THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501271094
SECTION: HAMPTON ROADS WOMAN PAGE: 4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY DIANE TENNANT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 179 lines
AS A YOUNG girl, Melissa Warfield wanted to be an artist, carving wood with her hands. As a college student, she wanted to be a surgeon, working miracles with a scalpel.
Instead, she put her hands to work as a pediatrician, specializing in children's cancer and blood diseases. And with her hands, and her heart, and the strength of her personality, she shaped the region's first hospital for children, then its residency program for medical students, then its hematology/oncology unit. And finally, she took on life and death, creating an ethics committee at the hospital and an ethics course at the medical school.
At age 65, Dr. Melissa Warfield has called it quits - sort of. She still has an office at Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters, and she sits on the ethics committees of three medical facilities.
But now she's ready to take up that knife in a big way. The amateur artist looks hopefully toward small-scale sales of her wood carvings, the culmination of a childhood dream. No one who knows her has a doubt that she will succeed.
All she has to do, they say, is get her hands on it.
Dr. Melissa Warfield, newly retired, stood outside the electronic-sensored, automatic-opening doors of the eight-story Children's Hospital and watched a young boy in a wheelchair go inside. Thirty-five years earlier, she stood outside the doors of a much humbler facility, but the purpose was the same: sick children went in, seeking help. For a long time, Warfield was the only person they could turn to.
``The goals of the King's Daughters were to not have to send any child out of this area because they couldn't get the appropriate treatment here,'' Warfield explained. ``I was the only full-time doctor for some years before we finally got some help.''
Warfield began her medical career at the York Street Clinic, the precursor of Children's Hospital. Operated by the charitable Norfolk City Union of The King's Daughters, it opened its doors to the indigent and poor. Warfield started at age 12 by counting laundry.
She was interested in the clinic's work, but she wanted to be an artist. Her mother suggested she find a profession that would pay. So she studied medicine, with an eye on the operating room.
``Pediatrics hadn't been that much fun in medical school,'' Warfield said. ``Actually, I kind of liked surgery.
``When I got to be an intern, I discovered that kids were more fun. . . and that standing around in surgery could be kind of boring.''
She graduated from Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1955. In those days, women surgeons were not the norm. Warfield never really considered bucking the trend. ``I didn't really have anything to prove,'' she said. ``I wanted to take care of sick people.''
So she returned home, and took up the mission of The King's Daughters. When the clinic metamorphosed into a children's hospital, in 1961, Warfield moved with it.
Only once did she consider leaving CHKD. Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, where Warfield had done her own residency and where her mentor worked, called her for an interview. Stay here, her mentor urged. CHKD isn't even accredited. Warfield knew what she had to do.
``It wasn't just a job,'' she said. Warfield came back to Norfolk and set her sights on gaining national accreditation for CHKD and opening a nationally recognized medical residency program.
When those were achieved in the early to mid-1960s, she became director of the residency program. Not until she stepped down from that position, in 1979, did the hospital organize a department in her specialty: cancer and blood diseases. Now the department has four doctors and a full staff, including social workers and chaplains, but the field has changed dramatically over the past 35 years.
``All the children died, unless they had removable tumors, when I first went into it,'' Warfield said. ``There are still some very sad things with taking care of those patients with very serious illnesses, but it's gotten better.
``It became a progressively more hopeful field.''
Warfield lives in the house her parents bought in 1942, a tall, white house overlooking a marsh and its flying occupants: great blue herons, egrets, jets.
She pauses in conversation while the jet roar fades away. Since her father died, she has had the house to herself. ``I have no family at all,'' she says matter-of-factly. But she doesn't lack for love.
Her patients from years past still write. The parents whose children died still stay in touch.
``I even get Christmas cards from parents whose kids died 20 years ago, as well as wedding invitations for people who survived,'' she said.
Her Christmas tree is decorated with mementoes: brass silhouettes with the names of patients engraved on the side, crocheted wreaths with children's photos in the center. ``Some of my Christmas tree hanging is sort of a memorial because some of those children don't exist anymore,'' Warfield said. ``You sort of get a tear in your eye when you hang the ornaments.''
Warfield doesn't seem the sort to get tears in her eyes. Crusty, some colleagues call her. Tough, others say. Not many of her patients would say so. She loves the human side of medicine, the part that she fears will be lost in an era of managed health care and reform.
``That's sad,'' she said. ``The continuing relationship with the patient and the family that you have in the long term, there may not be that kind of long-term relationship anymore. Those are the things that soften the having to come in at 3 o'clock in the morning or losing the children, the bad things that happen. It's because you get this wonderful feedback. I'm afraid it (medicine) is getting to be a business proposition and that's sad.''
Warfield quit doing clinical work about five years ago, and moved into an area that was, again, just in its infancy - bioethics. It was a topic that occurred to her over and over as she worked with terminally ill children.
``Over these years,'' she said, ``you can imagine wondering when is the time to quit, if the patient's not going to get well.''
She went back to school, becoming the first Virginia fellow at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia. She followed it with courses at Georgetown University.
She became the ethics course director at Eastern Virginia Medical School, and established a committee at Children's Hospital to educate the staff and to consider troubling cases.
``We're not a hospital police,'' she said. ``The committee recommends, but by the time all aspects of the case are on the table, the answer is obvious.''
The committee helps write hospital policy on topics such as when to resuscitate, when to withdraw treatment and how to medicate for pain. There is more to be done, Warfield said, and in a larger playing field than just CHKD. Education is the key.
``We ought to be talking about assisted suicide before we have a referendum on it,'' she said. ``People run for `yes' or `no' placards without thinking.''
She took a sip from the mug on her desk. ``Don't take life too seriously,'' was written on the side. ``It isn't permanent.''
Warfield has put aside her white lab coat for now, but her hospital ID card remains clipped to the lapel of her flowered jacket. It dangles next to a mahogany pendant on a narrow leather string, a five-pointed leaf carved in relief.
``It isn't a marijuana leaf,'' she noted, rubbing it between her fingers. ``It's a sweet gum leaf.''
Warfield knows. She carved it herself. Woodcarving is a dream she has had since childhood, when her mother gave her a knife bearing the Girl Scout emblem to ease the child's disappointment at not being able to join the Brownies.
``So I made a series of boats that floated upside down, and letter openers - I got kinda good at that.''
But, she adds with a wry smile, ``If I were terribly good at it, a Michelangelo, I wouldn't be making my living at medicine.''
Warfield carves animals - dogs, birds, deer, ponies - in styles from realism to art deco. One of her favorite subjects is gnomes, and she has a veritable parade of bearded little men sharing her house. She carved - ``whittled'' is a better word, she claims - a five-level creche with a windmill on top that causes each carved figure to rotate.
Retirement, she hopes, will give her time to travel and do a little carving. ``Actually,'' she confessed, ``I hope it will be a lot of woodcarving. I like that.''
Maybe, she says, a few pieces might sell. ``It would be nice to sell enough stuff that you didn't feel guilty about buying the supplies,'' but she really wants to make a lot of gifts, pieces she always wanted to carve for friends but never had time to do. And she really, really wants to make a Noah's ark, and carousel animals.
Completing those dreams may depend, in large part, on how difficult it is for her to carve retirement out of a lifetime of service.
As she stood outside the hospital, the boy in the wheelchair went past. The words carved in the hospital wall could be read over Warfield's shoulder:
``This Hospital is dedicated to the generosity of those who seek to labor, not for self, but for others.''
In the eyes of the countless patients she touched, Melissa Warfield carved those words, not with her hands, but with 35 years of service. ILLUSTRATION: [Cover]
EYE ON THE FUTURE
[Color Photos]
MOTOYA NAKAMURA/Staff photos
Dr. Melissa Warfield, who retired from Children's Hospital of The
King's Daughters, has been carving wooden figures since she was a
little girl. She "whittles" animals and her favorite subject:
gnomes.
Warfield, 65, stands outside CHKD, which she helped build into an
accredited institution with a hematology/oncology unit.
Warfield hopes to spend much of her retirement carving. She has
crafted a creche with a windmill that rotates each figure.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE by CNB