I always thought I’d have made a great undercover agent—a detective, an investigator or a spy. So when it happened that I was involved in passing confidential messages via electronic eavesdropping and funding political dissidents in the Soviet Union, I wasn’t entirely unhappy about it.
The year 1971 was in the middle of the cold war with the Soviet Union. Daily life was infused with political jabs and propaganda from both sides. In the midst of a national atmosphere of suspicion, I received a call from a mysterious Florida physician. I wasn’t personally acquainted with him, and I had never heard of him professionally. He invited me to join a special medical mission to the Soviet Union. The stated objective of the trip was to visit and observe Soviet medical outpatient clinics. The mission was not sponsored by any organization that I was familiar with and appeared to be put together by a group of individuals about whom I knew nothing.
The Florida physician who was organizing the trip had some amazing connections in the travel industry. The cost for the trip—round-trip airfare to Moscow and then to Leningrad, all hotel and travel expenses and special travel arrangements included—would be $360 each for my wife and me. Granted, the trip would take place in the middle of the Russian winter—not exactly the height of the tourist season. Even so, this was an unbelievable offer, and I accepted. I can’t believe I was so trusting or stupid as to ask no other questions about the trip. Maybe I was afraid the bubble would burst and I would miss out on this ridiculously inexpensive opportunity. But I was so intrigued by the opportunity to visit the Soviet Union that I chose to believe it.
The arrangements grew more, not less, peculiar. There was never any written correspondence confirming plans. There were only telephone calls. The doctor was taking care of the difficult-to-obtain visas (he somehow knew that Nancy and I had active passports). Our tickets and itinerary would not be given to us until the group gathered in New York.
When we did meet in New York, I found the group even more surprising. Of the fourteen physicians in the group, I could identify only three who were true physicians. It is not always possible to tell when someone is a physician, but I can certainly tell when someone is not. One of the three true physicians was a family practitioner and part-time allergist from Wisconsin. He was as confused as I about why he was invited to join the trip. The second of the three was a surgeon from Wisconsin whom I had met briefly in my training days at Milwaukee County Hospital.
The third physician was a pathologist who was accompanied by his girlfriend. She spoke very little and seemed to disappear for hours at a time, reappearing during scheduled activities. This couple argued loudly about every possible issue, beginning with the taxicab ride to the airport. In our Moscow hotel, we could hear them scream, sometimes from passion, but more often one was beating the other. The next morning at breakfast they would have the bruises to match. Sometime after this trip, Newsweek would report that the pathologist had been indicted for murdering his sweetheart by giving her medication to simulate a diabetic coma.
We started off flying to Stockholm in the opulent, first-class section of Delta Airlines. We continued on to Moscow via the cold, impersonal and foul-smelling planes of Aeroflot, the Russian airline. I would have backed out any number of times each day because of concern over what we had gotten ourselves into, but I did not want to appear lacking in adventurous spirit. (Months later, in the safety of our home, Nancy confided to me that she would have backed out in a minute too, but didn’t want to appear weak in my eyes.) So I proceeded along like everyone else, thinking this would be a real adventure.
As we passed a checkpoint where an armed guard in his booth raised the barrier to admit us one by one, Nancy (whose comments I often compare to Gracie Allen’s), remarked, “This is just like going behind the iron curtain.” I cannot imagine anything more “behind the iron curtain” than going through the last checkpoint from the west to the east in the 1970s.
Everywhere we went, the same guide, a cold and distant woman who was the epitome of Russian bureaucracy, escorted us. We were given numerous rules about what we could and could not do: remain together, sit at the same position at the table for every meal, don’t talk freely with anyone on the street, strictly adhere to the Soviet government’s curfews and rules. We weren’t given room keys at the hotel. There was a desk and a registrar on each floor instead of just one in the lobby. After we entered our rooms, the doors were locked from the outside by the registrar.
Our schedule was rigorous. We toured a number of completely unrelated locations and activities. On one trip we might stop at a hospital clinic providing emergency service for some high-rise apartments and meet with the attending physicians there. The next visit might be to examine the structure of a bridge in which none of us non-engineers had any experience or interest. One of our “doctors,” who had no more medical training than a third grader, asked the questions. His questions were invariably about highly detailed and non-medical minutiae: “How high is the second span of the bridge?” “What relationship is that to the saline content of the water?” This went on the entire time we were there. He always carried a large wall thermometer with him. Throughout the trip he would hold up the group while he went to check the outside temperature. We thought this particularly stupid. It didn’t take a rocket scientist—or even a trained physician—to tell that it was cold outside during the winter in Russia. Two members of our party disappeared after the first day. Our guide didn’t ask about them and no explanation was offered. One of the two showed up on the airplane at the last minute, just as we were returning to the States. We never found out what happened to the other one.
I had my own special agenda for this trip. I wanted to see for myself if the stories about the persecution of Russian Jews were true. My quest was made almost impossible by the fact that we could go nowhere without a guide, and even if we could manage to get away, none of us spoke Russian.
But the surgeon from Wisconsin also had a secret that no one, especially not the trip’s organizers, knew. He could speak a little Russian. He’d picked it up during World War II and, fortunately for me, thought better of revealing this fact to our hosts.
One morning the Wisconsin surgeon and I rose very early and caught a taxi to a synagogue in a suburb of Moscow. About a dozen old men were there, making matzo for Passover. They told us in detail about the Soviet persecution of Jews. Their synagogue was allowed to remain open only as a showpiece for visitors. Had our visit been planned, they said, we would have seen quite a different picture.
We rejoined our group at breakfast. No one asked where we’d been or seemed aware at all that we had gone off by ourselves. I mentioned to our guide that I would like to see a synagogue because I had heard about a good deal of religious prejudice in the Soviet Union. She said it could be arranged for the following Saturday.
The old men were right. When we arrived at the same synagogue that Saturday, it was filled with young people. There was singing, a sermon—everyone was happy. It was the very picture of freedom of worship, but it was all a charade. I couldn’t help thinking of what the Nazis had done at Theresienstadt concentration camp: a make-believe model village was constructed to convince the outside world that the poor camp inmates were happily living in a humane environment.
The synagogue visit was the highlight of my Russian adventure, but I should not have done it, as I learned a few years later while working with an organization concerned about the oppression of Soviet Jews. Those elderly gentlemen may have put themselves at great risk by telling us what they did. They took that risk hoping that we would do something with the information, but I was not an official representative of any government and I had no role in any group that could help them. I did nothing but recount this story to friends and family over the years. I only hope that my later efforts on their behalf made up for any negative consequences of my visit.
Even in medical situations, I saw tyranny and oppression at work in the Soviet Union. We were taken to a premier hospital for children. In a group of apparently healthy children who were there for evaluation of heart murmurs, I saw a child with obvious Down’s syndrome. I asked if the retarded children were mainstreamed. The head physician said, “We do not have retardation in the Soviet Union. Down’s syndrome? It is very rare, and I didn’t see the child you mentioned.” I asked if we could see those children again so that I could point out the child. When we went back to the ward less than an hour later, the same children were there, except for the one with Down’s syndrome. It was very important at that time for the Soviets to present the perfect society, without any visible flaws. It was a chilling echo of Adolph Hitler.
Soviet medical care, it turned out, was an inexplicable blend of up-to-date research and equipment and out-of-date systems and protocols. For example, after childbirth they kept the mothers on bed rest for seven to ten days. There were marvelous, sophisticated, tertiary-care hospitals with the latest equipment, but the vast majority of medical care was given by poorly trained, inexperienced nurse practitioners. Although the Soviets kept careful accounting of medical expenditures (which they showed us), the allocation of those resources was purely political.
Of course, if I had wanted to let them know my opinion of their medical system, all I had to do was whisper it to Nancy in our hotel room. Our rooms were thoroughly bugged, as I found out one morning. I looked in the mirror to shave and saw a small electronic device looking back at me. If one of us asked a question in the seclusion of our room, the guide would answer it the next morning at breakfast. We got into the habit of writing notes to each other. I came to cherish the assumption of privacy in America that, before this trip, I’d taken for granted.
In spite of the clear message from the Soviet government and our tour leaders to obey the rules and accept on its face the picture of Soviet society as presented to us, I couldn’t stop thinking and wondering about the Soviet dissidents we Westerners had heard about. For a variety of reasons, including religious persecution, they tried to leave the country and were denied the opportunity. The very act of applying for an exit visa had, essentially, ruined their lives. These professionals from all occupations were relegated to menial jobs.
On our third night in Moscow, I contracted food poisoning. Unfortunately, it was the night our group was going to attend a performance of the Bolshoi Ballet. Nancy decided to go with the group, and I stayed behind in our hotel room. A few hours later, when I was feeling better, I decided to join the group at the ballet. That’s how I found out that our hotel room doors were locked from the outside. With enough banging on the door and shouted threats, I was released and found a driver to take me to the theater. My official guide was nowhere about. Thinking I was safely locked in, he’d probably taken an unauthorized coffee break.
By then, everyone had left the theater. Nancy and another couple from the group had gone on to a restaurant for an evening snack. When I finally caught up with her at the restaurant, she told me she had met a group of “dissidents” at a bookstore. She introduced me to Sergei, a biochemical engineer who had been relegated to a job tending a boiler in a large apartment house. Sergei was meeting some of his colleagues later that night and asked us if we would like to join them. I do not know what possessed me to go with this stranger, but the desire to meet Russian dissidents was overwhelming.
We met in the basement boiler room of a large apartment building. In very broken English, Sergei told us about how they could not speak in public to Americans or to any strangers. They got their news from the BBC. They survived the austerity of the Soviet economy through the black market, a necessary, albeit dangerous, fact of life for those emotionally imprisoned people.
I foolishly gave this group a contribution of one hundred American dollars.
The Soviets exerted fanatical control over foreign currency. When one entered the Soviet Union, the amount of money brought in was counted to the penny, and upon leaving, every penny spent had to be accounted for with receipts. Just before we were to leave the country, I realized I’d have to explain why I could not produce this money and did not have a receipt for purchases to account for the missing money. A wise foreigner in Moscow gave me some advice that ultimately kept me out of trouble: I went to a bar near the hotel where American dollars could be spent, and pretended that I was drinking quite a bit. When my bar tab reached $100, I asked for a receipt and pretended to stagger out. The Soviets accepted my explanation that I truly loved their vodka.
To this day, we do not know what actually took place on that trip. But some things we do know. There were at least one or two people in our group whom our American intelligence agencies were using for information gathering. Perhaps it was that annoying man who kept asking the ridiculously minute questions: if he became known for asking unrelated and foolish questions, perhaps he could slip in a few important questions without arousing suspicion and actually receive answers. Maybe it was the leader, who left the group for a few days. Or maybe it was the couple who disappeared the first day, with only one of them reappearing just before departure time. Maybe it was all of them! The only thing we are certain of is that it wasn’t us (although when you are in that environment for a while, you begin to wonder about yourself). The entire trip was set up so that these agents could be allowed to observe what was going on in the Soviet Union. We were fillers, extras in this real-life spy movie. Well, I’d always loved the movies.
In October 1962, the United States of America became involved in one of the most serious political and military confrontations in its history—the Cuban missile crisis. For me, this was not simply a paragraph in a history book or a news article clipped from the daily paper. I was there. (And I was also a little bleary-eyed, as Nancy and I then had three children under the age of five.)
President John F. Kennedy had announced the existence of missiles in Cuba provided by the Soviet Union and capable of striking the continental United States. Two days later, three B-52 bombers landed at Charleston’s civilian airport next to the air force base. These were Strategic Air Command (SAC) planes, which, as everyone knew, carried our major nuclear retaliatory weapons. We wanted to avoid the errors of Pearl Harbor, where our aircraft had been packed neatly together on military bases. The deployment of these planes, either in the air or at small, non-SAC bases such as Charleston, was the last stage before all-out thermonuclear war. By all indications we were truly “eyeball to eyeball” with the Soviets and their surrogates, the Cubans. We were on the brink of war.
The next morning I received a telephone call at five o’clock from the Charleston Naval Hospital, urgently requesting that I assemble a group of internal medicine specialists or general practitioners with some experience with cardiology who could take over the care of a group of very ill patients at the hospital.
In the preparations for war and the expectation of unprecedented numbers of casualties, and in the massive deployment of forces to Florida in anticipation of a Cuban invasion, no one had made plans for the disposition of the many critically ill patients already at the naval hospital. The hospital’s doctors were being sent to marine combat units, and no replacements had been identified. There were simply no medical professionals left at the hospital to care for the patients.
I was a civilian consultant to the naval hospital, a position that, most days, demanded little of me. Through my contact with Dr. William Lukash, chief of gastroenterology at the hospital and with whom I studied for my specialty board exams (and who became the personal physician to two U.S. presidents), I was called that morning to help with a desperate situation. The hospital’s beds were filled with elderly retired veterans who had chosen to live in Charleston to be close to the naval hospital. That meant that there were more truly ill patients than most hospitals of that size might handle.
I called a number of my colleagues in the community and explained the situation. They, like me, had full patient schedules, concern about malpractice potential and some had been trying to retire. Even so, not one refused to help. They all came in, and they all were desperately needed. Years later, in the aftermath of the decimation caused by Hurricane Katrina, I called upon my colleagues in Charleston to help obtain much-needed drugs from the pharmaceutical representatives when the national relief organizations fell short. In both of these situations, governmental agencies failed to provide appropriate distribution of physicians. Even after the secrets of the Cuban mis sile crisis were all told, I have not seen any revelations about the sudden withdrawal of physicians from their critically ill patients during a national emergency.
Some secrets of the cold war remain.
Sometimes the stress of those cold war years came out in other ways. Once I found myself in the middle of a bizarre incident so improbable that I never would have believed the tale if it hadn’t happened to me.
I had only been in practice about a month. I was locking up the office after seeing patients on a Saturday morning when a very distraught, well-dressed patient banged on my door yelling, “Is the doctor in? Is the doctor in?”
“I’m the doctor,” I replied. “How can I help you? Did another doctor refer you to me?”
“I don’t know what kind of doctor you are. I came into Charleston from the naval base, and I need to see a doctor—any doctor—right away.”
I asked him what his problem was, and he insisted that I must first lock the door. He asked if I was sure that no one else could hear us. Obviously I had a paranoid, mentally ill man on my hands. I tried to figure out how I could get free to call for help. Who knew what this person might do in his condition?
When the doors were locked and the window shades drawn, he told me his story.
“I’m a civilian,” he said, “a chief engineer with the navy. I help design nuclear submarines and missile carriers. I’ve just come back from a test cruise in the most advanced nuclear sub ever developed.” His position required psychiatric evaluations and follow-up, not to mention security clearances. He showed me his identification and papers. The more I talked to this man, the more I realized that every word he said was true. He was not at all mentally ill, but under a tremendous strain.
“I feel like I’m on the edge of a crackup. I need a rest, Doc, but I know too much. After what happened with the recent spy trials and exposés, if I admit how I’m feeling, my career will be over. Not only that, if the navy doesn’t lock me up, the government will be watching every move I make for the rest of my life, believe me.”
I believed him, but I doubted that anyone else would. I realized that this man, with the information he carried, would be of invaluable help to our enemies, and therefore an ideal kidnap candidate. I was very concerned. If I called the local police or the FBI, they probably would just send him right back to the navy, where he was sure he should not go. And I wasn’t sure what this might do to the navy’s—or any security agency’s—opinion of me, no matter how accidental I knew my involvement to be. I’d probably end up sharing a mental ward with my new patient.
My thinking was getting a bit paranoid, in tandem with that of my patient. But the atmosphere of the times fostered suspicion, even of our own government, regardless of our constitutional rights.
Things got worse: the man began to suffer a severe anxiety attack, with a true psychotic panic. I had no nursing staff with me and I was alone in the office, but I gave him an intravenous sedative, and he promptly went to sleep on my sofa. I locked the doors every way I could and tried to keep pinching myself to make sure that this wasn’t some dream after a Saturday afternoon B-movie.
Then I had an idea that proved to be my salvation. I called one of my patients, a boyhood friend who was now a local FBI agent. Because he knew me to be a reasonable person, he believed my story. Within an hour, three agents came to the office, and I turned my patient over to them. Officially, I never learned what happened. Unofficially, the man wrote me a note with two words on it: Thank you. He delivered this letter in person. Shortly after his visit I received a beautiful photograph, which had been security cleared, of one of the newest submarines in our fleet, as a gift for my son. I could not tell that story until after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
There were other times when the cold war, or its side effects, invaded the homefront. In the 1980s, we still were very concerned about the power and instability of the Soviet Union, and Charleston, with its naval base and shipyard, was the homeport for much of our submarine nuclear force.
I was still a consultant to the navy, and so received another urgent call from the naval hospital. One of our most advanced nuclear submarines had recently embarked on a two-month deployment to an undisclosed part of the world. The wife of a crewmember had become ill; she might have been coming down with chicken pox. This would not seem on the surface to be a major crisis for the navy. But her husband, apparently, had never been exposed, and surprisingly, a number of the male crew, according to their naval health records, had never had chicken pox. The navy was looking at the very real possibility of an epidemic of chicken pox on a nuclear submarine in the middle of the cold war.
There was at least one clear solution to the problem—bring the sub back to port. But things are never that simple in the navy. In those days, communication with these vessels was one way. When on a mission, the sub could receive messages but could not break radio silence by responding. Chicken pox in adults is far more severe than in children, and if there were an outbreak onboard, naval command would not be able to help. Even more critical, recalling the sub would create a hole in the country’s nuclear defense network. Every resource, from the Strategic Air Command on down, would have to be redirected at huge expense, not to mention difficulty and confusion.
The naval command needed to know if the crewman’s wife was in the early stages of chicken pox. Not only had I never seen an adult case of chicken pox, but I was not trained to diagnose its early stages in an adult. This was one hell of a responsibility to thrust upon a non-active-duty navy physician.
I called my infectious disease consultant at the Medical University of South Carolina, as well as two pediatricians with whom I had professional relationships, but none of them could help me. When chicken pox is fully developed, there’s no question about what it is, but an early diagnosis is difficult to make. The poor woman was shuttled by ambulance from one physician to another, while I updated the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery every thirty minutes.
The experts were evenly divided: half thought they were seeing early-stage chicken pox, and the other half thought not. The final decision rested with me. I recalled the submarine.
The next morning, the crewman’s wife was covered with the unmistakable blisters of chicken pox, and when the submarine arrived back in port, there were, indeed, several cases onboard. I don’t know how much it cost the navy to recall that ship, either in dollars or defense, and I don’t care. I’m just glad I made the right decision.
The intersection with the Soviet Union happened in many areas of my life in those days. I was president of the Charleston Jewish Welfare Committee and very involved in helping Jews leave Russia, where they were persecuted because of their religion. Soviet Jews came to many communities in America and we adopted some of them into our community in Charleston. They were hard workers, and did any job offered them. I was very interested in their conditions in the Soviet Union. Had they really been mistreated, or was their coming to our country more a matter of economics than of religion? Why did they all not go to Israel? Many would simply go to Israel to get out of Russia and then would come to the United States. Were they honest about their reasons for leaving Russia?
Through my involvement with the Jewish community of Charleston, I was invited to a briefing from Thomas G., then a senior representative of the American Bar Association, who had been chosen as an independent observer to evaluate the treatment of religious groups in the Soviet Union. He was not Jewish and presumably would be completely impartial. He told his listeners the following story, which was validated by his co-presenter, an ex-CIA agent.
On the airplane leaving the United States, Thomas and his two staff members met a very delightful, newly married couple on their way to Moscow as tourists. The couple chose this honeymoon trip because the husband was newly employed by the State Department and thought this would be good experience. Significantly, his wife spoke Russian. Thomas thought her skill would be of great help to him in finding out what was really going on within the tightly controlled Soviet Union.
On the other hand, Thomas knew that if this couple were to travel with him, they would quickly be identified by Soviet intelligence, which could be disastrous for the young husband’s career. He might be blacklisted from returning to work in the Soviet Union. A moral dilemma ensued: should they befriend this young couple and use them to get information or, recognizing that this would be dangerous for them, simply drop the acquaintance? After careful consideration, Thomas G. decided to befriend this young couple while in Russia.
Together, Thomas, his staff and the young couple visited private homes where tourists could not normally go. They saw (and heard, with the newlywed translators) how oppressive the old Soviet Union was and how persecuted religion was in Russia at that time. The frightening stories were all true.
The observation team used the couple, indeed: they paid for dinners, provided transportation and hotels. They spent the entire two-week trip in one another’s company.
Back in the United States, Thomas was called to Washington for a formal debriefing. He asked the couple to attend. In addition, the CIA and other governmental agencies were there, as well as an Israeli Mossad officer. As he came into the room, the Israeli introduced himself and exclaimed, “Oh, I see you’ve met our two Mossad agents.”
That chance meeting between the young couple and the representative of the American Bar Association had been well orchestrated in advance. The Israelis as well as the Jewish religious leadership in America wanted to be certain that this independent observer was given an opportunity to meet people who could show him the reality of the situation in the Soviet Union at that time. The observer, as he told us the story, added that in his opinion, all parties to the trip had been “well used.”
And it answered my question: apparently the refuseniks were sincere in their desire to leave Russia for reasons other than economic. As I drove home that night, I reflected on the interesting way each of the parties in this tale had used each other. I appreciate a good O. Henry story, and this tale seemed like a good one. But the story wasn’t finished.
A few years later—this time during my presidency of the American College of Allergy—I was invited by Pfizer Pharmaceutical Company to the President’s Forum, which is a meeting for the exchange of ideas between the various presidents of all of the national medical societies. The forum always invited interesting speakers. This time it was an ex-KGB agent who had defected to the West.
After the lecture, I told him gleefully how we ordinary people had outfoxed the KGB and how the fact-finding committee of the American Bar Association had used the Israelis who, in turn, used them. I explained to the Russian ex-spook and KGB graduate that were he an American, he would have agreed that this was a good O. Henry story.
The man smiled. He remarked that a good KGB agent would naturally know the enemy’s literature: he agreed that this was, indeed, a good O. Henry story. Then he proceeded to tell me his version of the story. This man claimed that he not only remembered hearing about the visitors I mentioned; he said that he was assigned to make sure that both groups saw exactly what the Soviets wanted them to see. Furthermore, he claimed that the KGB knew in advance that Mossad had arranged for the young travelers to meet. According to his version, while the observer and Mossad both thought they had outfoxed the Soviets, the Soviets were outfoxing them. Who knows the real version?
This I do know: O. Henry was probably enjoying the whole show from his front-row seat in heaven.
In the late 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I made another trip to Russia, this time as an invited speaker. By then, the country was in financial decline and organized crime was flourishing. It happened that the Russian mafia often sponsored scientific meetings in Russia. These gangsters managed to have legitimate professional and social functions, such as conventions, brought to large Russian cities, and they provided the honoraria for international speakers. The hotel business, transportation and all the other profits from conventions slipped back into the hands of these thugs. One always knew when the invitation came indirectly from the Russian mafia: the honoraria were always paid in crisp $100 bills left in an envelope on the bed.
On one of these speaking trips, in 1998, I was asked to lecture on cat allergy. I don’t know if there are any scientific studies to back me up, but I’ve observed that those who love cats the most are the most allergic to them. I have had the unpleasant duty of advising patients to give away their cats; it’s like asking a parent to put up a child for adoption. In the 1980s, researchers proved that cat allergy is caused by the dander of the cat. Allergy sufferers are more allergic to male cats than to female cats because the allergic material in the dander and saliva of the cat is hormone-related. In many cases, castration of the cat helps to decrease the cat’s allergic effect, and many cat lovers have been able to tolerate their cats despite their allergy to them. This was a major breakthrough in environmental control for asthmatic patients.
The meeting was held in the Kremlin. More than a thousand Russian physicians were invited by sponsoring pharmaceutical companies. The audience was given a dinner and unlimited vodka. When it came time for me to give my lecture, I found myself facing an unruly, anti-American audience more interested in commenting on the recent Monica Lewinsky affair than on my scientific presentation. Many ribald remarks were made about President Bill Clinton and his indiscretions. Regardless of my political feelings, it was very uncomfortable to have these Russians insult America this way, and after almost an hour of watching my audience bang on the tables with their shoes, a la Khrushchev, and hearing rude jokes about the United States, I’m afraid I got angry.
I asked the projectionist to put the first slide up to begin the lecture. Unfortunately, the first slide’s headline read: “If the cat becomes intolerable, CASTRATE him.” The audience screamed with laughter, assuming I was joining in the Lewinsky joke. I could only stand there with a Jack Benny expression on my face and think to myself that we were foolish to worry about these people acting so stupidly for almost fifty years. In fact, when I received my post-lecture assessment, I had the highest grade for my “humorous” presentation.
If those Russian physicians never figured out how to help their allergic patients it was their own damn fault.
Cat allergy, though, is serious business. Often we simply are unable to separate the beloved cat and allergic owner. We then have no alternative but to give the patient allergy shots to build up her immunity to the cat. Recently, after explaining the process in great detail to a patient, she came back the following week for her first allergy shot carrying her cat in her arms. My entire office—crowded waiting room, receptionists and assistants—erupted. The patient was rushed back to my office for a stern lecture on the inappropriateness of taking a cat into an allergist’s office.
“But, Doctor,” said the patient, “if I don’t bring Ginger in with me, how will she receive her allergy shot?” Perhaps she should be forgiven her ignorance. Her PhD was only in nuclear physics.