Indianapolis 2 ( the early years continued )

Once Frank had left the practice, I was faced with the problem of keeping his patients and his referral pattern. Some of the family practice doctors tried to take advantage of me by saying Frank did this or that for them and I had no way of knowing if this was true. So I started cutting all of them loose except two, one who was an IU classmate and FB who liked me and really didn’t give a damn but was prone to send me some bad shit….like a one legged OB or the worse pelvic abscesses or terminal ovarian cancer you could imagine, telling the patients I could do wonders. He and I hit it off and he wanted me to hang out after hours with him and drink (at the Red Garter or the Famous Door) but he didn’t have to go to the hospital so I had to be careful with him…..plus he packed a .45 colt at all times and was known to shoot at someone or something in a heartbeat. Once a guy broke in his office ( it was in a bad part of town ) and he was sitting there in the dark. He let him creep all the way down the hall before blowing him away. After that no one ever dreamt of robbing him. He was a legend at Fisk getting booted out in the 1st semester and transferred to Howard where he managed to finish. He was smart but didn’t think any Black doctors knew anything except Frank Lloyd, Cup and me. Saturday office hours were special because all cash went in his pocket and he kept a fully stocked bar in his office and all his cronies would come by after the last patients to drink and tell stories, most of them showing off their latest gun purchase.
One of the first things had to do was get me a girl Friday to take over what Judy had done for Frank and she found one of her nursing school classmates to fill that position. She worked out for me for awhile but we went separate ways in later years when she differed on the need for abortion that I felt was a key to a woman’s basic right. Later I found Anna, who became my right hand for forty years of practice. She was a person who was loyal to me to a fault and did the work of three because at times it was just the two of us.
Let me give you a typical day in my practice, at the hospital by 7am for rounds if I wasn’t already there awaiting a delivery, in surgery for 2-3 hrs and then to the office. I had a sofa in my office so I could catch a nap before lunch.





I then would see patients from 1pm until 5pm and then go back to the hospital one or both for evening rounds. I usually got home around 7 pm had dinner and spent some time with the family unless I was called back in for a delivery or see a patient in the ER. If I was out after 9 pm, I would stop in one of the clubs to have a drink and catch some music sometimes a lot of drinks.
There weren’t any pagers or cell phones so I had to call in to my answering service to catch calls so I wouldn’t go home and have to double back. It was a real pain and the communication available today would have definitely been welcomed. I remember carrying a pocket full of dimes than quarters and knowing every working phone booth between my home and the hospitals I worked in. You can’t imagine how annoying it was even after pagers became available to pull over to find a working phone and than call the answering service and than call the patient or hospital in the dead of night and most booths had no light.
One of the things that OB patient wanted was that you delivered them personally and working in two hospitals and being only one person made that sometimes unlikely. So many a patient was put to sleep and than the resident on call did the delivery for you unbeknown to them. During my residency there was seldom a husband let alone a father in the waiting room after a birth so when I got in practice I often left the hospital without checking and often be back home in bed and the nurse would call saying Mr So in So wanted to know how his wife and baby are doing to my embarrassment. I had a lot to learn about paying patients, some of whom were a real pain in the ass. The reason why private practice in OB is so stressful is that it is so time consuming for the remunerations that’s paid. Slowly, I began to get disenchanted with Obstetrics and began to concentrate on the Gynecological side of the practice going against the time honored rule that you built your practice on the OB side and they stayed with you throughout their life for health care.
It turned out that I was like my mentors Smiley and Lloyd, a fast surgeon, and nurses and residents all wanted to be assigned to my surgeries because we would be in and out, Hysterectomies under 90 minutes and C-sections 20 minutes. I did not piddle or waste time. After the first year of practice, I stopped going to St Vincent’s because covering 2 hospitals with the patient load I had was not efficient and really impossible. So the patients that did not want to go to Methodist, I referred to another physician.

One of the other reasons I wanted to limit my practice to Methodist was that I had a huge high risk OB group of patients and St Vincent’s had some religious policies (like sterilization and abortion) that I felt restricted me in providing total care and making important clinical decisions in certain situations. As it turned out, I feel I made the right decision because it narrowed my focus and placed all my hospital resources in one place.
My family grew in an unexpected way that 2nd year of practice, my wife was again pregnant having taken a newly released birth control pill ( C-Quens) that the local giant Lilly had developed was later taken off the market. She was due roughly 13 months after the birth of our daughter, Diane. She went into the hospital in labor and Frank and I had gone to a Chinese restaurant to have dinner when they called us to hurry back for her delivery. I was sitting at the nurses station reading the evening paper when a nurse came out and told me “ Dr Robbie you have twins a boy, and a girl.” and I replied “ that’s bullshit”. than I heard Judy say we need another incubator. Here’s the best obstetrician in Indianapolis and a husband who is an obstetrician both miss the diagnosis. Boy were we ragged on after that. Judy ‘til this day says she suspected twins……she didn’t bother to tell us.
So now I had 5 kids (Robbie, Kenny, Diane, Timothy and Michelle). Three of them babies, using 300 tiny tot diapers a week plus cases of similac plus the older boys drinking 3 gallons of milk a week. Wow! now my house was too small and I hadn’t been in it 2 years.
I guess it was fortunate that my in laws lived in Indianapolis and could give my wife a break with some help.
When the twins were sleeping through the night and the other kids less rambuncous we were able to get a neighbor’s daughter to baby sit so we could get a night out. A funny thing happened one night that we had her baby sitting. We now had a German Shepard named Titan who I had chained in the basement so he would run through the house while she was there.
When we came home we found him running loose to the door to meet us and I asked Lele what was he doing upstairs. She said our Vet. Dr C. had stopped by to give him a shot and apparently unhooked him and Titan chased him out of the house, he leaving his leather coat and instrument bag in his wake. I never stopped teasing him about his way with my dog in the dogs’ house.
Well year two was coming to an end and I had passed my written boards and was awaiting taking my orals coming that November 1965. When all of a sudden, I received a shocking surprise, I was notified that I was to report for a physical exam for the draft into the Army for the war in Vietnam.
I had been deferred in medical school for having Tb and was now being reclassified as a physician. Having a family of 5 was not a grounds for a deferral. My life was now in chaos since I had 30 year mortgage, purchased a medical practice whose note was secured by a bank for 3 years and I would have to make plans if called up to notify patients of my leaving and lastly I had to study for the upcoming oral board exams.
On top of all this Evansville, where my father had practiced for practically 30 years was going through a recession and my parents were considering moving to Indianapolis, my Dad taking a position at the local VA hospital
Talk about being in a funk……sometimes shit comes at you from out of no where! And all you can do it try to duck as much of it as you can.