I am one of the 10,600 babies Dr. Abel delivered over his decades of medical practice. He was also my medical director for about a year when I worked at Miller’s Merry Manor in Wakarusa.
A week ago after my cousin’s wedding, I was sifting through Facebook when I saw Dr. Abel’s obituary.
I knew Dr. Abel was 92 but I was still shocked. I wasn’t sure that he was ever going to die. He had been through numerous illnesses and injuries before, and had always rebounded, not only to health, but into his medical practice.
There are three things I’ll always remember about Dr. Abel, perhaps to the end of my life.
I will remember Dr. Abel for the rest of my life whenever someone asks me what my birthdate is, and I reply that I have two.
Apparently it was he who wrote a 5 instead of a 6 on my birth certificate in the early morning hours of June 23, 1982 in my grandparent’s basement. Perhaps he was distracted by the environment, and the necessity of placing the new baby on a ping pong table.
However it happened, this established my birth in the month of May instead of June. No one noticed it until I went with my dad to get my drivers’s permit in Wausau, Wisconsin, and the clerk looked across the counter at me and said, “That’s not what your birth certificate says.”
My mom tried to change it, and was told it was too late. She also insisted that SHE was not wrong on the date! Prince William of England had been born a few days before, she pointed out, to lock the date in historically.
So I resorted to having two birthdays: my legal birthday May 23, 1982, and my true birthday June 23, 1982. I suppose I should just choose one or the other. But, if a legal document is involved such as if I get stopped by the police or need to show my passport, then of course I say my birthdate is May 23. However if it’s Starbucks wanting to give me a free drink for my birthday, I want it to be my real birthday– June 23. In fact, I can’t tell you which birthday I have on file with my employer at Elkhart General Hospital.
This results in interesting conversations with insurance agents or other people I speak with on the telephone. The bored person on the other side of the telephone rattles off the questions: “What’s your name? What’s your birthdate?”
On my end of the line there’s a pause after the birthdate question as I mentally scramble to remember which birthdate I gave to that organization. Usually I have to resort to saying, “Well I have two… it could be either…” This inevitably transforms the robot on the other end into a living human being.
A second thing I remember about Dr. Abel is the night I called him several times in the middle of the night about a patient of his. I was working at Miller’s Merry Manor in Wakarusa. I had graduated from nursing school and then taken a year to write books, not a great move for the career of a nurse. Miller’s Merry Manor hired me with no experience, and I was grateful to them for giving me a chance, but I knew I wasn’t a great nurse. I had struggled anyway in nursing school with the feeling that my fellow classmates had more experience than me and more reasonable motivations for having gone to nursing school. Many of them were compassionate human beings who gave reasons for being in nursing school such as “I love helping people” or “I was a patient as a child and the nurses were so kind to me and I want to pass that on.” Me? I just needed a job.
Starting at Millers was a freefall. I was suddenly in charge of about 50-60 residents overnight, with only one other nurse at the other end of the building who was herself in charge of 60 residents. Of course, most of them were long-term care patients who didn’t need much attention. However we also had rehab patients recovering from surgery or illness who would be going home. It was one of these rehab patients who one night begin to drop her oxygen saturation and I had to call Dr. Abel two, if not three times in the wee hours of the morning, probably about the same time my father had gotten him out of bed in 1982 with a call about my imminent birth.
I followed his orders and continued to watch the woman as I tried to pass medications to another 30 people. The night hours wore into early morning and Dr. Abel arrived at Millers at about 6 o’clock to round on his patients before going to his office for the day. He was stoop-shouldered, an old man. (Sometimes he would arrive with a rolling walker.)
Our patient was stable, but still needing more oxygen then she had been before. I was exhausted and feeling bad that I had called Dr. Abel during the night.
I remember him walking up to the nurses station where I was sitting at my computer.
“You did a good job keeping her going through the night,” he said to me.
I think I stared at him in shock. I don’t remember if I stammered out an astounded thank you.
Besides being surprised and gratified that he was not upset at me for calling him, I think for perhaps the first time in my career it occurred to me that perhaps I was, or could be, a good nurse. Maybe he wasn’t just saying that to be nice. Maybe he was glad that I had called him about this patient, because that was the right thing to do.
The third thing I remember was from a few years later, when I saw him at a fundraiser. By then I was working as a nurse coordinator for heart surgery.
At that time Dr. Abel must have been 90, and he said he was planning to work for the next 10 years following which time he would divide his time between traveling and staying at home.
Again, I must have looked at him with a certain amount of shock.
He looked at me and said, “You have to have goals. It doesn’t mean that you will achieve all of them. But if you want to get anything done, you have to have goals.”
I should finish the story about the birth certificate. One morning at Millers, I was in an expensive mood. I decided to remind him that he had written the wrong date on my birth certificate. I thought I would fish for a little remorse on his part, for the psychological damage I had received.
I told him the story and that now I had two birthdates because he had written the wrong number. He barely looked at me, continuing on with whatever he was doing, and said, “Well, you seem to have gotten along okay so far!” As if he was thinking, “Just be glad I didn’t let you fall off the ping pong table!”
So that’s that!
I want to set lofty goals, even though I know I may not achieve them. I want to be an encourager to people at the bottom of the totem pole, like he was to me at 6am that morning when I was overwhelmed.
And, unlike the 10,600 other people with his name on their birth certificates, I have a built-in memorial to remind me of Dr. Abel, every time someone asks me what day I was born!
