Where Are You When I Need You?

8 April 2011

I stood there looking at the door and started laughing as so many memories flooding in.

My friend Ruth recently had replacement hip surgery and had her post-op appointment at a doctor's office today, but she can't drive yet, so asked I could drive her to Sacramento for the appointment. I've been missing our bi-weekly lunches, as I haven't seen her in a month, so I was happy to oblige.

Daniel M. D'Amico, M.D. is not her doctor. He is in partnership with another orthopedist, but D'Amico's nameplate is on the door and oh what memories. I've never met the man. I don't have a clue what he looks like, but he changed my life.

When I first went to work for The Typing company, the owner, Ann Holke, was a medical transcriptionist. I would work all day on student and business people's orders and Ann would pound out medical records.

One day she tossed a tape and a medical dictionary at me and said "Here...learn medical transcription." The tape was dictated by Dr. D'Amico. She chose him because he dictated more clearly than any of the other doctors whose dictations she transcribed.

It was very difficult in the beginning. I was looking up every other word, it seemed. As I began to learn the medical terminology, I realized how horribly I had botched a huge job that we had been given by a Japanese veterinarian when I was working for The Secretariat. The doctor had said "just type what you can hear" when he handed us about 50 tapes from a veterinary medical conference. Conferences are the most difficult thing to transcribe under the best of circumstances and when you are dealing with a vocabulary you have had NO experience with, it's even more difficult.

But I kept plugging away on D'Amico and I did learn. Then I went on to type for other doctors and to learn the vocabulary of other specialties, eventually centering on ob/gyn, where I then worked for about 15 years, in one office for 12, in another for 2 and then some transcription at home.

The thing about D'Amico was that he droned on...and on...and on... He would repeat himself and then repeat himself over again. He had the kind of soporific voice that could put you to sleep even while typing.

My favorite D'Amico story, though concerns my friend Diane. I had never met her, but she and Ann had been best friends and had raised their children together. Diane was a medical transcriptionist in the Seattle area, when I was learning medical transcription in Davis. During a particularly busy time for The Typing Company, Diane offered to take vacation from her regular job and come down and help Ann out with our overload.

While we typed student papers, Diane sat at a typewriter transcription D'Amico's work.

Now one thing doctors don't realize is that the transcriptionist hears everything that you are doing while you're dictating. I swear I once heard one of the doctors I worked for peeing while he was dictating.

On this particular day, Diane, who was such a funny lady, kept complaining that D'Amico had a cold and that he kept snuffling and sneezing and coughing. She said "If he spits, I'm out of here!"

Then suddenly she ripped the earphones out of her ears, leaped up from her chair and shouted "He DID! He actually DID!"

Diane and I became great friends during her time in Davis and our friendship continued after she returned to Seattle, though she and Ann kind of lost touch with each other.

As I sat there in the office today, waiting for Ruth to have her exam, all I could think of was that I really wanted to tell Ann and Diane where I was and how much I was thinking about them.

Sadly, they are both dead and there is nobody else who can fully appreciate how weird it was to be sitting in the office of Daniel M. D'Amico

When you are in the last years of your life, the sad thing is how lonely it is that so many of your peers, the people with whom you have a shared history, are no longer here to remember with you and to laugh at the time that Dr. D'Amico spit phlegm while he was dictating and how funny Diane was when he did it.

My Friend Diane

She wasn't my friend, really. At least not at the beginning. She and my boss, Ann Holke, had been friends for many years. They were both medical transcriptionists and when Ann relocated to California, they kept in touch by mail, spurts of mail. Years of closeness, followed by years of not so much closeness, followed by years of closeness again.

It was one of those "years of closeness" periods when Ann, who owned The Typing Company for which I worked, invited Diane, who had just been fired from her job as head of the transcription department of a Seattle Hospital (in what was one of the worst cases of injustices ever) to come and help out in our office during the "end of the quarter" period, which was always such a terribly stressful time for everyone.

Diane flew down from Seattle and worked in the office for a week or two. We became fast friends. She had an amazing sense of humor and we laughed and laughed and laughed. She would do such outlandish things. For example, she wore a prosthetic breast, following breast cancer surgery. One day I came back from lunch and the thing was sitting on my chair...it had gotten too heavy for her to wear, so she just took it off.

By the time she returned to Seattle, we had become good friends. I can't remember the first time I went to Seattle to spend some time with her, but there were several trips, sometimes on the train, sometimes I flew in. We both shared an addiction to food and so my visits always centered around how we could pack in the most calories--the best restaurants, the most sinful snacks, all the while knowing how bad we were being, but loving being with someone who understood.

On one trip to visit her, I brought some pecan amaretto bread that I had made that she was still raving over years later.

Peggy and I went up to spend time with her when Peggy was here in California. She had met Diane thru the weight-loss-by-mail group I had run for awhile, and was eager to meet her in person. We spent a week at Diane's house, traveling all over the area, all of us indulging in our love for photography. I remember Peggy helping negotiate a special price on a new computer for Diane and the work she went through getting it all set up for her. I don't know if she ever used all the bells and whistles. I can't count the number of times I had SOS e-mails from her that she didn't know how to do such and such. It always amazed me that she was the head of the medical transcription department for the University of Seattle, that she was the troubleshooter for banks of computers but that she couldnt figure out how to attach a photo to an e-mail.

She introduced me to the tulip festival of Skagit Valley and I went with her three years in a row to see the blankets of tulips.

Over the years, I listened to her tales of woe as medical transcription changed, and suffered with her through the planned sabotage that led to her leaving the department, the pain that she felt at being stabbed in the back for a second time.

But by the time she left the University, daughter Wendy was pregnant with her first grandchild. Wendy and her husband, who walked on water, as far as Diane was concerned, were married in a small ceremony at a wedding chapel at Lake Tahoe. Walt and I were honored to be invited as, I think the only non-family members to attend.

But now Joey was expected and when he was born, he was the apple of his grandmother's eye. She got to see him every day and was there for all the firsts. Her e-mails just bubbled with her happiness at having this little guy in her life. Of course she bought a special camera to take pictures so she could share them with me, and never figured out how the camera worked, so I saw very few pictures.

A few years later along came the twins, Danica and Brooke. By now Diane had sold her condo and moved to a place closer to the kids and became a part-time babysitter and invaluable help to Wendy. Of course the promised baby photos again never materialized, though I did get this one sent in August of last year, when the twins were 10 months old and Joey 4 years old. (She didn't know how to make the photo larger, so this was the size I got.)

She loved cats, the way I love dogs. She always had a couple in her house and feral cats that she fed and tried to catch to have neutered. It was a cat house, literally. The cats had no boundaries and I do remember feeling a bit uncomfortable when the cats were allowed to share the dinner table (and our food and drink) with us!

She adored all my dog tales, though, despite her love of cats. She begged for more...more...more pictures when I had puppies (and her encouragement was what prompted me to write so many dog entries). She always pushed me to adopt a dog that I had fallen in love with and we had good-natured battles about why I couldn't adopt every one of them. I think she finally came to accept that, after many long years of trying to get me to save each and every one of those special dogs.

She suffered from health problems for many years and I know was thinking of a hip replacement. But she was like the energizer bunny. She just kept going and going and going through the pain, through the shortness of breath, through everything.

The one thing she couldn't keep going through was the heart attack that took her life yesterday morning. Her beloved son-in-law called me this evening to give me the sad news. I am numb.

She became my friend and I loved her. I will miss her humor. I will miss knowing that she was there if I wanted a reason to go to Seattle. I will miss her e-mails and her nagging. And I think I need to go have some gooey high caloric thing in her memory. She would love that.