Old age sneaks up on you. Who is old ? Not me. It’s that old guy next door wobbling down the hall on his walker. It’s the old lady chirping nonsense to anyone who wants to listen. It’s the glum old guy that eats alone, never smiles, never converses with anyone even when approached. No, that’s not me. That’s those “old” people. Attributed to Charles DeGaul is the statement that “ old age is a shipwreck”. I was not much of an admirer of him, particularly as related in Churchill’s memoirs of his behaviour and statements while being given sanctuary in Britain after France was over run by Hitler in 1940. Actually, if he said it, it’s a very good analogy. As an aside, his other relatively sensible statement said to be from him when he became post war President of France facing all the turmoil was “ how can you govern a country with 600 different cheeses." A glimmer of humour !
Exploring the shipwreck concept, some ships hit rocks and go down in minutes with no hope of rescue. Others develop a slow initially hidden leak which gradually fills the ship until is slips between the waves in spite of all efforts to plug the hole or keep up with the rising water with pumps. No lifeboats available for rescue. Thus old age life and the ship slip away, with sadness and mourning. On a more positive note I have speculated on the role of how luck, chance, circumstance plays a big part in many lives. In mine it played large many times and in many ways.
Consider. I was born in December 1931, the worst month of the worst year of the Great Depression. My parents were struggling on their farm in southern Alberta with their four young kids. Catastrophe struck in 1929 when one of their cherished daughters Jessie age 4 or so suddenly died of meningitis. My mother was inconsolable. She went to see her doctor, pioneer doctor Gershaw in Medicine Hat lamenting that whatever could she do ? He said “go home and have another baby." But, she said” doctor I’m forty." Do it anyway he is said to have replied.
Instead of a replacement cute little girl, they got me. A monster sized guy almost 13 pounds Partly as a result it was claimed that she believed she had to eat for two and gained a enormous amount of weight during her pregnancy. If Jessie hadn’t died I doubt that I would be here. Reverse luck ? The roll of the dice. In 1942 or so on the farm my father was diagnosed with lung cancer. As a result he faced the inevitable. He decided to sell the farm and move the family to Victoria in 1944 when my life changed completely. He died in 1946 or 1947. If I had remained on the farm I very much doubt that I would have had the opportunity to live a similar life to Victoria or attend post secondary education. Fate? Roll of the dice. In spite of a very mediocre high school academic performance and not much money I was able to enter Victoria College. Work on brother Dick’s fishing boat provided a big part of the money to be able to do so. In later times with the greater competition for university spots there is no way that I would have been accepted. However as bad as my marks were I could still get in . The attitude of the College was that anyone who could graduate from high school would be accepted. This opportunity was a windfall. This experience was a wonderful transition rom high school to higher academia. As old time comedian, Jack Benny ,said lamenting about the demise of vaudeville , that it gave young people somewhere to be bad before they became good. In retrospect that was certainly the role of Vic College for me . In first year I took an elective- psychology 100-and as part of the course the prof had us undergo a written IQ test to demonstrate the concept. I found it very easy and I sailed through the task of spotting number sequences, interpreting and unscrambling sentences etc and completed it well before the three hour designated time for it.
I handed it in and departed. Later each student was interviewed one on one to go over the test and discuss any implications. The prof seemed to be reacting to something when I sat down He looked up and asked if realized that the test was designed not to be finished in the allotted time and he hadn’t had anyone complete it, especially early and I was exceptional. I wondered if he had the wrong guy. He asked what my academic aim was and I said that I had some thoughts about medicine but I wasn’t sure that I could handle the heavy course. He looked at me carefully and said “ you can be successful in any field that you chose”. A revelation. A confidence builder. I always thought that I was a bit dumb. A real aspirational game changer. Maybe Medicine was not out of the question after all. Roll of the dice.
Meeting future wife Joan in high school. She was a bright energetic very smart gal who was a good athlete- no one could beat her in the sprints and broad jump. No one could catch her running down the wing on the field hockey team. She worked as a server in the family fish and chip shop on weekends. She used to tease me that I was attracted to her because she smelled like a potato chip. For school competition the students were divided into “ houses” depending on your birthday ie: January was Cascade, February was Olympic and March was Selkirk and repeat. All names were mountain ranges. Joan was March, I was December, therefore we were both Selkirks. I was house captain and she was the go to gal arranging events etc. We had a lot of laughs and I started to take her to school dances which must have been a trial for her considering my dancing skills. She never complained. She was a year behind me and attended Vic College the year after me and then UBC where she took a degree in nursing. So we continued to see each other through those times and of course married in 1959 and had three great kids. Meeting by circumstance Roll of the dice.
When I was attending UBC I was playing rugby and generally drifting along in mediocrity as far as my studies went. One afternoon I hitched a ride out Marine drive on my way to my sisters and a small portly older man with a stutter who was a prof of some kind picked me up. He reminded me of the 1930s cartoon character “Porky Pig.” He asked me about courses and school and I told him that I wasn’t doing that well . He then said that he was in a similar position In his earlier university career but he turned things around and was awarded the Governor Generals medal for highest standing in his grad class. He attributed this turn round to his discovery of the SECRET. I was all ears. There was an answer. So I blurted out “ so what was the secret”. He looked at me and with his stutter said “ c-c-c- copious a-m-m-m amounts of hard work”. Oh that, I thought. Later I began to think about it and damned if he wasn’t right. Sort of a game or attitude changer. It worked. Roll of the dice. Thanks Porky. There are a number of other significant life changes that occurred by by chance or fluke. My entry into medical school in the fall of 1954 was a good example. When I finished my undergraduate degree in the spring of 1954 I went to work for the Federal Fisheries Research lab at 898 Richards St in downtown Vancouver. I worked with Bob McLeod a biochemist on research projects related to the fishing industry. My project was to investigate whether herring products could be used for for fattening cattle as the dried meal was very high in fat and protein. Herring were in profusion up and down the Coast and easily collected by seine boats by the hundreds of tons so there was interest in finding more uses for them. So I was submerged in test tubes etc. Initially it was interesting but after a while it became unchallenging and even boring. Later they did a cattle feeding test with the herring meal and- eureka- there resulted some wonderfully big well nourished animals. Their meat and milk all smelled and tasted like a herring. Back to the drawing board.
I had long harboured an urge to go to medical school. Competition was very stiff. The UBC medical school had inducted its first class in the fall of 1950 and they graduated in the spring of 1954. I figured that I would tough out the fisheries job and maybe do the Mcats next winter and apply to the class entering in the fall of 1955. Fate intervened. One day in late August at work I ran into Al Patterson that I took some grad courses with. He was visiting Bob McLeod and I remember I ran into him on the stairs. His boss Marvin Darroch was vice dean of medicine The Dean was away with a prolonged illness. Their office was in chaos trying to get the new entering class settled with Darroch doing two jobs and Al as his assistant was dragged into it to help.
So after a chat I remarked that I had this med school plan. He looked at me kind of funny and then said “ would there be any chance that you could go into this class starting next week ?” I was speechless. The story unfolded that one of the new class members coming from Australia was denied entrance to the country for some reason. So here the med school office was faced with dropping everything to search through the waiting list etc. for a replacement. I was well known in biochemistry and microbiology UBC programs and my thesis advisor was a colleague of Darroch. I guess they thought they could take a chance. Roll of the dice ++ The scramble was on. I was staying in my sister Jean’s basement. Emotional parting from Bob as he was such a nice guy and I was leaving on such short notice. Borrowed money for first term fees from sister- $ 200 - call to mother- letter to Joan working in Kelowna as a Public Health nurse - shock all around. It was Labour day weekend and the first lecture was set for the following Tuesday at 1:30 pm. At 9 am Tuesday I was in the Faculty of Medicine office filling out forms and being interviewed by Darroch. Whew !! Just time for some lunch at the old bus stop coffee shop just next door.
As I munched away with my mind swimming who but a friend from rugby sat down beside me and we had a pleasant chat. After lunch he looked at his watch , stood up and said that he was on his way to his first medical school lecture. I had said nothing about my plans. I asked where it was held and he pointed at the large white hut next door. The devil made me do it. I’m going that way sez I so we departed together. He kept on trying to say goodbye but I stuck with him right up the steps into the lecture room and sat down much to his gathering confusion. I said nothing. The anatomy prof appeared lordly and regal, scanned the class and looked at a class list and suddenly called my name. I responded and the lecture proceeded. My friend said afterward that I was the only first year med student whose name was written in pencil on the bottom of the class list. I was in. Another roll of the dice !!
Medical school was characterized by a tidal wave of information the engulfed me starting with the first lecture . The pace was terrific. Lectures and labs all day including Saturday morning. Evenings were devoted to reorganizing an absorbing notes from the day. You couldn’t put it off to later as tomorrow night you had that days stuff to deal with. No time to take a day off or even go to a movie. There were sixty in the class. By Christmas we were down a half a dozen people. When we graduated in may 1958 we were forty seven. This grind improved a bit in third year when we moved to the hospitals for small group clinical teaching. Here I hit my stride.
Mid way through first year I came to know George. He was a very bright guy who had a talent for organizing and boiling down information. We began to do review sessions together. It was a revelation to me as we covered the material much quicker by dividing a subject, organizing it and then presenting it to each other. I was boarding with the Hunsleys at the university gates in a small bedroom upstairs under the eves George and I developed a system. George lived with his parents in a ranch style home at 32nd and Cambie. He had a beautiful study in his basement which he never used. He studied leaning against a pillow on his bed.
I would get back from classes and have dinner at Hunsleys, then jump into my old Morris Minor and drive over to George’s, me in his basement, he upstairs. We would divide the current topic in two eg. the thyroid gland. He would go over the gross and microscopic anatomy. I would concentrate on the physiology , biochemistry and clinical aspects. About 9:30 we would get together, he to cover his area and me mine out loud with questions. At about 10:45 we would jump into his Ford Meteor and roar down to get the last call for a beer in the Georgia Hotel beer parlour before it closed.We always parked in the Archbishops spot next door to the Pub behind the church. We followed this method right through medical school. We both did well exam wise. Meeting George ? Roll of the dice.
I was awarded a number of bursaries and prizes which helped with the finances. In third year I was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha, the International honour medical society, one of three in third year and presented with an engraved gold key similar to the Phi Beta Kappa society one. I won the paediatric medal and graduated third in the class. C-c-c-c copious amount of hard work, George and the sudden opportunity all paid off. Dice again ? Maybe. Thanks again Porky.
The years rolled by and there were many minor examples of how fate and chance occurred, mainly in my favour.Sometimes the dice rolled “snake eyes” but we survive them. I retired from full and later part time practice in the first decade of the 2000’s. Joan and I bought a big old house on Wiltshire street in 1962 which we loved and where we raised our family. We looked at a lot of places before we chose this one. A Victoria real estate guy known to Joan’s parents had chosen the poorest time to relocate to Vancouver. The real estate was in the doldrums. He took us on with a vengeance and showed us a number of multiple listed places which we didn’t like.
He was so desperate for a sale that he actually took Joan grocery shopping and wheeled baby Anne around in the shopping cart !! Somehow he heard of one at 5888 Wiltshire which was listed six months previously and didn’t sell so it was taken off the market and not listed again. We drove by and it looked interesting for a number of reasons. Years later we were told that the number 8 was a lucky number in the Asian community. Somehow on bended knee our guy convinced the elderly lady and dour daughter allow us to tour the house and we decided that it was for us. A bit of negotiating and we got it at a very good price, thanks to a $ 5000 loan from Joan’s parents for the down payment. Another turn of good luck. In October of 2017 I sold the house near the peak of the Vancouver real estate market. I became concerned that the high prices could not persist and there was likely to be a significant correction before long.Besides the house was needing a lot of upgrades- new roof, wiring, plumbing heating system. With an address full of “lucky 8’s” and the choice of a fireball young realtor, the house sold within a week. I was out the door into my comfortable rental at UBC. . Roll of the dice. Keep rolling. Charlie the alleged old guy May. 2020
Wow. You make your own luck. Great post. Turns out, they had the right guy? A little encouragement can make all the difference. Great lesson.
Life certainly is a combination of luck and work! Great post. ❤️