Lucky to be born a Strong baby!
Parents were graduate students in Psychology at University of Rochester when love intervened. First born Michael George delivered not long afterward at Strong Memorial Hospital. A blend of rural French Canadian meets Swedish stock in Minnesota with the Scotch-Irish diaspora of NYC forged among the ivory towers of a now luster-less urban outpost along our easternmost Great Lake.
Studies complete, the young family migrated to San Antonio, Texas where father studied effects of jet & space travel on human circadian rhythms at the nascent military aerospace medicine labs and mother moved into rapid breeding mode.
Soon with three siblings, I enjoyed the post-War 1950s suburban boom as what would now be termed a “free-range child”. This lifestyle was soon fettered with the corporal abuse and thought control tendencies of the parochial (Catholic) school educational system.
A move to civilian employment in college town Norman, Oklahoma brought the family unit new horizons and me, escape from the nuns along with a few rewarding years in the laboratory school of the University of Oklahoma’s education department.
Academic offers poured in for mon pere, the keen researcher. Adolescence in Montana was possibility but in the end, maternal pull homeward resulted in accepting full professorship at the University of Delaware and a move to mid-Atlantic region. Vietnam was ramping up and our cities were starting to burn. All happening while I attended public high school in Newark, Delaware, mastered driving on the local byways and acquired a fondness for the ocean life at Rehoboth Beach, blissfully unaware of the seismic cultural shift. It was the 1964 World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows, NY and sadly not the Beatles Shea Stadium
appearance nearby that marked my zeitgeist.
Registering with the Selective Service and graduating high school in 1969 made attending college with its 2-S draft deferment more than attractive as a next step. Inspired by Jeffersonian ideals, I chose the University of Virginia. Yet it was the summer job as a busboy-waiter at the Broadmoor resort in Colorado Springs, Colorado that year which altered my trajectory significantly.
Coming of age…on one hand, meeting idle heirs, smooth talking Persians and Governors’ Reagan, Romney & Rockefeller at western themed mountainside barbeques. The same weekend watching Jimi Hendrix set his guitar aflame and seeing VVAW-attired young men injecting heroin in tear gas filled Mile High Stadium at the Denver Pop Festival. Enriched by an end-of-summer California road trip to surf Santa Cruz and wander Haight-Asbury I returned to genteel Charlottesville to begin the collegiate life.
Here, I trained two years as a ROTC cadet, made innumerable road trips to area girls’ schools, and pursued non-occupationally oriented studies. A bohemian university year in Paris and wannabe country squire final few semesters rounded out the curriculum. And kept my draft deferment going.
Nixon ended the draft as my graduation neared opening up options not possible for many men of my generation in the prior era of military conscription. I headed to Washington, DC as the Watergate spectacle was unfolding. Money was earned as a bicycle messenger, later a paralegal for a powerhouse liberal law firm. Wanderlust won out after three years. A carefully planned, severely underfunded and naively executed extended yacht cruise ended prematurely in a thrilling taxpayer funded rescue at sea. It was while licking my wounds from this debacle and doing archeology at a Mayan site in Belize that a chance
conversation propelled me to pursue medicine as a career.
Two and a half additional years of (p)re-medical coursework required returning to Texas. However, Austin in the late 1970s was a cultural oasis and far from hard duty. My path was eased as I allied forces and life with another “older-than-average” (p)re-med student, Rose Blackwell. A love that blossomed among the beakers and test tubes of freshman chemistry lab has persisted through our entire medical careers. Four years of medical school in Dallas at Southwestern Medical School funded by the riches of Permian basin oil and gas insured a lifetime of gratitude and appreciation for the Lone Star State. Clinical rotations in trauma surgery at Parkland Memorial Hospital fostered my choice of surgery as a profession.
The NRMP couples match and a yearning for life near the ocean and mountains determined Portland, Oregon as our next destination. Oregon Health & Sciences University proved an exceptional training ground for the earnest and no longer young residents. As so often in graduate medical training, we chose to start practice near our GME alma mater. I spent a busy twelve years pursuing a broad spectrum general surgery practice in Portland within a large multi-specialty clinic while maintaining academic credentials via resident teaching and nighttime Level 1 trauma call. The tribulations of the managed care years were balanced by the excitement of the laparoscopic & minimally invasive revolution that followed.
Nonetheless, a change was needed to stave off burnout at millennium’s end. I morphed into a rural surgeon in the Columbia River Gorge and scaled the work volume down to accommodate other pursuits. First on the bucket list was an international humanitarian medical mission. As a Francophone and a progressive I was drawn to Medecins sans Frontieres. In 2001, I served for five weeks as surgeon for an MSF project in the scorching Afar region of Ethiopia, near Djibouti. This experience ignited a keen passion for tropical medicine, public health and global surgery. Over the ensuing dozen years, I pursued a diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene, opened a travel medicine clinic and participated in a series of surgical missions to Africa with MSF.
On the domestic front I worked to develop proficiency in wilderness, event and sports medicine. I strove to incorporate tenets of integrative medicine into my practice by studying acupuncture, obtaining licensure in massage therapy and opening a bodywork clinic addressing acute and chronic pain with acupuncture and massage.
Mentoring of new surgeons to our area began around 2010. A transition to locum tenens work in acute care surgery as well as emergency medicine occurred gradually. I spent September 2014 as a volunteer surgical preceptor at Tanzania’s National Hospital in Dar-es-Salaam. A fascination with the polar regions has led to more than six months aboard various expedition cruise ships in the Arctic and Antarctica as ship doctor.
As I reached Medicare age, I phased out of surgery but remained medically involved working regular shifts in our local emergency room while preparing for an extended sailing adventure with hopes of avoiding another rescue at sea ( My Sailing Life). Alas, I proved to be more land than sea mammal. Retirement from paid clinical activity ended in 2018 allowing more time for personal pursuits while volunteer stints at mass gathering events kept me in the medical game.