Memory vs. Journal: another look at how I ended up working in prisons

 

              I have been a journal writer, off and on, for a good part of my life, though frequently more off than on.  Now that I am retired, I thought about looking through them and finally got started.  Many of them are no more than statements of goals and attempts to organize and balance my life a bit.  But I hit one this morning that surprised me.  It contained a story I have told many times over the years, and written about before in the How I Ended Up Spending Twenty Years in Prison blog.  It seems there is part of the story I didn’t remember at all, though I wrote it down in some detail.  There is a striking difference between the story as I remember it and the journal entry, because the story as I wrote it in my journal is about experiencing God in my life for the first time!

               I’m sorry.  I have to retell the story to have it make any sense.  And I need to go back a bit, for anyone reading this who hasn’t read the blog about being sick.  In 1993, I developed cytomegalovirus hepatitis and a post viral chronic fatigue.  I was out of work for five months.  I prayed daily about getting back to work, asking God what I should do.  I couldn’t work full time and the ER, where I had been working, would not agree to part time.  I had been in private practice, but that hadn’t worked with one child, much less two plus the chronic fatigue.  I knew a physician working at the local prison, and that came to mind when I prayed, but I didn’t want to work in a prison.  I ended up at Stockley Center, Delaware’s state institution for the mentally retarded/developmentally disabled.

              I was working at Stockley Center about two months when the administration announced that they were going to contract out the medical director’s position to Liberty Health Care.  Part of doing this was to force the current medical director out.  I loved Stockley: the work, the patients, the teams, so I applied for the medical directorship.  Liberty Health Care interviewed me.  The offer was incredible: (all of this is from the journal - I wouldn't have expected to remember these details) $135,000 a year (this was in 1995) the first year, with annual raises tied to the Consumer Price Index, a $5000 sign on bonus, $2000 for continuing medical education, $3000 for life, health and disability insurance, 9 weeks paid vacation (this was the one that trapped me - I wanted that so much!), flex time so I could work 40 hours a week for the other 43 weeks any way I wanted: five 8 hour days, or four 10 hour days, if I worked a Saturday I could take another day off, and they would send me to one physician executive course and pay my membership in the American College of Physician Executives.  I would make 2 site visits a year to other MR facilities and their medical director would visit me once.  An offer I could never turn down!  But for the second time in my career I prayed about the job.  I told God that this was an incredible offer that I could not turn down, so, if this wasn’t where He wanted me to serve Him right now, they would have to turn me down.  I made the offer.  Be careful what you ask!

              Liberty was doing a nationwide recruitment.  The minimum requirement was board certification in a primary care specialty (I was board certified in Internal Medicine with added qualifications in Geriatrics), but they would strongly favor someone who had a fellowship in Developmental Disabilities or an MBA, and I had neither of those. 

              Stockley’s search committee interviewed 11 applicants: 9 had either the DD fellowship or the MBA.  The 10^th was a local physician with no board certification.  The 11^th was me.  Stockley’s administration kept looking for something, dragging their decision making out, so after 9 months, the first 9 applicants dropped out.  The only applicants left were the local physician who was not board certified and me.  The search committee asked to interview us back to back.  

              Liberty called me to their office before the interview.  They told me I was their candidate, and as far as they were concerned, I had the job.  They gave me the contract, but told me not to sign it until after this last interview, which they thought was just a formality.

              Three weeks later, the medical director of Liberty called me and said he had been told to negotiate the contract with the other physician.  I was angry!  If they had hired anyone more qualified than I was, with a fellowship in developmental disabilities or an MBA, that would have been fine.  That would be someone I could learn from and I would have continued working at Stockley as a staff doctor.  But they were giving this job to someone who was less qualified than I was!  Not only that!  I had been working the day this doctor was first interviewed.  I offered to take her to meet some of the clients at the medical center, where the most severely disabled patients lived, and she refused.  She didn’t care about seeing the patients she would be caring for! 

              I would not have gone to the head of Stockley, but she called me in.  She said “This is no reflection on you as a physician!”  Well, of course it was!  But the director of Liberty Health Care explained: Liberty had received $250,000 from the state of Delaware to do a nationwide recruitment for a medical director and chief of physical therapy at Stockley Center.  The administration of Stockley could not go to the legislature after that and say, “Hey they found us a great medical director and guess what? She was already working for us.”

              OK.  I could understand that, but still, I was pissed! 

              The Saturday before I got the bad news, I had received a notice in the mail (one of those things sent to every physician in the state) that there was an opening in the prison system.  I had hung on to it, just in case.  So it looked like I was going to work in the prison anyway.  I was still pissed!

              At the same time, I was meeting with a small group of women from my church, who were going through “A Course in Miracles” with Roy Davis, an Episcopal priest.  I told my story to the group.  Roy said, “Have the fight with God!  There are no four-letter words God doesn’t already know! (I think they were annoyed about the number of times I told them how pissed I was!).  Roy said that my anger, while honest, was a block to communication and I should argue it out with God!

              It wasn’t easy.  I tried to start the protest in my room that night, but there was a crucifix hanging over my bed. How do you fight with a God who died for you?  Jonah and Jacob and the old testament characters who fought with God had it easier!  Their God hadn’t died on the cross yet.

              But I tried again in the car the next day.  I thought of Jesus riding in the back seat, the Jesus in the picture that Pastor Kay had given us at St. Luke’s and that still hangs on my wall: too light skinned, but at least brown-haired and brown-eyed and smiling.  That man I could argue with!  I told him how pissed I was that I wasn’t getting the job and someone less qualified than me was chosen.  I complained over and over.  This went on for two days. 

              Then, suddenly, the anger seemed laughable, actually funny.  I was angry at God for answering a prayer!  For giving me a pretty clear-cut indication that he was actually there in my life.  Suddenly I felt very much loved!  I felt like God did this for me, set up this situation so I would know that he was there, and that he wanted me somewhere else.  I felt, in my mind and heart, that God loved me.  And I felt that he loved everyone that way! 

              Can’t remember who said “the hand of God writes large in coincidence”, but that is how this seemed to me.  So I asked “But why the prison?”  And heard a voice in my mind and heart say, “I was a prisoner.”  And I felt a great peace with the idea of going to work in prison, since it seemed God had given me this.  (which didn’t keep me from trying to get out of it: I made two more tries at the Stockley job – the doctor they had hired only lasted a year – the second time they wanted to give it to someone already working there and the third time there was this impossible political mess.  So I wasn’t allowed to duck out). 

              I have told the story of the Stockley job and how I ended up in the prison system many times, but totally forgot telling it to Roy Davis and the subsequent argument with God.  It will be interesting to see what else I have forgotten, going over the journals.