The grilling didn’t stop there. If you get into medical school, you have to be in top condition, physically and mentally. According to the surgeon’s philosophy, to enter the field of medicine, all candidates should be physically and mentally capable of performing any role in any field. This idea that a medical student, a future physician, must be “pluri-potential,” capable of working in several different roles, is fortunately going by the wayside, and medicine is opening its eyes to the fact that many talented individuals are being overlooked because of this thinking. Now more than ever before I am seeing physicians with disabilities entering the field.
I never believed a doctor had to be capable of being every type of doctor there was—a neurosurgeon, an ER physician, a pathologist, a general practitioner, an endocrinologist, and so on.
When asked specific questions related to my physical abilities, I was honest and confident. I told them I could drive a car, I would carry my own step stool around, I have a scooter that I would use for distance. I felt that I could learn and participate in all fields of medicine during medical school, but that I would never want to choose a specialty in which my physicality could put a patient at risk.
By the time I finished my cross-examination, I was beet red, and not even sure I wanted to go to that medical school anymore, even if I did get in.
The following week, the unbelievable happened. I was invited to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine for an interview. This time it appeared to me that I was invited on my own merits. Not that I hadn’t appreciated Dr. Foote’s effort on my behalf. I thought he was a great president, and I absolutely loved the University of Miami.
Because I had been a patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital for ten years, from the age of two through the age of twelve, and still knew a few people, such as Dr. Victor McKusick, who had diagnosed my skeletal dysplasia, I didn’t tell anyone from there that I had applied. The only person from Hopkins I told of my visit was Donna, who had morphed from being my favorite nurse to being my good friend. I didn’t even tell her until after I received the invitation to interview. In fact, the reason I called her was that I wanted to see her while I was in town.
After my tumultuous interview at the University of Miami School of Medicine, I was nervous about my interview at Hopkins. However, much to my surprise, the interview was fantastic. I met one-on-one with a single physician, a pediatrician. He didn’t start interrogating me about my limitations. Instead, he asked me about why I wanted to become a doctor and things relevant to the study of medicine. He asked about my interests and extracurricular activities. He never even brought up my stature. At one point, I was beginning to wonder if he even realized I was a Little Person! Of course he did, but it felt strange that he wasn’t bringing it up. So I had to bring it up! I thought if he had concerns and was afraid to ask me about them, I wanted to address them head on!
“I will need a step stool to see patients,” I told him offhandedly.
“Yes,” he replied, “that makes perfect sense.”
“And I will need a scooter to make rounds,” I continued. “Is that okay?”
He said that a scooter sounded fine to him. The interview ended with him showing me pictures of his kids. Wow, what a different experience. The interview was easy, almost too easy. I thought it had either gone great or gone horribly, but I could not predict which. After the interview, I went on a tour with about twenty other applicants. We went all over the hospital. My favorite part of the tour was the “dome,” where our guide explained how Sir William Osler and other physician icons used to go around the dome, examining and discussing the patients in each of the rooms. That is where the term “rounding” that every medical institution now uses comes from. Doctors “round” every morning, seeing all their inpatients and making the plan of care. Because this practice began at Hopkins due to the circular configuration of patients’ rooms, the term “rounding” was born. After touring the hospital and remembering my experience as a patient there, I was in awe of the institution. How amazing would it be if I got to be a medical student where I was once a patient? As much as I wanted this, I truly thought that it was an unattainable dream.
Well, that is what I thought, but I guess dreams can come true. One week later, I got a phone call from the dean of admissions, offering me a position in the Johns Hopkins Medical School Class of 2000.Wow! A personal phone call and a spot in the School of Medicine! I happened to be with one of my good friends, Brian, when I got the phone call. He was so happy for me, he literally picked me up and we spun around my dorm room.
I learned, too, that my connection with the hospital as a former patient was irrelevant to my acceptance, thank goodness! Dr. McKusick didn’t even know I had applied or was interviewing until well after the fact, when he learned I had been to Baltimore from a colleague and heard that I “may have made it to the second step” in the application process. He must have found out the day I got the acceptance call from the dean, because when he called my house to tell my mother that he had heard I was interviewing there, he warned her it was tough to get in, because Hopkins only accepted the “cream of the crop” from a pool of applicants from all over the world. He said I should feel good about the interview, but not get my hopes up.
My mother knew I had already been accepted, so when she told me about this phone call, I knew that I had been accepted on my own merits. Dr. McKusick couldn’t have been in on it. It was an incredible confidence boost for me to know that the people who knew me growing up had nothing to do with my getting in. I hadn’t even seen Dr. McKusick since I was a kid.
When I started medical school, there were almost no physicians who were Little People. I knew of only two, one being Dr. Michael Ain, who started at Johns Hopkins Medical School two years before me as an attending physician. He is actually a pediatric orthopedic surgeon and specializes in patients with skeletal dysplasias. The other Little Person physician I know of is Dr. Kenneth Lee, a pediatric gastroenterologist. Both of these doctors are male and have achondroplasia, which is very different from my dysplasia. People with this type of dwarfism are often taller and can have fewer orthopedic complications. I might be the first female Little Person physician, but I cannot be sure.
It turned out that despite the stressful interview at the University of Miami School of Medicine, I was also accepted there. A part of me really wanted to go to the University of Miami, because so many of my close friends were going to medical school there. However, ultimately, I had to say yes to my dream school. I knew I could never feel good about going to a school where I believed that some of its faculty doubted my capabilities. I realized it would only intensify the feeling that I needed to constantly prove myself. Still, I had a little bit of anxiety telling the university I wasn’t accepting the offer.
There were about three thousand people in my graduating class that May 1996. There was a smaller, separate graduation ceremony for the individuals who were in the honors program. There, we each got to personally cross the stage and receive our diploma when our name was called. My parents were proud members of the cheering families in the audience. My aunts, my brother, and even Dr. Kopits had made the trip to see me graduate!
I was called up to the stage to be presented with my honors medallion by the vice provost, Dr. William Butler, whom I knew fairly well from my involvement in student life. He said “congratulations,” and then leaned down to give me this big, weird, awkward kiss, which was like on the top of my head. He then went on to laud all of my accomplishments, resulting in an enormous round of applause. He finished by saying, “The only mistake that Jennifer made at the University of Miami was not staying to go to our medical school.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Bill
Hot Rods and Custom Suits
AFTER MY INTERNSHIP WITH Dr. Kopits in Baltimore, I returned to New York, packed up whatever belongings I still had in my ex-girlfriend’s East Village apartment, and moved back to Mom’s house in Port Jefferson. It was time to find a career. Most graduates with
a degree in biology in the mid-1990s looked to the pharmaceutical industry, which was exactly what I did.
I sent my CV to every single pharmaceutical company out there—Bayer, Bristol Myers Squibb, Abbott Labs, Forrest Labs, Wyatt, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Pfizer, Zeneca, SmithKline Beecham, and so on, hoping to land a career in pharmaceutical sales. Besides a BA in biology from New York University, my clinical experience with Dr. Kopits that past summer was enhanced by a junior year internship at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The lab was one of the top research institutions in the world in the fields of genetics and molecular biology, and I had the privilege of working with the best scientists out there. I was working in the live animal laboratory, drawing blood from rats, mice, and rabbits, cleaning their cages, and feeding them. I was also assisting the scientists in performing laboratory experiments and dissections.
Once my resumes were out, I looked around for temporary employment while I waited for calls from potential employers. My father had a friend who owned a private security company, and he offered me a job as a security guard, working the midnight shift at an abandoned warehouse in Riverhead. A small aside, this friend, Jay, was a former police officer who had worked with my father and had been my childhood jiujitsu instructor growing up. Anyway, the pay wasn’t very good, but the hours guaranteed that I would be available during the day for interviews for permanent jobs.
I was pretty excited when I got my first couple of requests for interviews. I got a few callbacks, but nothing materialized. At first, I wasn’t surprised to not get a second interview—it happens to a lot of applicants who are starting out with little or no sales experience. But after ten or so interviews, optimistic patience became realistic disappointment. Although I looked great on paper, my in-person meetings ranged from bland and very uncomfortable interactions to blatant prejudice.
One particular interview at a publicly traded pharmaceutical company blew me away. I pulled out one of my new outfits, a gray pinstripe suit, white shirt, and power tie. I drove from my house on Long Island all the way to the company’s corporate headquarters in New Jersey, at least a two-hour drive without traffic from Port Jeff.
My interviewer met me in the lobby and almost immediately I could read by his face that he wasn’t going to give me much time. He was a bottom-tier sales manager with an outwardly cocky manner. From his expression, I could tell he would rather be showing me to the exit door. Nonetheless, he dutifully led me past the elevators and down a long hallway to an in-service classroom, where he administered his version of an interview—a few basic questions that had no relevance to the job for which I was applying. He didn’t ask me anything about myself, or why I wanted to get into pharmaceutical sales, just a couple of offhanded generic questions about the company’s products, and even these questions came out totally flat. I didn’t even get the often recycled “Sell me this pen” sales question. Then he abruptly rose to show me the door. “Unfortunately, you don’t have the look we are looking for,” he told me as he escorted me out of the building. THE LOOK!
His remarked floored me. I was totally groomed and dressed in a fancy, never-been-wrinkled gray pinstripe suit, just like everybody else I had passed on the way to the “interview.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, acting completely baffled.
He glanced around, as if he was suggesting that I observe all these guys around me, who were six feet tall, in snappy suits and polished shoes, maybe off to model for the cover of GQ after work. The girls, too, were gorgeous. In retrospect, it looked more like a fashion show runway than a hallway in a corporate office. You had to be cookie-cutter good looking was what he was suggesting, and I didn’t fit that bill. The “corporate look” the firm was looking for did not look like me. He didn’t say it, but his insinuation was that I was of lesser value than my resume conveyed due to my appearance. This creep didn’t even want to know what I could bring to the table. It was one of the most outwardly prejudicial acts with relation to my stature I had ever encountered. I was infuriated that, in a professional environment such as this, and in the grander world of medicine, it could be conceivable, let alone condoned and encouraged, to filter prospects based on their physical disability.
As appalled as I was, I didn’t let it deter me. This would not be my last disappointing experience, and why would I want to work for a bunch of ignorant fools, anyway? In another gem of an interview, the hiring manager told me he was afraid I might not be capable of the heavy lifting the job required when dropping off sample boxes to doctors’ offices. And my all-time favorite excuse anyone gave me was that there was concern that I might not be noticed in the waiting room, which perplexed me.
“What do you mean I might not be noticed?” I asked, thinking he must be kidding.
“How are you going to get noticed by the receptionist?” he asked, as if my size made me invisible. He added, “People might assume you’re a patient.” As if every man who goes into an OB/GYN office that is short in stature must be there for treatment. While I was certainly frustrated with these idiotic comments, I accepted that these people weren’t for me, and just kept looking. If this was the caliber of individuals I would be working with in this industry, the industry I wanted to be in, I realized I had better get used to this stuff . . . or start looking at other options.
About fifty interviews later, I finally met with success. I faxed my resume over to an ad I saw in Newsday, our local newspaper, and to my delight, I got a call from a man named Michael Sperduti at a company called Triad Medical, Inc., a national distributor of infusion products, devices, and pharmaceuticals to the home infusion marketplace. He wanted to begin with a cursory interview with me over the phone before he took it to a face-to-face.
“Tell me what you are looking to do,” he began, and satisfied with that, he went next to, “Tell me about college.” After thirty minutes of in-depth dialogue, we finally arrived at the end, at which point he set up an interview. “I would love you to come in tomorrow at eleven o’clock to meet with me. Does that work?”
It worked for me. The next day, I hopped in my car, a Cold War–era 1987 Pontiac 6000 SE station wagon with a few dents and a touch of “spy hunter”–like smoke coming out of the tailpipe. I hadn’t needed a car at NYU, so this was a legacy vehicle my dad had provided me while I was back from college and looking for a career. This was the beast I drove all over the tristate to my many interviews. And it was the vehicle I drove to Deer Park, about forty minutes from Port Jefferson, for my interview with Michael.
“Hi, my name is Bill Klein,” I told the receptionist at precisely 10:52 a.m. “I have an eleven o’clock interview with Michael Sperduti.”
She handed me a clipboard with the application and a pen and directed me to fill out everything. As I was sitting down in a chair to do just that, she was disappearing into a back office to alert Mike that his eleven o’clock interview had arrived. I only learned later what she had really told him. She had come running into his office in total confusion and said, “You are not going to believe this. There is a midget in the waiting room filling out an application!” Apparently, this was the first time she had interacted with a person short in stature. She seemed a bit more nervous than me, and I was the one applying for the job!
When she came back to her desk, I could see that she wasn’t as bubbly or exaggerated in her motions as she had been initially, although she wasn’t rude. “Come this way,” she directed, motioning for me to follow her to Michael’s office.
Michael was a stout, dark-haired guy, standing just under six feet tall, well-groomed, with wire-rimmed glasses and a firm handshake. “Let’s talk,” he said, signaling for me to have a seat across from him. We talked about everything from football to college, from health care to personal goals and aspirations.
“I hired you on the phone, because your phone presence was phenomenal,” he told me. “That’s what you need in this job in order to succeed.” I appreciated Michael’s candor. He had been imp
ressed by my personality and my presence, my ability to “sell” myself over the phone. He wasn’t going to object to my height. After all, he was hiring me based on my qualifications and his confidence that I could do the job well. Not to mention that this job was an inside sales position, so while appearance and professionalism were important internally, no one cared or knew how tall I stood on the other end of the phone.
At the end of our interview, Michael offered me the job, and then invited me to lunch at Pace’s Steak House to celebrate. It was where he took all his new hires.
With the business of the day out of the way, we headed to lunch. Mike asked me to drive, which was my pleasure—since I loved being behind the wheel of any car, even mine. We walked over to my big maroon wagon in the parking lot. He looked surprised that I had chosen this size vehicle, and even though I hadn’t necessarily chosen it, the wagon did the job well for me.
I opened the door for him and ran around to my side of the car to hop in. He was a bit stunned at the acrobatic, fluid motion I made to hop into the car. He put on his seatbelt and sat, with anticipation, wondering how this was all going to work. He didn’t seem to mind the antiquity of my car, but was excited like a kid getting on a roller coaster for the first time. I was beginning to see that this was my kind of guy, someone who didn’t judge things or people on nonsense criteria, like height or make and model!
Life Is Short (No Pun Intended) Page 13