The medicine bug hit me at about 15 yrs old.
Applying in the late 1970’s and being a mediocre
standardized test-taker, it took me three years
to get into medical school… in Lille, FRANCE!
So there I was, now in my mid 20’s, living two
dreams at once…
studying to be a doctor, and living in France! I
worked hard in school, but also made it a goal to
leave France bilingual, having lived as much of
the true French experience as possible. By the
time I graduated with my MD in June of 1983, my
French friends said I spoke better grammatical
French than they did! My accent, once a deadgiveaway as someone whose native language
was English, (and being in France so close to
Britain, they always asked me if I was British!), I
now was asked if I was from Switzerland, or the
South of France, so I felt I met my goal of fluency
fairly well! Lille, in Northern France, is that country’s industrial center, and the home of the worldrenowned embroidery thread manufacturer, DMC.
I never did get to go to the factories, though!
With all those years of school and practice, I
kept up many of the crafts I loved, although with
less time in which to do so. Never in my wildest
dreams would I have known that in my early 40’s,
I would develop a work-related neurological injury
and chronic pain syndrome, that would change
my life forever! Practicing as an Invasive Radiologist using live x-rays as guidance, I would wear
a very heavy wrap-around lead apron vest and
skirt for hours a day, that protected my body from
radiation exposure. But the heavy lead coupled
with a monitor on the ceiling behind me, requiring me to turn my head 180 degrees against all
that weight, eventually caused severe stretch and
traction injury of the main neck nerves supplying
the entire upper body, including the two nerves
to the arms and hands. Seemingly overnight,
(although the symptoms developed over 4 years),
my body collapsed from the pain and disability. After 10 years of practicing medicine, I was
forced to leave on total disability on November
18, 1996. At the time, I had no idea that my life
then, as I knew it, was over.
I had lost the use of ג