Half a credit
The letter said no.
I was over forty. I had applied to dental school three years in a row, and three years in a row I had missed the cutoff by about a tenth of a point. So I turned to physician associate programs instead. A school in West Virginia said yes. My first choice, the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, said no.
I had already accepted West Virginia. Most people would have stopped there.
I picked up the phone and called UMES. I wanted to know exactly what I had done wrong, so I could fix it for next year.
When a member of the admissions board called me back, the answer was almost funny. I was half a credit short in physical education.
Half a credit.
What he didn't know was that I had already read the university's admission policy. All of it. And in it was a line that waived the physical education requirement for applicants over 40.
I told him. He said he would look into it.
A few weeks went by. Then the phone rang again.
"Can you come in tomorrow? We'd like to offer you an interview."
I've thought about that call many times since. About why a woman in her forties would read a university's fine print line by line, and why she would call to ask a question most people would be too proud to ask.
The answer starts in a basement in Southeast Washington, D.C.
The turquoise freezer
I was born a month early, in 1967, at Cafritz Memorial Hospital on Southern Avenue. My mother was eighteen.
My first memories all live in my grandmother's basement. My little sister's crib stood in one corner. The bed my mother and I shared stood along the next wall. Between them was a door to the laundry room, and in the laundry room was a turquoise freezer. If you've read Fat Is the New Rx, you've already met it.
I remember climbing the basement stairs behind my sister while she crawled ahead of me. I remember her in a high chair, being spoon-fed carrots from a little glass Gerber jar. She hated those carrots.
My parents had separated by then. My mother was still very young, still trying to live the teenage years she'd missed.
When I was about four, my sister and I went into foster care, off Florida Avenue. I don't remember much about that house. I remember one moment clearly.
I'm at the top of the stairs, looking down between the railings. My parents are in the room below, visiting. And I want, more than anything, to leave with them.
They left. We stayed.
But not for long. My father was divorced by then, and he decided his girls were not going to grow up in foster care. He came and got us, and he raised us himself, in his mother's house in Northeast D.C.
The attic
The three of us slept in the attic: my father, my sister and me.
One of my father's sisters was a teacher, and she kept books up there. Primers, the thin, plain books children learn to read from.
Nobody sat me down with them. I just opened them. Somewhere between three and five years old, I taught myself to read. Then I turned around and tried to teach my little sister.
It was the first thing I remember figuring out on my own. It would not be the last.
By elementary school I was carrying home ten library books at a time and reading under the covers by flashlight, sometimes until morning.
Two friends I never said goodbye to
When I was five, my father remarried, and we moved to Landover, Maryland. I had two best friends there, from kindergarten all the way through fifth grade.
Se Won Cho was a Korean boy, and my absolute best friend. He taught me my first Korean words. I still remember them. Around fourth grade he told me, "When I grow up, I'm going to make my American name Steve."
Renee Jenkins lived on my way home from school. Some afternoons I'd sneak over to her house for a little while before I went home.
When I was ten, my father and stepmother bought their first house, in Forest Heights. My sister and I had seen it once. Nobody told us when we were moving.
One day, we just moved.
I never got to say goodbye to either of them.
More than forty-five years later, I still think about them. I long for them. I still grieve their absence.
I've searched for Renee online and never found her. A couple of years ago I found a Steve Cho on LinkedIn, with a University of Maryland connection, working in science. I'm almost certain it's him. I sent him a message. I'm still waiting.
Renee Jenkins. Se Won (Steve) Cho. If you ever read this, I'd love to hear from you.
Needle and thread
Both of my grandmothers taught me to sew. By seven, I could do it on my own.
My father's mother sewed and crocheted. My mother's mother could do everything. She painted, made hats, sewed, knitted, crocheted, did macramé and ceramics, and she could bake and cook. Watching her, I learned that a woman could make almost anything with her hands.
I drew constantly: women in fashion, with hair feathered like Farrah Fawcett's. I cut out paper dolls and designed their clothes. At fifteen I made my first wedding dress, for a friend from church. From ninth grade on I made prom dresses, for myself and for other girls, and I talked my way into extra hours in the home economics room to finish them.
I was sure I'd be a fashion designer.
Hold on to that.
The clubhouse
Our home in Forest Heights was strict. My sister and I weren't allowed to join school activities. There was a swing set in our fenced backyard, and we were rarely allowed to use it. At the back of the yard stood a wooden shed, and we turned it into our clubhouse. We could only really play there in the hours before our parents got home.
By fourteen, I was pushing back the way teenagers do, and I found my share of trouble. My grades paid for it.
Through all of it, I was still the quiet one. Shy. Never a problem in class. And somehow always the first hand up, whether the teacher was asking a question or I was. I loved learning even when I wasn't showing up for it. My teachers saw that, and they gave me room I hadn't earned.
My family saw it too. One of my aunts started picking up my sister and me late at night and driving us into the city, down 14th Street near Logan Circle. She'd slow down so we could see the people on the corners.
"This isn't who I want you to become," she told us. "But this is what'll happen if you don't change."
Then the grown-ups held a kind of council. My uncle, a dentist from our church, talked with my parents and grandparents. Another uncle and his wife talked with my father. And the family decided my sister and I needed to be somewhere else.
Separately.
I went to live with my uncle and aunt. My sister went to Arkansas, to live with our mother.
We could not have been more different. She's fair, with hazel eyes that look green one moment and gold the next, and brown hair with natural blonde streaks. She is still under five feet tall, and she has never once backed down from a fight. I was the reserved one, the soft-spoken one, the one who avoided confrontation at almost any cost.
She was my best friend.
If you've seen The Color Purple, you know the scene where Celie and Nettie are pulled apart. That was us. I don't think that's an exaggeration.
I made up tenth grade in summer school, transferred to Elizabeth Seton High School, and graduated in 1985.
People ask me why I care so much about community in health care. This is why. A family that refused to let me go is the reason I'm here.
A pipe dream
By senior year I loved science. The summer before, in 1984, I'd interned at St. Elizabeths Hospital, where I was introduced to dentistry. I knew I wanted to be a medical doctor or a fashion designer.
My uncle the dentist was blunt. Fashion design, he said, was a pipe dream. Go into medicine.
I wanted to apply to the U.S. Naval Academy too. He talked me out of that as well: only the top ten percent of their students go on to medical school, he said.
So I enrolled at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. That summer I worked as a cashier at a Rite Aid, and I met a young man who lived in Suitland, where I was living.
I had my own car at school. I spent more time on the road back to Suitland than I did in the library. For two and a half years, I watched my grades slide.
In 1987, I withdrew from school and got married.
I traded the degree for the man. It would take me more than twenty years to go back for it.
The car seat
Dentistry is where I found my footing. I had worked as a dental assistant since high school, and I kept going until I was a chairside, four-handed, expanded-functions assistant. The dentist would prepare the tooth, leave the room, and come back to take a look when I was done. I did everything but drill. I loved it, and I stayed for about 25 years.
My first son was born in 1990. That same year, at 23, I started my own window treatment and interior decorating business, Window Designs by ART, for Angela Renee Taylor.
He came to every client consultation and every installation with me, in his car seat and infant carrier. Between measurements and brackets, I nursed him.
The little girl who sewed prom dresses had found a way to keep making beautiful things.
Anse
My blood type is O negative. My babies were O positive.
For most mothers, that means nothing. For me, after an early pregnancy loss and then my firstborn son's birth, it meant my body had learned to treat my own children's blood as an enemy.
My second son needed blood transfusions while he was still inside me, more than once, and another after he was born. He made it.
A few years later I was pregnant with another boy. At 21 weeks, he developed hydrops: his body was filling with fluid because the antibodies were destroying his blood. The doctor tried to transfuse him through the umbilical vein and couldn't. He switched and began transfusing into the baby's abdomen.
While the blood was going in, my son's heart stopped.
I went into labor the next day.
We named him Anse. We gave him a funeral.
Later came my youngest son, born eight weeks early, and then our baby girl, who arrived right around her due date.
I know what it is to lie on the table while a doctor tries to save your child. I carry that into every exam room where I'm now the one holding the chart.
Starting over
After ten years, my first marriage ended.
The Saturday after my divorce was final, in December 1997, I went on my first official date with David Akinpelu. We were married on February 28, 1998.
In 2004, David and I started a medical practice together, Kinpel Medical. David built the name from the letters of Akinpelu, minus the first A and the last U. It would become RejuVe Medical Group. I still had no medical training.
David is the one who said: go back. Get the degree you never earned.
My heart was still in dentistry. I went back to school to retake the classes I had failed and take the new ones I needed. I applied to dental school. I missed the cutoff by about a tenth of a point.
I applied again. Missed again.
And again.
The problem was arithmetic. Every application averaged my new grades with my coursework from fifteen years earlier, from the girl who spent her college years on the road to Suitland. However hard I worked, she was still in the average.
That's how I ended up applying to physician associate school, and that's how I ended up on the phone, asking about half a credit of gym.
The fine print
I went to that interview. I got in.
A while later I learned that the West Virginia program, the one I had already said yes to, had lost its accreditation. I would have spent three years there and walked away with no degree.
That admission was God-ordained. I believe that with my whole heart.
I also believe God used what was already in me: a little girl in an attic who opened a book because nobody else was going to teach her, and who grew into a woman who reads every line of the fine print.
I started at UMES in 2010, in my forties. In 2012 I graduated summa cum laude and was named the program's Most Outstanding Student.
What came next
I spent the next decade on hospital service, most of it on 24-hour OB/GYN shifts. I became a better clinician, and a less healthy woman.
Then one morning after a shift, in the physicians' lounge, a colleague looked at my breakfast and said one sentence.
Everything I've built since started there.