My medical career started because I wanted to be a hippie.
In the summer of 1969, the hippie movement had arrived in Montreal. I was fascinated by the groups of long-haired fantastically dressed people hanging out in front of Christ Church Cathedral on Ste Catherine St., or around the “Three Bares” fountain on the McGill Campus. So, I would dress up in my best long peasant skirts and hang out with them, pretending that I was cool and older and not a 15-year-old girl who lived at home with her parents.
I acquired a hippie boyfriend, Bill, a gentle looking, vague, constantly stoned, man with a wild beard and heavily embroidered jeans. One day Bill and I walked into Community Switchboard, which had a commune upstairs and an office downstairs. The Switchboard helped people find where to eat, where to sleep, where to find work and how to access medical help. That is where I met Mia.
Mia was everything I aspired to be. First, she was beautiful, with wide green eyes and delicate features. When I walked in, she was wearing a t-shirt with a small rainbow on it and a Women’s Power necklace. She looked effortlessly cool. When she smiled at me, it was direct and open. We began to talk. Mia had a remarkable quality of intense focus when she spoke to people. I felt completely heard and understood. By the end of that first meeting she invited me to join her and learn how to volunteer at the Switchboard, which I did.
This began my feminist education. With Mia, I started attending “consciousness raising groups” at the Women’s Centre. I was hanging out and helping with the distribution of the famous McGill Birth Control Handbook. I even did an action outside my high school distributing the handbook. When the principal called my mother, instead of outrage with me, she told him he should pay less attention to what I was doing outside the school be grateful that I was keeping the girls safe from what was happening inside the school.
Mia and a few other women started doing abortion counselling at the Women’s Centre, referring to the famous Dr. Henry Morgentaler. One day when one of the francophone counsellors threw up her hands and declared, “Je ne peux pas faire un autre en anglais!” unable to cope in English for one more minute. I slipped into her chair and did the counselling. After that, I became a frequent replacement at the Women’s Centre and later, at the abortion clinic of the Montreal General Hospital when Mia started working there.
I learned a lot doing that counselling. I heard about women’s lives, the challenges they faced, the economic realities that forced untenable choices on them, the abusive relationships they were attempting to escape, their desperation. I learned other things. One of the tasks we had to do at the clinic was to assure each patient had a hospital card. We would call “Master Index,” give them the patients’ information and then visit the cavernous room in the hospital where a group of women sat at an enormous rotating rolodex, entering and retrieving information from index cards. Mia knew all the ladies at Master Index. She recognized their voices, called them by name, asked about their families. That impressed me. “The whole hospital depends on these women,” Mia said. “Yet no-one knows that they exist.”
By this time, I was already doing my undergraduate degree in psychology at McGill and Mia had become a trained psychotherapist. I parlayed my experience at the abortion clinic into a part time gig at the Youth Clinic as a peer counsellor. Here I learned how to do medical interviewing, learned about contraception, sexual assault and STIs. I chaperoned the moonlighting residents who staffed the clinics during sensitive examinations. I drank many cups of rot-gut coffee during clinic, since I was the only staffer who didn’t smoke. I could not use a cigarette to cover my shock, as the others could, when people would say things like, “I was raped last night by six Hell’s Angels.” I would stop, breathe, take a sip of coffee and say, “Oh, would you like to tell me about it?”
One night, Howard, one of those moonlighting residents said to me, “So Perle, when are you applying to medical school?”
“What?” I said, “Why do you think I am planning to go to med school?”
“Well, it’s obvious, this is the perfect job for a med school applicant,” he said. “Ok,” I thought. “That’s an idea.”
A few weeks later, I ran into Dr. Kinch, the chief of Ob-Gyn at the Montreal General. “What do you think about me applying to medical school?” I asked him. He smiled at me in his gentle avuncular way. “Perle, I’ve been waiting a year for you to ask me for a letter of recommendation.”
So, it seems, many people knew I was going to medical school before I did.
I then changed my program to include the five prerequisite courses to get into medicine. I had never worked harder. Yet, during that year I found the time to fall in love with my future husband.
Three days after we got married, I started medical school.
This genesis of my long and fulfilling career was not an inevitability but really the result of a chance meeting, a mentoring relationship and luck.