“Ain’t you Sam?” he asked, then waited for my response. “My name is Sabu.”
I was shocked because there was always underlying tension between the cliques on campus, but these brothers—
Sabu, Al-tareek, Rabu, Rad, Felix, Serron, J.P., and New—seemed different, really down-to-earth. I shot back the same vibe to him and told him how the ladies were always “biggin’ them up.” We bonded right then, went to the Greek together, and are cool to this day. Some of those guys are married and have children now, or are expecting them. Others never got married. When George, Rameck, and I started the Three Doctors Foundation, Sabu, Al-tareek, Al-tareek’s brother, Dan, and Rabu donated $1,000, no questions asked.
I also fell in love on the Livingston campus. She walked into the dining hall one day and, wow, there was something about her that grabbed me right away. She was attractive, petite with a pecan-tan, earth-tone complexion, and had pretty, narrow brown eyes. I could tell by the way she walked that she was feisty. This might sound crazy, but I believed I saw a glow of light around her. Maybe it was that blue dress she was wearing, but I had to know who she was.
We quickly became a couple. It was so easy to vibe with her. She was one of the few people who really knew how to make me relax. Once, for my twenty-second birthday, she helped Rameck and George plan a surprise party for me at a club called Gregory’s. It was my first birthday party since the kiddie parties my mom used to throw in the backyard.
During my second year of medical school, we broke up. Medical school was causing me such stress that even my relationship with her seemed to pull on me, and I broke away. She heard rumors that I was dating someone else, maybe because I happened to be with another girl when I ran into some of her relatives at Great Adventure theme park.
Months later, I realized how much I missed her and needed her in my life, and I stopped by the Livingston campus to look for her. But when I dropped by a friend’s room first to get a haircut, he hit me with some shocking news.
“Hey, man, you heard about your girl?” he asked, referring to my former girlfriend. “She’s four months pregnant!”
The news socked me in my gut. She and I hadn’t been together during that time, so I knew the baby couldn’t be mine. Even though I had broken up with her and knew I had hurt her, I felt betrayed for a long time. I clung to my friends.
Rameck and I often went to shoot hoops in the Livingston gym. One day, this cat from D.C. walked up to us and introduced himself. We knew he was from D.C. before he even said anything because the cats from D.C. always wore their socks pulled up to their knees, and with their shorts hanging down to their knees, all you could see was their kneecaps.
“Y’all got next?” he asked. “I’ll run with y’all.”
His name was Dax, and he would become our roommate the next year when he, Rameck, and I moved into a fabulous condominium complex called the Hampton Club. The place had two bedrooms, a loft, and a huge living room with cathedral ceilings and a spiral staircase. The complex was just five minutes from College Avenue and hadn’t done as well commercially as expected, so the rent was cheap when split three ways. Dax volunteered to take the loft, and Rameck and I, as always, flipped a coin to determine who got the bigger room. We threw countless parties there, and George didn’t miss a one. He usually spent the night. When he walked into our place, he knew he was home. He would kick off his shoes, go dig in the refrigerator, and then put his feet up like he lived there. We did the same when we went to his place. That’s just how we were with one another.
George wasn’t with us one time, though, when Rameck and I went to a club and ended up getting into a brawl together. I started dancing with a girl, not realizing she was already dancing with another guy.
“Yo, I’m dancing with her,” he said, offended.
I ignored him. She started giving me more flavor than she gave him, and he walked away, looking defeated. One of my friends came up to me later and warned me that the guy had threatened to get me back for disrespecting him. I didn’t think much about it, but when I got outside the club, about eight guys rushed me. I was in the middle of them throwing punches. All of a sudden I saw Rameck run into the circle and start throwing punches with me. He had my back.
Neither of us was seriously hurt, but Rameck got hit in the face and complained for days later that his jaw hurt. Years later when he got a dental X-ray, he learned that his jaw had been broken. I realized afterward that both of us could have gotten killed, and we tried to avoid such situations. But I always appreciated Rameck’s loyalty.
Robert Wood Johnson was just a five-minute bus ride away. We took a class in biochemistry the first semester and classes in cell biology and histology the next. We rode the bus back to Rutgers in the afternoons for our electives. Traveling back and forth between the two schools wasn’t so bad, once we caught the rhythm.
But medical school became a struggle for me right away.
I still liked to party too much and hadn’t matured enough to realize that I couldn’t hang out the same way anymore. Also, I still wasn’t even sure I wanted to be a doctor. Those doubts had intensified in my sophomore year at Seton Hall when I witnessed a surgery for the first time.
Dr. Nathan Doctry, an African-American doctor and volunteer mentor for the Pre-Medical/Pre-Dental Plus Program, had invited me to accompany him during a knee surgery he was performing at East Orange Hospital. On the day of the surgery, I scrubbed up, followed him into the operating room, and watched as the anesthesiologist put the patient to sleep. Dr. Doctry then spliced holes in the patient’s knee, inserted a scope, and began probing to find the problem.
“My goodness, that has got to hurt,” I thought to myself.
Suddenly, I felt queasy, warm, and weak in the knees. I dashed over to the scrub sink. One of the nurses saw what was happening and yelled through the paper mask covering her mouth, “You can’t do that there!”
It was too late. I hovered over the sink several minutes as my insides heaved involuntarily. Then I hung my head and slipped out of the operating room. I quickly composed myself and returned, but I wondered: How could I become a doctor if I couldn’t even stand the sight of blood?
I just kept hoping my doubts would disappear once I entered medical school full-time. But at Robert Wood Johnson, I felt out of place. At first, I clung to Rameck and another Access Med student named Camille, who had also been an undergraduate at Rutgers. A math and science whiz-kid, Camille had skipped a couple of grades and entered college and medical school two years early. She and Rameck became friends first because, like him, she had grown up in Plainfield.
It seemed there was no one else on the medical-school campus I could identify with. When my colleagues talked about lifelong dreams of becoming a doctor, I felt guilty. I was in medical school, and though I knew I wanted to help people someday, I still wasn’t sure I wanted to be a doctor.
Many of my colleagues had parents or other relatives who were doctors. In class, they were the ones who already knew how to use the medical instruments before our professors introduced them. They were the ones who nodded in agreement and raised their hands first during class lectures. And they were the ones who always knew the perfect companion books to buy or source to call for help when studying for a test. For me, everything was new, unfamiliar, and intimidating. Without the different summer programs I attended before our freshman and senior years of college, I would have been completely lost. I took notes furiously in class and occasionally scanned the room in a futile search for another face that showed even a hint of confusion, frustration, or fear. I’d never felt so alone.
A simple encounter during my third year of medical school pointed out clearly to me why more black children don’t choose medicine as a career. They’re just not exposed to it in an intimate way. You can’t aim for what you can’t see.
During a clinical rotation at the hospital where I worked, I stepped onto an elevator with a schoolmate who began talking about his weekend visit with a six-year-old niece.
He said he had spent some time teaching her how to listen to the heart through a stethoscope and how to test the reflexes in the knees and arms with a reflex hammer. Can you imagine how comfortable she’s going to feel with those same instruments if she ever decides to become a doctor? I was a twenty-three-year-old medical-school student the first time I held a stethoscope or even saw a reflex hammer. My only exposure to medicine as a child had been an occasional visit to a doctor’s office or an emergency trip to the hospital.
Rameck didn’t seem to struggle as much as I did. He loved science and math and seemed at peace with his decision. He, Camille, and I initially spent countless hours studying together. But Rameck and I studied differently. I was meticulous about going over facts and formulas over and over again until I was sure I understood every detail. That often slowed me down, but it didn’t matter if I had to stay up practically all night to study for a big test. Rameck focused on understanding a concept, not the details, and usually was ready to move on to the next subject before I was. When he got tired, he was ready to call it quits. That would cause some tension between us later in medical school, and I would decide at times to study on my own.
We tried to balance the all-night study sessions in the library and dorm with some fun, though. This was, after all, our senior year of college, and the senior year is supposed to be fun. Between study sessions, Rameck and I played basketball in the recreation center, picked up George on the weekends, and went to parties. We often had to leave parties early when we had to study for a big test, but it seemed to relieve our frustration and stress if we partied for a few hours and left at a pre-set time. It was easier to walk away from the fun when I looked to my right and there was George, and I looked to my left and there was Rameck.
Because our medical-school classes required so much work, we were unable to hold part-time jobs, which meant we had no extra money coming in for books, food, and other necessities. Our student grants and loans only went so far. Most of that money paid for our tuition and our room and board.
One summer, Rameck worked two jobs. We were both hired as counselors for a high-school science program based at United Hospital in Newark, but Rameck also worked full-time at the Plainfield post office. He would work from eight A.M. to four P.M. at the hospital, return to our room at Seton Hall (where we stayed during the summer), sleep for a few hours, then go to work at the post office from eleven P.M. to seven A.M. He drove for forty-five minutes, straight from the post office to the hospital, and started it all again every day.
Our most fun job was as toll collectors on the New Jersey Turnpike during weekends, summers, and other long breaks from school. Sometimes, during our junior year, Rameck and I stayed out all night partying, then went home and put on our uniforms—navy-blue pants, gray shirts, and a matching navy-blue jacket in the winter—and made it to work for our six-thirty A.M. to two-thirty P.M. shift.
We initially worked different exits, but George transferred to the Jersey City exit, 15E, where Rameck worked. I worked at 16W, the exit to Giants Stadium. Rameck and George requested booths next to each other and talked across lanes the entire shift. They brought portable radios and CD players to work and swapped discs back and forth. All three of us brought our books and studied during down time. The two of them rode to work together and stopped every morning at the Dunkin Donuts for a box of Munchkins and coffee. George, who hadn’t been a coffee drinker before, even started drinking coffee during those commutes. Before the morning traffic picked up on the Turnpike, the two of them used their leftover Munchkins for target practice, darting in and out of the toll booths to lob the pastries at each other. I sometimes noticed celebrity athletes and coaches headed to Giants games, and the three of us often laughed together about the weird things we saw, like a prostitute finishing an all-night shift or a couple engaged in oral sex.
We rarely, if ever, missed a day on the Turnpike.
Since we couldn’t work during medical school and couldn’t call home for cash, there were many days at Rutgers when Rameck and I didn’t have money to buy food or the books we needed for class. We had to be creative. One of the things we tried was a scribe service. The business had been handed down to us from a previous medical student. We hired friends for $25 per hour to tape every class and transcribe the notes. We sold the notes to our peers—$125 for all the notes in each of their classes for the entire semester, a real deal. The first semester, Rameck and I made as much as $3,000 each. But our classmates rebelled the next semester and refused to pay for the notes. We never understood their rebellion because the scribe service had been a tradition passed from one graduating class to another. A couple of them tried to start their own service.
Still, we never seemed to have enough to cover our expenses. One class alone required four books. Those were the times when Dr. Hsu stepped in to help. Sometimes we called her when we were in a bind, and she dropped what she was doing to rescue us. She brought us food, books, supplies, whatever we needed. She allowed me to store some of my belongings in her attic during our many moves from dorm to dorm. She invited us to dinner at her home. And she often visited us at Rutgers to make sure we were doing okay. Once, she drove to visit us during a torrential rainstorm and, before leaving, slid $100 into each of our palms, just because.
She knew we were struggling financially, and she constantly assured us that everything would be okay. I tried to believe her. But at home in Newark, things kept getting worse.
During one of my visits home, I had noticed something different about my sister Fellease. She didn’t look sick, but the texture of her hair had changed, becoming finer and softer. In the ’hood, that was one of the first visible signs that someone was infected with HIV or AIDS. Fellease and I were always real with each other, so I said something like: “Girl, you got that good hair.”
She knew exactly what I meant.
“Boy, I ain’t got no HIV,” she said.
But later, she told me the truth: she was indeed infected with the virus that causes AIDS. I felt helpless. Here I was, studying to become a doctor, and I could offer nothing to help my own sister.
My mind was always cluttered with worries beyond school, but I kept trying to stay focused. Watching Dr. Hsu go through such trouble to help us inspired me. I didn’t want to let her down. I would remember, as Carla Dickson had often told us, that the future of Access Med was linked to our success.
Our senior year came to an end, and we received our final grades: on a scale of Honors, High Pass, Pass, Low Pass, and Fail, I had received High Passes and Passes in all of my classes, and Rameck got a High Pass in each one.
We had succeeded.
Both of us were accepted to Robert Wood Johnson without taking the MCAT. And I clung to the faith that eventually I would find my place in medicine.
14
OLD TIES
George
JUST DAYS AFTER GRADUATING from Seton Hall, I packed all of my belongings and moved home to Newark to begin dental school. My mom’s apartment in High Park Gardens was practically within walking distance from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey downtown. It didn’t make much sense to spend money renting an apartment elsewhere when just paying tuition was a struggle.
I moved back into my old room. My mother and I have always been close, so I didn’t feel bad asking her if I could move back home. She saw it as just another way to help me. She didn’t hassle me too much about the times I stayed out partying, and everything worked out well.
Living so close to campus couldn’t have been more convenient. I sometimes zipped home to eat lunch, study, or take a nap during long breaks between classes. But six months after moving home, I faced an unanticipated dilemma. My mother and stepfather got back together and bought a house in Piscataway, the suburb where Sam and Rameck were attending medical school. I could either move to another place or try to maintain the apartment on my own. I decided to keep the apartment because the $340 monthly rent was cheaper than I would find anywhere else. But when Mom
tried to turn over her lease to me, the board of directors, all of whom were tenants, resisted. Most of the tenants were older residents who brought stability and security to the complex, and board members didn’t want to upset that. But, of course, they didn’t tell me that directly. They tried to use my status as a full-time student against me. They said they were concerned that I didn’t have a steady income. I explained that my grants and loans would cover the rent. The President of the Board, Blonnie Watson, who had given me my first job as a yard boy at the complex, spoke up for me. Somehow, she persuaded the other board members to give me a chance. I got to keep the apartment.
No one was happier for my mom than I was that she had finally realized her dream of buying a home. She’d been working so hard to help put me through college and dental school that at times I felt guilty. I worried that I was killing her. College and medical school weren’t the free ride that Sam, Rameck, and I had expected. The fund that was supposed to cover our tuition had been mismanaged, and we never got the full-tuition scholarship we had been promised. Though university administrators put together packages of grants, loans, and scholarships to cover the bulk of our expenses, we still had to come up with thousands of dollars. Practically every semester, all three of us worried about whether we were going to get kicked out of college over an unpaid tuition bill. My mom got a part-time job. She began her days at seven A.M. at Chubb Insurance, worked until four P.M., and arrived an hour later at Bell Atlantic Mobile, where she worked part-time in the customer-service department for another four hours. Many nights I worried about her driving home alone on deserted highways through the pitch-black swamp after working fourteen-hour days.
Unpaid tuition fees kept accruing each year, and I graduated from Seton Hall with an unpaid balance of more than $6,000. That would cause problems for me during my residency, when the university would go to court, obtain an order, and garnish my checking account for half of the balance at a time when I really couldn’t spare it. Because of the unpaid balance, the university also held on to my degree.
The Pact Page 14