That night, Sam and I were out on a double date when Ma’s doctor called me on my cellular phone. Her blood pressure had dropped to dangerously low levels, and the infection had crept all over her body. I needed to get to the hospital right away.
On the way there, I prayed that Ma would be okay, but somehow I knew she wouldn’t. When I arrived, family members were crying and hugging one another in the family room just outside the intensive care unit.
Ma was gone.
In my grief, I needed answers. I needed to know who was to blame. Had the doctors sent Ma home too soon? Was the liver they transplanted infected already? What had gone wrong?
I pushed for an autopsy, but my family wouldn’t hear of it. That wouldn’t bring her back, they said. Nor would it erase my pain. It was the hardest thing I have ever done, but I accepted their decision.
I let her go.
19
HOME AGAIN
Sam
AFTER GRADUATION, I moved back to Newark, into the house of a friend from high school, Mary Ann Jackson. It was a perfect arrangement. The Jacksons live in a modest three-level house in a working-class neighborhood just three and a half miles from Beth Israel. Mary Ann lives in an apartment on the first floor, and I rented a bedroom on the top level, next to her cousin, Frankie White. As soon as I moved in, Mary Ann’s mother, Carole Jackson, became my second mother and welcomed me into her extended family. She cooked big meals, which were wonderful after long shifts at the hospital. Frankie cooked on weekends. Alex, a neighbor and another of Ms. Jackson’s adopted soldiers, stopped by in the evenings to eat and socialize. Ms. Jackson and Frankie took great pride in their cooking, and I was more than happy to clean up the leftovers.
Though we were back home, in some ways it felt as though everything had changed. None of us could have predicted the kind of reaction that the newspaper story about us would generate.
We became every mother’s son. Strangers approached us with hugs. One woman walked up to me and burst into tears. We began to get letters from single women, and we got telephone calls at work from church groups and nonprofit organizations that wanted us to tell our story to other young people. Practically everyone saw us as a unit.
“You’re one of those three doctors,” people we encountered on the street would say.
We quickly amassed $3,000 in gifts from speaking engagements, but we didn’t want to divide the money and just blow it. We figured we could put the money to good use by giving it away as a college scholarship to a needy student. But we decided we could do even more. We could create a nonprofit foundation that would finance ongoing scholarships, as well as programs that would expose children living in poor communities to professionals, colleges, and careers. We wanted to do for children in our neighborhoods what we knew would have helped us. We researched and established the Three Doctors Foundation, Incorporated.
The publicity from the newspaper story had another unexpected effect. Strangers who showed up in the emergency room at Beth Israel began telling the hospital staff that they were related to me. It became a big joke.
One time, though, it wasn’t funny. Three months into my residency, I was about to begin my morning shift in the intensive-care unit when a nurse approached me. A woman in a room down the hall had come in the night before and was suffering from AIDS-related pneumonia. She claimed to be my sister. I froze. I knew this time it was true. The patient down the hall was my older sister, Fellease.
For a moment I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t imagined my professional and personal lives meeting this way. Should I tell everyone that she was my sister and rush to her bedside? How would I be able to maintain a professional demeanor while watching my sister suffer? And what would my colleagues think if they saw me break down?
I pushed those thoughts to the back of my mind. I couldn’t worry about that now. My big sister needed me.
It wouldn’t be the last time that Fellease or someone else I knew showed up at the hospital during my shift. One time, I barely missed an old friend.
Just three days before I began a rotation in trauma at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, one of the older guys who had been involved in the robbery with me was rushed to the emergency room with gunshot wounds to his hip and abdomen. Another guy had been quicker to pull the trigger during an argument in the projects. The medical staff operated to remove the bullets. But he died the next day. He had just turned thirty.
When I heard what happened, I hurt for my old friend and his family. I suddenly saw myself. Instead of turning out to be a young doctor treating guys like him, I could easily have ended up a hustler, lying on the gurney with bullet holes about to snuff out my life.
Incidents like those helped me to grow and find the thing that had eluded me through all four years of medical school—my purpose and place as a physician.
More times than not, the patients I treated were poor. Sometimes they were drug dealers, addicts, prostitutes, or drunks. I couldn’t look down on them. I had brothers and sisters who suffered from mental illness and addiction. I had been a thug myself. I realized that the only thing that separated my patients from me was opportunity, and the support of family and friends. No matter what state they were in when they came to me for treatment, I never judged them.
“Hey, I know you,” I would say with a big smile when a familiar face showed up in the emergency room. “You know I’m gonna take care of you.”
I saw relief in their eyes and knew why I needed to be a doctor.
I discovered that peace of mind follows purpose. All of the misery and doubt that I had felt over the past four years disappeared.
In my evaluations, the head doctors said things like, “I’ve never seen a guy so happy to be at work,” “I’ve never seen a guy interact as well with the ancillary staff as he does with the head staff,” “I’ve never seen another guy who can bring a smile to a patient’s face no matter what kind of day he is having.”
For the first time in years, I was truly happy. I had overcome so much, and there were regular reminders of that.
In my second year of residency, I received a subpoena to testify at a rape trial. I had treated the alleged victim in the emergency room and had to testify to her physical condition.
As I walked up the courthouse steps that day, it dawned on me that this was the same building where I had met regularly with my probation officer a decade earlier.
This time, I was returning as a doctor. During the hearing, I would be deemed an expert witness.
Now that I was back home, I got to spend more time with family and old friends from the neighborhood, particularly my boy Will.
William Cortez was one of the first real friends I ever had. He lived across the street from me with his mother and younger brother in Building 6 of the Dayton Street Projects. We met playing sponge ball in the neighborhood, and before long the two of us and Noody and another friend, Jermaine, were hanging together all the time.
Like mine, Will’s family struggled. On many days he had to eat at his grandmother’s house because there was no food at home. And like me, he was seduced for a short time by the thrills of the street. The day I got involved in the armed robbery, we had stopped by Will’s house to pick him up. But he had a new girlfriend, and he told her to tell us he wasn’t there.
When I left for college, Will had dropped out of high school and was working in the housekeeping department at a nearby hospital. His girlfriend was pregnant. He was so happy for me when I told him I was going to college.
“At least somebody’s gonna do it,” he told me.
That’s what I liked about Will. He was a positive brother who always encouraged me, even during the rough times in medical school when I called him and talked about dropping out.
“Naw, man, there ain’t nothing back here for you,” he would tell me. “I’m proud of you. You got brothers like me looking up to you.”
We were cooling out in my room one day before I left for college when he asked me t
o be his daughter’s godfather. My mouth dropped open. I had this expression on my face, like, “Me?” He was my boy, and the gesture meant so much.
I was in medical school in January of 1995 when Will called and told me he had been shot. He had stopped at a stop sign in his gray-and-white Oldsmobile Achiever when a car full of guys pulled up next to him and started staring him down. Suddenly, one of the passengers jumped out and started shooting into Will’s car. The guy fired at least ten rounds with a .45, striking Will in the chin near his neck and his front-seat passenger in the face and arm. Broken glass from the shattered car window grazed the backseat passenger on the ear. Two of Will’s friends, following behind him in another car, were also shot.
Unbeknownst to Will, the guy in his backseat, an acquaintance he was giving a ride home, had gotten into a beef with the shooter at a bar earlier. Will survived the injuries, but for a long time, the shooting made him leery of meeting new people. Even so, when I introduced Will to George and Rameck, the three of them instantly hit it off. Will wasn’t the least bit threatened by or jealous of my relationship with the two of them. If anything, he co-signed the friendship pact and became a part of it, once even vacationing with the three of us.
George, Rameck, and I each kept up ties with some of the more positive brothers from our old neighborhoods, and the other two of us would embrace him as part of our group. Will was at our graduation, he was there many times when the three of us gave speeches in the community or received awards, and he began hanging out with us when the three of us returned to Newark as doctors.
One of the most gratifying things to happen when I returned to Newark was my relationship with my oldest brother, Kenny. Kenny, who had been paralyzed on his right side, was living in a residential home for the disabled in a suburb called Cedar Grove. As a kid, I had always admired him, but he was often so mean to me that I wondered whether he loved me. Before his injury, our relationship had been strained. But I began to visit him regularly, and I could feel us getting closer. Every time I went to see him, he had a hundred people—doctors, nurses, other staff, and patients—who he wanted me to meet.
During one of my visits, just before Christmas in 2000, he casually handed me a plastic bag.
“This is your Christmas present,” he said.
I was surprised. I couldn’t remember the last time Kenny had given me a Christmas present. I opened the bag. Inside was a big, green leather photo album. A few days later, when I had a little downtime at home, I pulled out my new photo album to start filling it with pictures. On the cover was something I hadn’t noticed: DR. SAMPSON MARSHALL DAVIS, 1999, in gold press-on letters.
He had obviously worked on it during his crafts workshop. I flipped the album open to the first page to start arranging my pictures, but there was another surprise. It read:
Marshall, I admire you, and I’m proud of all your accomplishments. The following pages will prove it to you. Love, your brother, Kenny.
He had saved and collected old photos—every graduation program and newspaper article that mentioned my name, even my old report cards and diploma from grade school.
I’m not one to cry easily. But the tears came faster than I could swallow. It was the best gift I’ve ever received.
Every successful career has defining moments, those times when you know deep down that you’re doing what you were meant to do and you’re good at it. For me, those moments have been as simple as seeing the gratitude in a patient’s eyes or as grand as watching a patient you’ve fought to save gradually come back to life. Sometimes, though, it is even in the agony of falling short after giving everything you’ve got.
April 19, 2001, about 9:15 P.M.
I was stitching a patient’s mouth when I suddenly heard chaos—doors slamming and people shouting and rushing down the hall. I finished and stepped out of the door.
“Someone’s been shot,” I heard in the commotion.
I ran outside and saw a young man, about my age, holding his torso, bent over, stumbling around. Blood covered his shirt and pants. I took his hand and helped the staff put him on a stretcher. We quickly wheeled him into the emergency room. I counted six gunshot wounds.
I observed his chest and checked his airway to make sure he was breathing normally and there were no airway obstructions. He was alert enough to tell me that he had been standing on the corner when some guys walked up and shot him.
“How old are you, man?” I asked, trying to keep him calm as I worked to save his life.
“Thirty-three,” he said softly.
I ran an intravenous line into his blood vessels to pump fluids into him as quickly as possible. He was losing too much blood.
He looked up at me.
“Doc, I’m gonna die,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do.”
I put a tube down his throat to open his airway, cut a small incision in his chest, and inserted a separate tube to expand his lungs, which had collapsed.
“Stay with me, man. I’m here,” I said. “I’m with you.”
One thing I had learned in my short career was that when a patient tells you he is going to die, you’d better listen.
My patient closed his eyes, and within minutes the rhythmic thump of the monitor became a shrill, steady beep. A flat line appeared on the screen.
His heart had stopped. We were losing him.
“Stay with me, man. Stay with me,” I shouted.
I immediately began CPR. He didn’t respond.
Time was running out.
A surgeon who had responded to my page and was standing at the patient’s bedside took over and performed a thoracotomy, a last-minute lifesaving procedure in which a patient’s chest is opened to evaluate the heart and major vessels and look for holes in those structures. Sure enough, my colleague discovered a hole in a ventricle of the heart.
By then, our patient was dead.
“I’m sorry,” I said to his wife and mother at the man’s bedside a short while later. “We did everything we could to save him.”
“You should have done more!” the mother yelled at me. She was hurting. I knew it. I just wish she could have known how much I was hurting, too. I had worked nearly two hours to save her son’s life. And I had done everything humanly possible to bring him back. I had already asked myself if I could have done more. Still, I would go home and read more, study more, try to improve, and pray that just maybe next time I could help more.
That, to me, is what being a doctor is all about.
As I left the room, the director of the residency program pulled me aside in the hall. I was in no mood for questions. What did he want?
“I just want to congratulate you,” he said.
I gave him the strangest look. I had just lost a patient, and my boss was congratulating me?
“You scored very well on the in-service exam, one of the best in the class,” he said.
He was referring to the exam that residents at hospitals across the country take each year to test their proficiency in their specialties. It is the profession’s way of gauging how a resident is doing in the field. My score was above average for the nation.
I had risen to the top of the class.
Sometime later, Rameck, George, and I got together to celebrate my performance on the test, George’s birthday, and all the blessings we’d received to that point. We met at a nightclub and ordered drinks.
When the drinks arrived, we raised our glasses high. No need for a bunch of corny words. We knew what we had been through.
“To friends,” we said one at a time, clinking our glasses together in a triumphant toast.
EPILOGUE
IT REALLY MAKES us feel good when we finish a speech at a school, church, or community center and kids come up to us in their cliques and say they’re going to form their own pact. When the three of us promised in high school to see one another through to becoming doctors, we had no idea how we’d make it. We honestly didn’t even give it much thought. But we’ve realized since then that each
of us was successful individually in large part because of our pact.
The pact filled us with motivation and purpose, giving us a reason to keep pushing when it would have been easier just to give up. It provided us with a firm base of support, and it strengthened us to face the challenges that came our way. So we’ve come up with a few pieces of advice to help others unite with friends to reach short- or long-term goals. We believe these steps can be useful to the group, no matter what the goal is:
Join trustworthy friends who have the same goal. George was the one who put our pact together. Though two of us—Rameck and Sam—initially had different ideas about what we wanted to do after high school, we eventually came around to George’s way of thinking about going to Seton Hall.
Find strength in your differences. Friends don’t have to be alike to be part of a pact. The three of us all have distinct personalities that we bring to the mix, and that just makes our bond all the more interesting and stronger. We draw from one another’s strengths. For example, when George began dental school alone, he relied on study tactics that he’d learned from Sam, the workhorse, to become more disciplined. It was Rameck who pushed us to form the mentoring group Ujima in college. And George was the one who pulled Rameck back when he was set on becoming a rapper. To be able to keep our promise to one another, we first had to want the same thing. The few times when our promise threatened to break apart was when one of us began to want something different from what the other two wanted. We also had to trust one another completely. We had to believe that we had one another’s back, or crazy suspicions of one another’s motives might have driven us apart.
Believe in yourself and your friends. After we graduated from high school, Rameck’s younger sister, Daaimah, ended up with the same biology teacher that he’d had—the one he didn’t like. When Daaimah told the teacher that she was Rameck’s sister, the teacher asked whether he had become a bum. “No,” Daaimah said proudly. “He’s a doctor.” That teacher may not have believed that Rameck was ever going to do anything positive with his life, but all three of us knew he was smart and would find a way to make a positive difference in the world. All three of us had—and still have—that kind of faith in one another. It just doesn’t make much sense to hook up with somebody you can’t believe in.
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