Second Suns

by David Oliver Relin

  While he was practicing general medicine, Tabin met a group of Dutch eye surgeons conducting cataract surgery in a nearby village. “I introduced myself and asked if I could watch what they were doing,” he says. He saw the doctors examine a silver-haired Sherpa woman named Dolma, whose milky cataracts were large enough to be diagnosed even by a doctor with no training in ophthalmology. For three years, her vision had been limited to discerning between light and dark. Tabin had visited his summit partner Nima Tashi’s family on his way down from Everest. He was familiar with how difficult conditions were, even for the sighted, in Sherpa villages. “I thought about the narrow stone trails we’d been walking on, the swaying bridges I’d had to cross, and couldn’t imagine how a blind person could survive in a place like this.”

  Tabin observed Dolma’s cataract surgery. And the next afternoon he saw the doctors remove her bandages. “The day before, she hadn’t even been able to detect a hand waving in front of her face,” Tabin says. “I watched her see the faces of her grandchildren clearly for the first time. And as I looked at the tears of joy running down her face, I knew exactly what it was I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to restore sight. But ophthalmology is one of the most competitive specialties in medicine, and I knew with my checkered history, I didn’t have a prayer of getting admitted to another residency.”

  For the next few years, Tabin set his dream aside and focused on mountaineering. He wrote an outdoor adventure column for Penthouse magazine called “View from the Top.” He swerved far from his medical career and cobbled together work as a climbing guide, leading paying customers to the top of Antarctica’s Mount Vinson, Alaska’s Denali, Argentina’s Mount Aconcagua, and Tanzania’s Kilimanjaro.

  In 1985, Dick Bass, the founder of the Snowbird ski resort, became the first person to climb the highest mountain on each of the seven continents. Since Tabin had already reached the top of the most remote, Carstensz Pyramid, and climbed six of the seven peaks, he decided he’d like to join the exclusive club Bass had founded.

  He organized a trip to the Caucasus Mountains of western Russia during the summer solstice of 1990 and invited four favorite clients he’d guided to come celebrate with him at the top of the highest point in Europe, an 18,510-foot dormant volcano named Mount Elbrus. On June 22, 1990, in a stiff wind, Geoff Tabin stood atop Elbrus, at the peak of his climbing career, the fourth person ever to complete the Seven Summits.

  The comedown from such a monumental achievement can be disorienting, even depressing. Tabin tried to embrace his career as a rogue, a refugee from medicine’s linear predictability. He even carried business cards he’d had printed that read, GEOFF TABIN: BUM. Climbing the Seven Summits had been the adventure of several lifetimes. It should have been more than enough for his only orbit through life. But Tabin kept picturing the ecstatic face of the no-longer-blind Sherpa woman named Dolma and realized he wanted to help others like her more than he wanted to climb any mountain. He couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t an eighth summit he might aim for, an achievement not of an individual nature but of a more universal, more meaningful sort. It had to be out there, past the horizon, beyond the curvature of his dormant career in medicine, someplace he could happily stand with his feet firmly grounded.

  Beth Peterson, meanwhile, had hewed to her chosen career track and moved back to her native North Carolina to train in plastic surgery. “Whenever I saw Geoff, I encouraged him to climb and guide because I knew that made him happy,” she says. “But when I realized he was feeling remorseful about possibly being out of medicine forever, I kept my eyes open for possibilities.”

  In the winter of 1991, at Utah’s Snowbird ski resort, where Dick Bass had invited Peterson and Tabin, his fellow Seven Summiteer, for a ski vacation, Peterson was riding a chairlift toward the ski area’s high alpine terrain when she struck up a conversation with a man who said he was at Snowbird for an ophthalmology conference. Her seatmate, in fact, was Arthur Geltzer, a retinal surgeon who taught at Brown University’s medical school.

  “My boyfriend graduated from Harvard,” she told him. “He wants to get into ophthalmology, but he’s led such an unconventional life I don’t think anyone would admit him.”

  “Tell me more,” Geltzer said.

  “Well, he actually did some research on high altitude’s effect on the retina for Harvard Medical School. He’s a brilliant doctor. But really,” she said laughing, “he’s just a bum. All he does is climb mountains.” Geltzer said he was particularly interested in the effect of high altitude on the eye and told Peterson that he’d read several fascinating papers about retinal hemorrhaging at altitude predicting edema that had been written by Dr. Mike Wiedman at Harvard.

  Peterson sensed the machinery of fate spinning combinations until they clicked, unlocking a bolt. She put her shoulder to the door and pushed. “Geoff did all the field research for Dr. Wiedman’s papers. While he was climbing Everest,” she said. “You should meet him.”

  “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to have a drink,” Geltzer said.

  No matter how far he traveled from the world’s highest peaks, regardless of how single-minded he tried to be about medicine, the mountains always seemed to seek Tabin out. Brown University, where Tabin began his ophthalmic residency on July 1, 1991, was located in Providence, Rhode Island; the highest point in the state was only 812 feet above sea level. And for much of his first year, Tabin felt a long way from the Himalaya. But the distance evaporated in the instant it took him to tear open the letter from his Everest summit partner, which arrived during his second year of study.

  “Dr. Geoff, I’ve had a great misfortune,” Nima Tashi wrote, the anguish evident in his language. “I’ve broken the wrists of both legs!” He explained that he’d narrowly survived a fall while carrying a triple load of kerosene down a snowy pass during a storm and it had taken him several painful weeks of travel before he was able to see a doctor. The Nepalese surgeons he consulted said there was nothing they could do to repair his legs.

  Tabin split the cost of Nima Tashi’s plane ticket to Rhode Island with one of his climbing partners, Pete Athans, who had been in Nepal at the time of the accident. And Tabin shared his apartment in Providence with the Sherpa while he recuperated from lengthy operations Tabin arranged for him with his friend Ken Kamler, an orthopedic surgeon. Kamler was able to reassemble one of Nima Tashi’s ankles but had to fuse the other, since it was so badly shattered that repairing it wasn’t possible. Trying to be helpful after he was once again able to walk, Nima Tashi insisted on accompanying Tabin on his clinical rounds and carrying his medical bags. “Patients would ask, ‘Who’s he?’ ” Tabin remembers. “I’d just say, ‘That’s my Sherpa’ and continue treating them without mentioning him again, as if all ophthalmologists were issued one, like a stethoscope or slit lamp.”

  Tabin felt as committed to ophthalmology as he’d been conflicted about his adventures in other medical specialties. At Brown he decided to pursue a competitive fellowship in corneal surgery. His commitment to the woman who’d supported him during his wanderings through the medical wilderness was less absolute. Beth Peterson finished her training in her chosen specialty—pediatric plastic surgery—and moved to Spokane, Washington, where she opened a successful private practice. “Why didn’t Geoff and I end up together? I’m not sure I know the answer to that,” Peterson says. “Geoff was really there when he was there. When we were apart, he was more committed to living in the moment. It made me sad. But I understood.”

  At Brown, in his mid-thirties, Tabin spent more than a year romantically entangled with an undergraduate tennis prodigy named Anna Sloan, though he never formally broke off his relationship with Peterson. Sloan and Tabin moved in together after Nima Tashi returned to Nepal, and Tabin says he was blindsided when she abruptly broke up with him days after her graduation. “You’re a great guy, Geoff,” she told him, “but I just don’t see what sort of future we could have together. I don’t know that you could really be there for anyone.”
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  “I was really wounded, and it took me a while to shake it off,” Tabin says. But pressed to explain how he’d drifted from Peterson to Sloan, and then on to the next series of women he dated, Tabin is uncharacteristically at a loss for words. Being able to restore sight, as he’d seen the Dutch doctors do, was a goal he trained obsessively to reach, and reaching it came at a cost: the self-absorption Anna Sloan wasn’t willing to accept.

  Tabin learned that he would be admitted to train in his chosen specialty, as a corneal fellow, at Johns Hopkins. But at an American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting Tabin attended in the spring of 1994, before moving to Baltimore, he met Hugh Taylor, who had accompanied Fred Hollows on his research trips to Australia’s outback and had helped gather the data that had proved that Australia’s aboriginal population received third-world-quality medical care. Tabin was anxious to impress a man of Taylor’s stature, especially one who’d managed to forge a career as both a respected academic and an agent of social change, the kind of career Tabin longed to create for himself.

  There is a certain type of sly, knowing smile that creeps onto a person’s face when you first ask about their history with Geoff Tabin. It was there on the face of the dignified sixty-year-old academic in gold-rimmed glasses when I brought up the subject of his former corneal fellow during a visit to Melbourne’s Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital. “You know, the only time I was ever thrown out of a topless bar was in the company of Geoff Tabin,” Taylor said, laughing. “When I met him in America, I was drawn to his passion,” he added. “And he didn’t shy away from promoting the part of himself that he thought would interest me most. Geoff front-loaded our conversation by telling me that he’d published lots of articles, and mentioned he’d climbed a few mountains. I later found out that most of the publishing he’d done wasn’t medical but adventure pieces he’d written for Penthouse magazine. And those few mountains he mentioned were the toughest and highest in the world.”

  Taylor had helped found Johns Hopkins’s Dana Center for Preventive Ophthalmology, and he’d taught there for more than a decade before returning to Australia. He told Tabin that, in his opinion, the cornea program he currently ran at the University of Melbourne was the finest in the world. Taylor invited Tabin, on the spot, to join him as one of only two fellows he accepted each year.

  “Don’t you want to see my transcripts?” Tabin asked.

  “If you’re good enough for Hopkins, you’re good enough for me,” Taylor replied. “Whaddya say? Want to come work with me down under?”

  If You Can Dream

  Many politicians and anthropologists, it seems to me, deal in and accentuate the differences between people. I think it’s more helpful, and it certainly behooves a doctor, to emphasize our common humanity—even if some people don’t like to be reminded of their kinship with others.

  —Fred Hollows

  “We’ve got a guest, newly arrived to Australia,” Fred Hollows said, propping his elbows on his oversized kitchen table. “He may be an ace in the operating room, but can he hold his liquor?” Hollows, as usual, was surrounded by the crowd of drinkers, artists, civil rights activists, and opposition politicians who often lingered at his home into the night or lived for a time in his mansion’s many rooms. “Bottoms up, fella. Save that long, serious face for the hospital and finish your whiskey!”

  Ruit drained half his glass and put it down delicately on the table, hoping no one noticed how drunk he was. But he needn’t have worried. He was the most sober person in Farnham House’s chaotic kitchen. Fred Hollows squinted disapprovingly at Ruit’s shot glass and refilled it. “I said bottoms up, Sandook!” Hollows roared. “No half measures here!” Ruit picked up the glass, eased it to his lips, and disposed of the whiskey in a single gulp.

  The applause woke Farnham House’s resident poet, Max Williams, who’d been snoring with his head down on the kitchen table next to an ashtray overflowing with Hollows’s spent pipe tobacco. He rubbed his eyes, refilled his glass, and, after lubricating his throat, recited a fragment of his favorite Kipling, which, he said, had kept his spirit from breaking during the years he’d languished in prison, after his previous, unprofitable career as a burglar and petty thief:

  If you can keep your head when all about you

  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

  If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

  But make allowance for their doubting too …

  If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;

  If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

  If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

  And treat those two impostors just the same;

  If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

  Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

  Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

  And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools …

  If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

  Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch,

  If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

  If all men count with you, but none too much;

  If you can fill the unforgiving minute

  With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—

  Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

  And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

  “Mightn’t you men turn the volume down a notch?” said Gabi Hollows, leaning in from the dark sunporch where she’d been sitting under a lamp, reading the same sentence of a novel over and over as the din from the kitchen escalated. “We have a gentlewoman fresh from Nepal sleeping in the next room who’s not used to your lack of manners.”

  Farnham House stood on a bluff in Sydney’s leafy Randwick suburb, a short walk from the Prince of Wales Hospital, where Hollows ran the Department of Ophthalmology, and to one of the city’s most freewheeling public spaces, Coogee Beach. Before arriving in Australia, neither Ruit nor Nanda had ever seen the ocean, except from the window of a plane.

  The first day they arrived, Gabi strolled down to the sea with her guests, anxious to show off her city and witness the mountain people’s first exposure to white sand and warm blue water. “Sanduk stuck his toes in a bit,” Gabi remembers, “and Nanda was far too modest to go for a swim. They glanced at the ocean like they’d seen it every day. But what really shocked them was the sight of two women kissing, just down the beach. Not the sort of thing you’d see in Nepal, I imagine.”

  Freedom. It was both a shock and a blessing to the Ruits when they arrived in 1987 to spend a year in one of the world’s most spirited cities. “In Kathmandu,” Nanda says, “especially in those days, you were always thinking about caste and religion, and you were conscious of everyone’s eyes on you at all times. At Fred and Gabi’s, we were free from all of that. Once we adjusted, it was like the honeymoon we never had.”

  Farnham House had a history as unconventional as Hollows’s own. Since the construction of the sprawling sandstone mansion in the 1850s, it had been a brothel, a boardinghouse, and a convent for the order of the Sisters of Loreto. When Hollows bought it, it was a wreck; the once grand residence was divided into seven flats containing eleven refrigerators. The tin roof leaked badly, and the grounds were overgrown with brambles.

  Hollows went to work tearing down the partitions, removing the refrigerators, patching the roof, and restoring the house to a state of disorderly grandeur. He left the frescoes nuns had painted in the hallways and filled the rooms with books and the furniture he built in his basement workshop. But he had no interest in turning Farnham House into anything like a normal home. Hollows distrusted the institution of the nuclear family, and he felt that small families tended to tear each other apart. He conceived of his home as an alternative, a place where a large, revolving cast of characters would keep life interesting and tension to a minimum.

  As a student in New Zealand, Hollows attended Bible college and was considering semin
ary school when he got a summer job as an orderly at a mental hospital. “Before that, I had assumed that life outside of the church … was the slippery path to perdition,” he wrote in the autobiography he produced with Peter Cornis. “I’d had a proper job done on me, and I’d gone along with it. Working in that place for a couple of months completely changed my life.” Hollows was strongly influenced by the other attendants. They were “rough, knockabout blokes … some who’d been in the war. But they were … kind and gentle. I never saw one of them display any spleen or antagonism towards the inmates, no matter what the provocation. It was amazing. Those men were good and religion had nothing to do with it. I found out what secular goodness was.”

  Hollows returned to college determined to embrace earthly life and pursue a career in medicine. “Sex, alcohol and secular goodness are pretty keen instruments,” he wrote, “and they surgically removed my Christianity, leaving no scars.”

  After training in the United Kingdom as an ophthalmologist, Hollows headed back beneath the equator, for a job as a professor at Sydney’s University of New South Wales. He performed surgery and instructed ophthalmic residents at the university’s Prince of Wales Hospital. But it was the work he did outside the hospital walls that made him one of the most famous people in Australia. Living in Sydney, Hollows knew in a vague way that there was a basic “disequity,” as he put it, between the lives of white Australians and those of the native aboriginal population. When he began traveling the interior of the continent, to conduct a national survey on the scope of the eye disease trachoma among aborigines, his goals in life took another turn.