In March, Al decided to start looking for a job.
“A real job,” he said. “The money from Kaiser’s going to run out by August, September at the latest.”
A shudder bubbled through my heart as I asked, “Where?” I had another year left before I finished my Master’s in Salt Lake. While we were apart in the fall, before he came out to ski, when he worked at Kaiser in LA, I found out I didn’t need him around every day. No matter what he decided, no matter where he went, I was going to stay in Utah and finish what I started, become a midwife. But I also discovered I wanted to be with him, long-term, to keep what we’d had in Venice going. After I finished, I dreamed, he and I would find someplace to work, together.
“I’m going to start here. I called up the Ob-Gyn group at Intermountain Health, and they’re looking to expand.”
“I don’t know. Working with a bunch of Mormons? Wouldn’t they want one of their own? And what are they going to say when they find out we’re not married, but we’re living together?”
“I can get along with anyone. We’ve got this house, we’re part of this community. USC is a great residency, I’m sure they’ll take me.”
“I don’t know if I want to stay here after I graduate. It’s a strange place, the way they treat women. It’s not like LA, a lot of different people around. Everybody’s all the same here, and they’re not like us. Are you sure you’d want to stay here, after I’m done?”
“We’re used to being here. We don’t have to stay, we could try it out for two years, five years, if it’s no god, move on. I want to explore the possibilities at least. We’ve got an appointment for an interview, next Wednesday at 11:00.”
“Us?” I asked. “You want me to go, too?”
“Family…they want to talk to both if us, they said.”
We decided not to explain our unorthodox (for Salt Lake City) arrangement. “We’ll just tell them we’re engaged, getting married in August,” I said.
“For real? I thought…”
“My sister called last night. She and Carl, the ER doc she’s living with now, they’re going to get married. So I started thinking, maybe I could, too?”
“August? I don’t know…August?”
What, now he’s not ready? I thought.
Two weeks later, I came home from school and found Al slumped at the dining room table, poring over maps with several medical journals splayed open around him.
“Taking a trip?” I asked.
He looked up. “It’s Intermountain. They called. They don’t want me.”
“What did they say?”
“The young guy called, the newest partner. He said they were concerned we didn’t have family connections here, that we might not want to stay. They want to have somebody who’s ‘rooted in the community’.”
“Well…”
“He said there was a lot of Ob work here, more than enough for another practitioner at the hospital. He suggested I go into practice for myself, maybe they’d fit me in as part of their call schedule. ‘There’s always room at the top,’ he said. Sounded like he wanted moe people in the call rotation, without having to put the practice at risk by taking on a new person”
“Would you? Go into practice by yourself?” I asked.
“That would be scary. We’d have to get a bank loan to set it up, find an office, hire people, all that stuff. I’m not sure I want to be in business like that all by myself. What if it doesn’t work out, if we can’t pay it off, if people won’t come to a gentile Obstetrician?”
“So what are you going to do?” I asked.
“I’m thinking of trying to find someplace else.”
“Where will you look?” I asked.
He pulled out a medical journal, the one with the green cover. He flipped through the articles and showed me a page with four ads on it. “I’m thinking of going on a road trip to Idaho, Colorado, California, Washington. This journal has a bunch of these ads, and also the weekly Ob-Gyn newsletter. I’ll find someplace I like.”
You like? I thought. What about me, don’t I get to choose?
*******
“I drove up from San Jose through Portland, around to the Olympic Peninsula and camped at a state park.” Al was telling me about the jobs he’d looked at. In Washington State, he said he’d found something which seemed perfect.
“You went to interviews after camping in the Bus? Didn’t you want to take a shower?”
“I washed my face, under my arms. I was OK. I had a suit in the closet and everything.”
“What was it like?”
“First I went to this place called ‘Doctor’s Clinic. That was in Bremerton, on the other side of Puget Sound from Seattle. Everywhere you looked, you’d see little inlets with houses on the water, on Puget Sound. It’s where the Navy has a shipyard, and they keep old battleships, the ‘Mothball Fleet’.”
“Did you like it, like the people in the group?”
“Umm…first of all, even though it was a group practice, they expected you to buy into the group, not start out as an employee. The docs are all paid individually, based on how much work they do. Not much security. I expected a probationary period, where we check each other out, and they pay me while I get up to speed. The guy who was recruiting me talked about the last person who’d looked, and why he turned them down. He said that guy’s wife had commented wasn’t a bookstore in town. The recruiter, the head doc, said they didn’t need one, they could just take the ferry over to Seattle where they had all the big city stuff.”
I imagined a frontier town, isolated in a rain forest. Sure, there was water everywhere, but what about people, what about all the culture that makes a city exciting.
“So I don’t think I’m interested in that one. The next day, in Tacoma, the place I interviewed at, I kind of fell in love with.”
“Tacoma, what’s that like?”
“I drove over this giant suspension bridge, like the Golden Gate. The city is right on the water, and reminds me of Cincinnati, hills everywhere, trees. And a giant volcano right out of town, Mount Rainier. A ski area an hour away.”
“Mount Rainier? Isn’t that a national park?”
“Yeah, it’s huge. You know Mount Whitney, how high it is? Mount Rainier is almost as tall but starting from sea level. It goes from sea level to over 14,400 feet. Mount Whitney starts at 8,000 feet. Rainier is like this giant scoop of vanilla ice cream looming over everything, glaciers make it look like its covered with snow all year.”
I remembered the hikes we’d taken in Colorado and Idaho, how much he’d enjoyed being in the woods, hiking up to a view with a lake or a mountain. That sounded like someplace we both would enjoy, in a real city, with mountains close by.
“What is that one like, the place in Tacoma. What’s it called?”
“Group Health of Puget Sound. Like Kaiser, except it’s a cooperative, not run by a big company, but by the people, the patients who use the services. It’s a big deal – they have two hospitals, clinics all over, all the specialties.
“They’re expanding just bought a little HMO in Tacoma, now they have to staff it up. I’d be the first Obstetrician. So it’s almost as if I’m starting my own practice, except I wouldn’t have to worry about any of the business stuff. Like Kaiser, I’d just take care of the people who are signed up, not have to hire nurses or buy equipment or lease an office. Only practice medicine. And get salary, not fee-for-service.”
“That’s good?”
“I think so. Fee-for-service, you wonder, ‘Is the doctor doing this because I need it, or because he needs the money?’ If I’m on a salary, I feel like I could do the right thing without money getting in the way.”
“Now what?”
“They gave me some forms, an application to fill out, get references and everything. I’ll start doing that, send it in and then – wait.”