicine my personal life was full, interesting, and challenging.  I was on hold with long-term personal relationships at this point in my life. I simply did not have the time for a commitment to anyone other than medicine.  One-night stands were preferable because they required no commitment from me, admittedly not a good way to enter any relationship with a date.   It was the era pre HIV-AIDS, and after the introduction of birth control pills. Let’s just say that Hahnemann Hospital in those days was much like the well-known soap opera  ‘Peyton Place’. Venereal disease was spreading through the medical staff, from the Chief of the Cardiac ICU, to the cardiology nursing staff, to the residents, and worked its way down to the medical students.  It had no respect for the length or starch content of one’s white medical coat,