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The stripper
'In Practice' columnist discusses the people he met as a pianist and those he treated as a physician.
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Now that I look back at my 40 years as a medical doctor, I do remember that there was a time in my life when I was not a doctor. For the first 25 years, I was a son, a student and a pianist. Yes, a pianist, and I am still a performing and concertizing pianist.
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I played the piano from an early age, and by the time I was 15 I was paid to play in bars and night clubs. I put my money aside to pay for college and medical school; tuition was a lot less expensive in those days.
By age 17 I was spending my summers playing piano full time in Catskill Mountains resort hotels. I studied for the National Board exams in the morning, rehearsed the show acts during the day, played for the shows and dancing in the evenings, and then went to play in jam sessions until the wee hours of the morning.
I accompanied aging vaudevillians, singers, comedians and novelty acts. I played show tunes for dancing, Latin music at the poolside, operatic arias and other songs for singers, as well as everything in between for a seemingly endless procession of jugglers, and harmonica and xylophone players. Many times I spent more than eight hours a day at the piano.
One evening, our resident comedian — there was one at every hotel to keep the guests entertained — performed an improvised Sunday night act, something we now call stand-up comedy. I had spent the afternoon studying “Guyton’s Textbook of Physiology,” and inadvertently had left the book lying on the music stand of the piano. The comedian had run out of jokes so he turned to look at the band for help, and spotted the book with its New York Medical College cover. He grabbed it and went back to the microphone.
“Look at the junk these young people are reading these days,” he said to the audience. “You think only the waiters and busboys are going to medical school — this guy is also going.” He opened the book and started to read with profound mispronunciations about the Tetralogy of Fallot to the audience. The audience loved it and I was so doubled over with laughter that I had to leave the stage. It took me 10 minutes to recover. The gag saved his evening.
At another show, a Hispanic kitchen worker joined us on stage during one of our Latin numbers. He borrowed a drum from our drummer and began to play it with his hand and fingers. Suddenly our drummer looked at him and exclaimed, “Hey man, you’re bleeding!” Sure enough, there was blood all over the drum, the floor and the kitchen worker’s hands. He had cut himself in the kitchen and the wound had opened up after he started to beat on the drum. Maybe it sparked my interest in hematology!
Another night our resident comedian said to me, “The stripper will be here by midnight so you can’t leave early for your jam session.” I did not believe him, this was a family place. Sure enough, at midnight they chased the children out of the theater. The stripper arrived with her driver and body guard. “Can you play ‘Night Train’ and ‘The Stripper,’” she asked. We said, “No problem.”
Backstage she was busy telling us all her plans to get into show business and how she was going to be a big star. At midnight, she did her show. We played as loudly as we could, as this was the era before sound amplifiers, while the drummer hit the snares and cymbals appropriately. Soon, she was off the stage, dressed and gone to the next show. She probably did three shows per night. I was not yet a doctor, but I thought she was somewhat delusional about her future career, and I never did learn how she made out.
One of my first patients as an intern at Metropolitan Hospital in New York City was a young male transvestite who was taking female hormones and developed a deep vein thrombosis. He was in the off-Broadway show “Twenty-six Men and a Girl,” which featured transvestite and cross-dressing men. Taking a thorough social history proved to be important in diagnosing his hypercoaguable state. This was long before knowledge of Factor V Leiden assays and prothrombin gene mutations was available. Several years ago, I treated a young woman go-go dancer who had stage III large cell lymphoma with rituximab plus cyclophosphamide, vincristine, doxorubicin and prednisone. She recovered beautifully with no significant pancytopenia and remains in a disease-free state to this day. She was not delusional and is now going to school full-time.
Perhaps my view of the wider scope of human behavior, as seen during my days in the Catskill Mountains, helped prepare me for my chosen profession. Unlike most people, physicians meet and treat a wide cross section of humanity: rich and poor, all creeds, old and young, gay and straight, and everyone in between.
Arthur Topilow, MD, is in private practice at Atlantic Hematology & Oncology in Manasquan, N.J.