Raising the Dead Page 7

  Caribbean Med

  A professor at the school noticed my diligent work and suggested I might try a new medical school in the West Indies, St. George’s University School of Medicine on the island of Grenada. The professor had been teaching down there—he was not sure the school was going to fly (they were then in only their second year of operation), but he thought it might be a good opportunity for me. Instruction was being given in English, so I wouldn’t have to learn another language.

  Several of the other graduate students and I were always comparing notes on how to get into medical school. One of them, Andrew, was keen on the Grenada idea and ready to go. He left to start his training there in the spring semester. If it worked out for him, I decided I would follow. His ensuing reports were entirely favorable.

  With the prospect of medical school finally before us, Deborah and I married in the spring of 1978. She had still not fully recovered from her ruptured appendix, however, and had to undergo surgery a second time. We thought the surgery would take care of matters and she would make a complete recovery, but she remained ill during the early days of our marriage.

  I had to leave for medical school in Grenada without her. We thought she’d recover in a matter of weeks and join me, but instead she was in and out of the hospital, fighting an infection that had, to date, fought off every antibiotic thrown at it.

  I missed Deborah terribly, but I found myself right at home in medical school. Many of the other students found adjusting to conditions in Grenada difficult, but after sweating out amoebic dysentery in a hovel in Togo, I found Grenada a Caribbean paradise. I conceived a lifelong love for tropical landscapes, which is part of what makes me feel so much at home in Palm Beach now.

  As my classes started, I found the material fascinating and realized—as I had hoped all along—that I was going to be a good doctor. I was as much in my element as the fish in the island’s Sargasso Sea. Energized by the material, I could stay up until 2:00 a.m. studying, rise at 6:00 a.m., attend classes all day, study into the wee hours once more, and repeat the same procedure again and again. I was one of the top performers on midterms.

  But Deborah’s condition continued to be touch-and-go. As we talked on the phone I kept hoping I’d hear she had improved, but the news continued to be bad. Finally, I knew it would be wrong to stay away any longer. When we first started dating as kids, I had promised that I would never hurt her and always put her first, and I’ve always tried to keep that pledge. I knew I could start medical school again in the spring, and so I came back, found a part-time job, and helped nurse her back to health. My father was not pleased that my long-delayed medical plans were being set back further; that I had, in his view, wasted a semester. But I didn’t want to be a doctor if it meant being apart from Deborah.

  Deborah was able to come with me to Grenada for the spring semester, although she still wasn’t entirely well. The doctors, having tried every full-spectrum antibiotic known, suggested that she complement her medications with traditional remedies like hot baths. It wasn’t that easy to take a bath in Grenada. In order to take a soak Deborah had to heat water on the stove and pour it into a steel tub that we used for washing our clothes.

  It was heavenly being together, but man, we were poor. Deborah found a job creating Sunday school materials for the missionaries, which made for a good atmosphere but paid very little. In my pride, I refused to write either of our parents for extra assistance when we could have used it, and during one memorable two-and-one-half-week stretch, I climbed palm trees every night to retrieve coconuts as a side dish to the little bags of rice we had for dinner.

  Fortunately prayer—and our parents’ intuitions of our financial situation—eventually prevailed and we began eating better.

  I received world-class instruction at St. George’s, because the opportunity to take a break and teach on a Caribbean island was attractive to many medical experts. But there was another big hurdle to jump. The first two years of medical school are devoted to classroom and lab work. The last one to two years involve doing rotations—six-week stints also known as clinical clerkships—through the various specialties, from internal medicine to dermatology to psychiatry, usually in the company of the heads of these units in a teaching hospital. That was the best juncture at which to make the leap back to the States, because then one could take the qualifying exams at home and be as much an American doctor as anybody else.

  Yale

  I had a friend named Mark Cullen who was from Connecticut. He had a son who was suffering from an immune disease and was in and out of the hospital at Saint Mary’s in New Haven, where Yale’s medical school students do their rotations. The faculty at Yale offered Mark the chance to do his rotations under their guidance so that he could be with his son.

  That opened the door for me—or started to turn the knob. I went up to Yale one weekend during my last semester at St. George’s and started banging on medical faculty doors. I was able to speak with an Englishman, Dr. Peter Fielding, who considered my request. As I had with Richard Snell, I appealed to Peter as a “fellow Englishman,” at least by virtue of lineage. I told him that my wife was sick and I couldn’t let her waste away in a third-world country anymore, so I had to come back to the States to do my clinical clerkships. If he’d just give me one rotation, I’d show him what I could do. I was Hippocrates, William Harvey, and Jonas Salk all rolled into one—at least in terms of St. George’s graduates. He had to give me a chance!

  He did. He allowed me to do a rotation with him in surgery. I imagine I didn’t impress him as another Christiaan Barnard—the first doctor to do a heart transplant—but he thought well enough of my work to recommend me to his colleagues, and over the next two years I picked up all the rotations I needed. I went from being a medical student outside the United States to being a Yale-trained MD. While I was at it, I assisted Peter Fielding with his surgical research and began to see my future as a cardiologist.

  Even after we reached Connecticut, Deborah continued to struggle with her health. The doctors at Yale discovered that abscesses had formed—localized collections of infected pus surrounded by inflamed tissues—in her abdomen. Her appendectomy and her second surgery had created scar tissue that effectively walled off these areas of infection from the medication she had been taking—that’s why she continued to struggle. Such a prolonged illness would have been a trial to anyone, but for Deborah it proved particularly difficult because of spiritual confusion.

  Although she benefited greatly from most of the teaching of her charismatic mentors, they also introduced a false and destructive idea. They said that our faith could be strengthened and purified by trials, and so one ought to pray for a trial. Deborah had done so and thought, early on, that her ruptured appendix might have been God’s way of answering this prayer. She did not understand that while God can use the trials Satan brings into our lives, God is never the author of these trials. God’s will for us is to enjoy His loving presence. Deborah became so confused by God’s failure to deliver her from a sickness she presumed He had brought about that she began to despair. What we should have done was unite with God in prayer—with as many others voicing intercessory prayers as possible—against the evil of her disease, in which no doubt Satan rejoiced.

  Her doctors told her that they were going to have to perform yet another surgery. Her spiritual confusion was so great at that point that right before she went into surgery, she told God she wanted to die.

  She heard God’s voice ask, “Do you really want to die?”

  She heard God’s voice audibly, as she would hear anyone else’s, and this shocked her. She suddenly realized what she was saying. The tone of God’s voice implied that He was taking her seriously. It wasn’t a rhetorical question God was posing. Did she really want to die?

  Her life had become so miserable with continued illness that she didn’t have much love for life left, but she did know how I, her parents, and her brother would grieve. “No, God,” she answered, “I suppose
I don’t really want to die.”

  The surgeons almost lost her on the operating table. When she woke up after the surgery, she told me that her left leg felt funny, like it was asleep. An orthopedist brought a stickpin. “Does that hurt? Does that?”

  Her leg was paralyzed. One of the attending physicians had held a clamp too tight on a nerve during the operation.

  She was determined not to be crippled, though, and began walking on that leg—or dragging it along—as soon as possible.

  Deborah was not truly cured of her infection and its accompanying fevers until a woman from our church came to pray with her in our living room. Deborah told her that she had prayed and prayed and it hadn’t done any good. The woman said that she had been healed of colitis and she wanted to pray with Deborah, believing that she would be healed. It was only after this prayer session that Deborah truly began to feel better and her infection dissipated.

  Prayer Cellar

  “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17 KJV)! We never know when in God’s providence God will choose to heal us. We do know that Jesus tells us never to stop praying.

  I learned a lot about prayer myself during those years at Yale. Deborah and I lived in a little town outside New Haven called Woodbury. We belonged to a church that had a prayer room located in the root cellar of an old saltbox house, circa 1700. Many nights toward the end of my forty-five-minute drive home from the hospital, I’d stop by, open the slanted doors to the cellar, and spend time praying.

  The cellar was so cramped that I couldn’t stand up in it, and it was mostly unadorned, except for a desk, a lampstand, a Bible, a few devotional books, and a box of index cards with prayer requests written on them. I’d often be in there alone on dark nights, the New England winter howling around the house. I’d pick up a card, pray over the request, and go to the next.

  Almost from the beginning of my Christian life, I attended Bible studies and prayer groups and benefited from them but still found myself slightly dissatisfied with all the talking about God. I wanted to meet God; to know God’s love, God’s power, God’s presence. Talking about God with our fellow Christians is good, but prayer is the main conduit, the direct line, we have to God’s power and glory. Go into your closet when you pray, Jesus tells us (Matt. 6:6). Praying in the root cellar I came to understand why.

  I’d be in that damp-smelling, musty place, the dust of the beams as heavy as a prayer shawl, with the taste of the house’s rusted pipes in my mouth—I’d be down there in the root cellar with now-empty mason jars and scatterings of nails and screws and a cracked and buckling floor, down there cold and still like a boxed cabbage, and God would show up. He would fling wide the night, hold aside the winds, steal through the slanted doors, and rest in my heart. Sometimes as I prayed, tears would come to my eyes for reasons I couldn’t fathom.

  Spiritual Interference

  My MD certification in hand, I thought about doing my medical residence in surgery, in preparation for being a heart surgeon. Two things deterred me. Just as I was graduating one of the bright young surgical residents lost a patient because he hadn’t learned enough about internal medicine. I never wanted that to happen to me. Also, Yale then had a pyramid system as a means of evaluating its surgical residents. Everyone was ranked, and no one was certified until he or she became the program’s top resident. That meant you could remain a surgical resident, theoretically, forever. So I did my three-year residency at Yale in internal medicine.

  In 1986, after my years at Yale, I went into cardiology at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital in New York. As the name would suggest, Beth Israel is mostly a Jewish hospital, and I was one of the few Gentile doctors there. I have a great love for the Jews and tremendous respect for their culture, as any Christian should since we are “grafted into” the vine of Israel (Rom. 11:17–24).

  When we moved to New York, Deborah studied at Parsons design school for a year and then went to work for a graphic design firm. She was fulfilling her artistic ambitions at last. She was still struggling, though, in her recovery from the paralysis in her leg brought on by her last surgery. She was exiting a bus one day, forgot about her leg not working well, and fell hard down the bus’s steps onto the sidewalk. Being Deborah, she promptly picked herself up and commanded her leg to behave.

  Her greatest frustration was in not being able to have children. Even though she wasn’t well when we first married, we wanted children right away. She had been trying to become pregnant for eight years. We did not know if she ever would become pregnant because of the damage caused by her ruptured appendix. That could well have made her infertile.

  Then she conceived and had a miscarriage.

  She conceived once more, and this pregnancy advanced into the third month, but an ultrasound revealed the pregnancy to be ectopic. The baby was growing outside the womb, attached to a major artery. The surgery meant to save her life almost ended it, as the artery exploded the moment the surgeons began the procedure. Her bleeding resembled that of a gunshot wound, they told her.

  God implants a desire for children deep within a woman’s heart. And both of us wanted life to come from the love we shared. At times Deborah thought about almost nothing else, night and day. Our marriage began to suffer as Deborah was inconsolable and I found myself frustrated at watching her suffer and not being able to do anything about it.

  What good was being a doctor if I couldn’t help the one I loved above all others? Why wouldn’t God bless us with children? Deborah had even had an experience in which she felt quite distinctly that God was going to give us children, but as the years went on this became harder and harder to believe.

  One day Deborah’s brother called. He had become a minister and had just finished attending a seminar out west. “You know that little statue you have on your bedside table?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think you should get rid of it. That’s a fertility goddess. A voodoo fetish. This seminar was about spiritual warfare. The speaker said that sometimes the most innocuous-looking things—like your statue—can be used by the devil to gain entry into a home and cause spiritual oppression.”

  Deborah’s brother tends to be more a rationalist than either Deborah or I am, and Deborah couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “It’s an art object. It’s not a… whatever you called it. Chauncey picked it up in Togo. I’ve been hanging my jewelry on it for years.”

  “Exactly. That’s why you should get rid of it.”

  When I came home, Deborah told me what her brother had said and suggested we get rid of the statuette.

  “But I gave that to you. It’s one of my nice memories from that trip.”

  “My brother said it could be the reason I’m not getting pregnant.”

  I thought of all the medical reasons this was complete hogwash. But my wife was upset and I thought it best to oblige her. “Okay. Let’s do it. And let’s do it right.” What did I care about a reminder of Togo, voodoo capital of the world?

  We lived on the twenty-first floor of an apartment building. There was a trash chute that led from our apartment down to the basement and an incinerator. I took the little statue and smashed it up in pieces, threw every bit of it down the chute, and prayed, “In the name of Jesus Christ, if any spiritual oppression has come to this house as a result of this statue, let it be gone.” Or words to that effect.

  Within two weeks Deborah was pregnant with twins.

  Game, Set, Match

  As our twins fought for the club’s junior tennis championship, Deborah and I realized, as an outside observer could never know, how much our boys had been longed for and prayed for—how much we cherished them. We cherished them so dearly in their early years, in fact, that we came close to making idols out of them. Christian, the dark-haired one, boisterous, protector of his shy brother, hands gifted for working with mechanical things—a born engineer or doctor; Chad, with his sandy hair, the artistic one, who wanted to play out every story he fell in love with and so took up the violin after learning of
one of the instrument’s masters, becoming accomplished in no time. Such a pair!

  They did not spare each other on the court, though, as the match went to a third set and then a tiebreaker. After Chad’s illness, it was hard not to root a little harder for him. What if the illness returned? How many chances in life would he have? But it was also hard not to root for Christian, as he was clearly the underdog. Chad would keep playing whatever happened; he was obsessed. Maybe a victory would give Christian the impetus he needed to be serious about the sport in the way Chad was.

  They battled, in McEnroe-Borg fashion, to a 16–14 finish. For the longest time neither could manage the win and neither would accept the loss. A super, running, down-the-line forehand finally gave Chad the victory.

  We jumped on the court and took them both into our arms.

  I told Christian I was never prouder of him.

  Deborah whispered into Chad’s ear, “You just won Wimbledon.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Why Chad?

  One day after Deborah had brought Chad home from the tennis courts, he was clearing out his tennis racquets, clothing bag, and other paraphernalia from the family Range Rover, which included a portable but heavy ball machine. The machine pitched out balls from one side of the court to the other and could be adjusted for height, spin, and direction, which allowed Chad to hit one hundred forehands in a row or alternating shots from either wing, and approach shots and volleys as well. When he lifted the machine out of the car, Chad crumpled to the driveway in pain, screaming. A rib on his right side had snapped.