The Compassionate Physician

I met Dr. Tom when I moved into the Glenbrook Hospital Professional Building in 1979 on the first floor as a general practicing dentistry. I was on the first floor and he was on the third. I visited each office in the building to make myself know and to meet the others. His office was most gracious. We started seeing him as our doctor.

About two years later wife Joan was preparing an early dinner for the two children with a Hurry Hot Pot, and accidentally poured hot oil down the front of her body. She had serious second degree burns when we met him in the hospital Emergency Room. That certainly qualified her for hospitalization, but by then her mother had joined us and he sized her up as a competent individual so he personally took us to the hospital pharmacy and helped acquire the necessary medications, supplies and procedures to treat the problem at home with her Mom's help.

We continued in his care and were in the first group to join his new MDVIP practice. About twenty years after the burn incident, daughter Sheryl returned home from the West Coast, newly divorced and now battling a new health problem: bi-polar syndrome that took years for several psychiatrists to get under control. Although she did not come into the new practice as a covered individual, Dr. S. insisted that she not hesitate to come to him for pro bono care. She did, although now under Medicaid.

When my wife went into the nursing home seven years ago, he was still there to support her. Eventually she went into hospice care and it was he who on Easter Sunday mid-day, 1915, called me on my car phone delivering lilies to the shut-ins to tell me that she had passed. "I think I know you enough, Steve, to do it this way."