The Good Doctor by Barron H. Lerner Page A

for reasons I could never quite understand, and highly emotional. He used his feet to move his wheelchair around the premises, constantly getting into other people’s business. When he learned that I was Phil Lerner’s son, he started crying, an event that would repeat itself many times. He would then proceed to rave about how my father was the most wonderful doctor he had ever met and how I was so lucky to have him as a father.
    Such unbridled emotion made me uncomfortable, especially if either of the two girls I liked was around. But I could not help but be moved. My dad did something for a living that really made a difference to people. Even though I probably hated him at the time for putting so much pressure on me, I could see what his intense devotion achieved for people in need of not only medical care but an interested friend. When I read his journals thirty-five years later, I came to understand how the combination of scientific knowledge, clinical judgment, and prolonged face-to-face contact with patients and families enabled a physician to truly excel at his or her craft.
    It was my experience at Montefiore that led me to seriously consider becoming a doctor. “I’m delighted,” my father wrote to me on my fifteenth birthday, “that you show this evidence of empathy and willingness to help those less fortunate than yourself.” I returned to the nursing home for a second summer in 1976. I still had no dates, however, with either the Montefiore girls or any others.
    The next year, 1977, would be a devastating one for our family. My grandfather Meyer unexpectedly died, and my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. We all took these events hard, but no one took them harder than my father. His relationship to medicine would never be the same.

CHAPTER THREE
    Illness Hits Home
    I still remember what my grandfather Meyer’s legs looked like. They were pale and almost hairless, in direct contrast to the very hirsute ones shared by my father, me, and my son, Ben. They also had a large number of varicosities, collections of veins pushing up against the skin. Although they bothered him, the varicosities did not necessarily indicate major problems with the other blood vessels in his legs.
    But those other veins are what most likely killed him. Recuperating in the hospital after routine surgery for a hernia, Meyer probably developed an undetected blood clot in his leg. At five in the morning on Easter Sunday, April 10, 1977, when he got up to go to the bathroom, it dislodged, traveled to his lung, and caused a fatal pulmonary embolism. That my father—his son the doctor—was in Iran made everything even worse.
    We were still reeling from this tragedy when, two months later, my mother found a lump in her left breast. The biopsy showed cancer—which had spread to the lymph nodes. By the summer, she had undergone a mastectomy and was getting chemotherapy and experimental immunotherapy as part of a clinical trial. It was far from clear that she would survive.
    That year, 1977, was a very bad year. The fact that both of these terrible events were health-related also had substantial ramifications. My father, accustomed to being in control of all things medical, now saw medicine as something that was causing powerlessness and pain. A sense of disenchantment with his career, which would accelerate over the coming years, began to creep into his journal entries. But at the same time, my grandfather’s death and my mother’s illness would contribute to my decision to commit to medicine.
    Meyer was actually the third of the five grandparents who had been present at my 1973 bar mitzvah to die. Ben, Meyer’s father, went first, in July 1974 at the age of eighty-six. Fittingly, given the role that religion had played in his move to America and the raising of his family, Ben died, presumably of a heart attack, at the local Jewish community center where he spent a few days a week “flirting with the old ladies.”
    Although I