CLAUDE AND WILHELM
Claude was one of my medical school classmates. He was French and at 6’3” he was larger than life — he usually had a lot to say, talking in his "BIG" voice. Whenever we crossed paths, it seemed to me that we were on common ground. He was bright and enthusiastic and was able to sort through the challenges of medical school rapidly. After our second-year academic finals were over, he invited me to a party. He said that some of the top medical students in our class would be attending. When I told him that I might drop by and would probably bring MK, he seemed delighted and said that wives and girlfriends were invited. The day of the party, MK made an hors d’oeuvres tray, and off we went.
It was not like the parties we had been to at BYU in Provo. A table filled with booze was at one end of the room. An imposing bust of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen sat on a pedestal at the other end of Claude’s living room. It was Röntgen who won the first Nobel Prize in physics for discovering X-rays. The doctors who learned to use Röntgen’s X-rays in medicine were pioneers. Most of the early researchers were unaware of the dangers of ionizing radiation and ended up damaging digits or bone marrow after prolonged exposure. As I gazed at the bust of Röntgen, I remembered my father taking X-rays almost every day at the Tall Clinic. I did not realize that for the next 50 years I would be using X-rays nearly every day.
As imposing as it was, the bust was not what troubled me about this party. One of my allies told me that the muffins on the table were of a mixed variety. Some were great walnut and banana muffins and the other half had some weed mixed into the recipe. As he told me this, I looked at MK and discovered that she was noshing her second muffin. She was startled when I took her muffin away and made an excuse to leave. When I went into the bedroom to get our coats, I discovered a half dozen of my classmates sitting around a Hookah waterpipe, smoking weed. The top three students in my class were in that circle.
Although I had done nothing wrong, I knew that the party was illegal. As we left, visions of an Arlington Police Department drug bust flashed through my mind. That was my first and last pot party.
The following semester, Claude and I were in the same physical diagnosis group and assigned to be partners. As such we did our first physical examinations on each other. Claude had the largest hands in the class and I had the smallest. When it came time to do rectal exams on each other, he had a better experience when I examined him than I did when he examined me. That was not the first time I had been surprised by Claude.
Ever vigilant,
RT
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