THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, May 16, 1995 TAG: 9505160054
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: MY FAMILY
SOURCE: BY TONY WHARTON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
THIS IS ABOUT Karen Napiantek. She happens to be married to me, but put that out of your mind. Her story is more important.
Karen grew up in Florida, the only child of working-class parents, wanting to be a doctor.
Her ambition was not that clear, even to her. And many people discouraged that notion, narrowly defining her expectations, as too often happened to girls.
How many succumb to that neglect? Certainly Karen accepted it. Instead of trying to become a doctor, she became a registered nurse, with a bachelor's degree. That was no small achievement; there were no college graduates in her immediate family until then.
She turned out to be a very good nurse. She swiftly sought out the most challenging jobs, in intensive care and cardiac care.
Ultimately, she found a job in a neonatal intensive care unit (or NICU, to medical types), among the most demanding, knowledge-intensive jobs in nursing. They shelter the fragile flame of life in babies so tiny they barely fill your hand.
Karen loved the work, its urgency, the feeling of being so vital in her patients' lives.
Still, she was restless. She had already realized nursing was not enough. By the time she and I met and started dating in 1985 (we had actually met long before then, but that's another story), her dream of practicing medicine had come back.
The process of becoming a doctor is still essentially a male one - a challenge, a trial. Medical schools require applicants to have already passed, with top grades, courses like physics and calculus, which we all know doctors do not use in practice. They are deliberate ``weeding-out'' courses. If you can pass those, the schools reason, maybe you've got what it takes.
So, after Karen and I moved to Norfolk, she began. It is unfair to call any part of this the hardest, but those years were very difficult - working long hours as a nurse, commuting to Tidewater Community College, struggling with subjects she felt no aptitude for. More than once she came home exhausted and ready to call it quits, crushed not only by the routine but by the weight of her fears and doubts.
Nothing came easily. Karen applied twice to medical school. She took the grueling admissions exam three times, never happy with the scores. And in her mind, the clock was ticking away on her dream.
Yet the question that drove her had an irresistible, elegant logic: If you don't do it, four years from now won't you be four years older anyway? You can either spend that time fighting for what you want or give up.
In 1990, on a day I vividly recall, she left the nursery, walked over to the offices of Eastern Virginia Medical School and learned she had been accepted for the class entering in 1991.
It was, obviously, a huge hurdle crossed. And it would be easy to think: ``Well, that's it. She got in. She got what she wanted.'' Yet all it did was raise the bar higher. You think physics was tough? Try five or six courses, just as hard, all at once.
I don't have the space or time to fully describe the difficulty of medical school. Perhaps it's trite, anyway. Suffice to say that probably only in the last two years has it dawned on Karen that, despite all her worst fears, she would actually realize her dream.
I will not say I never doubted it for a moment. Of course I did. I like to think I had a little more faith in her than she did.
But next Saturday morning, Karen will walk across the stage to receive her M.D. by CNB