Arts in Medicine series: Physician turned author finds her passion
Imagine giving up a successful medical practice to start over, mid-life, to pursue a life-long career fantasy. The Nov. 21 Arts in Medicine speaker did just that.
Gail Waldstein, a physician trained in pediatric pathology, left behind a 30-year medical career to pursue her “dream” of writing. In her new book, To Quit this Calling: Firsthand Tales of a Pediatric Pathologist, she describes the progression of her life in short stories, writing about her marriages, her children and what she refers to as the “man’s world” of medicine.
When she began medical school in the early 1960s, she believed that she could work in the field of pathology and get used to performing autopsies and doing research. By the 1990s, a combination of the depression of doing as many as five autopsies a day, the politics of the job and developing arthritis in her hands, gave her the incentive to pursue writing as a career.
At first, she was afraid to leave medicine and thought her motivation might just be a mid-life crisis. The turning point happened when Waldstein was riding with a stranger on a train. She and the stranger were discussing her love of writing, and she realized that she needed to get out of medicine and do what she loved. “When I write, I feel alive,” said Waldstein. She decided then to “jump into it.”
Writing had been her hobby for most of her life and she had taken writing classes whenever she had time. She has entered her essays in writing contests and won awards and acknowledgements. In 1994, her first essay was published, and in 2001 she quit practicing medicine to write full-time.
She wrote about her work as a pathologist, doing autopsies of children. In one poem, she integrated her own “sleeping babies” into what her Pilates teacher was using as a form of motivation for the exercise:
Prayer for the Light Baby
My Pilates teacher says think
of sleeping babies, how heavy
they feel dead weight. Tense those gluts
pecs, abs, make them work.
I squeeze even eyelids see light
babies from my medical practice
years I did post mortems
bad days up to five.
My breath draws her instructions in.
Waldstein is in good company in her pursuit of a writing career after medicine. She is joined by Gertrude Stein, who wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Anton Chekhov, who wrote The Lady with the Little Dog and Oliver Sacks, author of The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which was turned into a one-act play, an opera, and a theatrical production in French.
Gail Waldstein lives in Denver and is working on another novel and teaches writing.
The Arts and Medicine lecture series is held every Monday at noon and can be seen in the Third Floor Lecture Hall, SOM and also in Bushnell auditorium, Building 500 at Fitzsimons. For more information, visit http://www.uchsc.edu/artsinmedicine/lec.html
