I hope all of our family of patients are well, as vaccines and natural immunity create positive change in the Covid-19 pandemic that has upended our lives in such profound ways for over a year now. Winston Churchill's words from November 10, 1942 come to mind: "Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
It is now with a fair measure of sadness that I must announce that our Dr. Dena Feinberg has left our practice, to take a position at the Wilmington Veterans Administration Hospital.
Dr. Feinberg completed her residency at the Lebanon V.A., after graduating from Temple University of Dentistry. When her former mentors reached out to her about opportunities in the V.A. system, she felt the call. On this Memorial Day weekend, one can do no better than to reflect upon the excellence of such service, and upon the professional fulfillment to be found in the service of our nation's veterans.
My Dad served in World War II, in the U.S. Army. He was first in Mourmelon-le-Grand, France, a small town near Rheims. Later in the conflict, he served in an army hospital in Marseilles. I always imagined this looking rather like the medical compound in the T.V. show M.A.S.H., but the scale of WWII was always immense. I've seen his photos of the hospital he worked in--it was most of the city of Marseilles at the time.
Dad, not a medical person, didn't say much about his service there but he did state several times to me that the most upsetting wounds he witnessed were the burns that tank crews sometimes suffered.
My Dad passed away on Memorial Day weekend of 2017. He had developed aspirational pneumonia, a failure of the muscles of the esophagus that is, unfortunately, untreatable by modern medical science. During my many visits to him during this difficult time, I came to understand that the story of his voyage across the North Atlantic in November of 1944 had a far more profound effect upon him than I had realized earlier in my life. You see, his convoy was attacked by German U-boats. Torpedo tracks streamed through the water at 30 knots. The Liberty ships carrying thousands of American troops (there's one preserved in Baltimore's Inner Harbor) were only capable of 11 knots, and zig-zagged frantically in evasive action. And in my Dad's evocative turn of phrase, "Our escorting destroyers were launching depth charges off their fantails, one after another after another."
This all certainly sounds scary. And yet, until my Dad was at this end-of-life phase, I never realized just how deeply the memory of this U-Boat attack had affected him, his whole life long. That 24-year-old boy of yesteryear was absolutely, abjectly terrified of drowning in the icy waters of the North Atlantic because of a U-boat's torpedo impacting the thin steel hull of his Liberty ship.
The fact that I'm here writing to you all is sufficient proof that this particular tragedy did not happen. But there's so much more ...
When I was a kid, my Dad bought a Sunfish, a small fiberglass sailboat, which I still have. And then, bitten by the sailing bug, he built a GP14 from a kit, a magnificent jib-and-mainsail dinghy made of mahogany, teak and spruce. Our boat was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, growing up. And once built, we sailed our GP14 together all over the northern Chesapeake and Little Egg Harbor at Long Beach Island. On the fresh and salty waters of home, we shared the best father-son experiences a lad could ever hope for.
What never occurred to me until 2017 was this: Here was a man who was haunted his entire adult life by a dark terror in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic that had almost ended his life in November 1944. And yet, he took to sailing like a natural; my Dad (a superb jazz drummer) was as comfortable and confident on the open water as he was at his drum set or in his easy chair, listening to his beloved Big Bands like Count Basie and Harry James and Ted Heath.
What strikes me most about all this is: every veteran I've ever met has a similar story of a severe wartime trauma, and then a quietly inspiring story of overcoming that trauma in civilian life in some way or other.
Each of us has faced something terrible in the course of our lives; perhaps more than one something terrible. To me, the lesson here is that the human spirit can overcome incredible challenges and just ... keep pressing on. My hope is that my Dad's efforts to overcome will serve as a gentle reminder to you all that you are incredibly strong, and can push through this pandemic and whatever other challenges you may face in the course of your lives.
Godspeed, Dr. Dena Feinberg, and thank you for serving our veterans.
Rick Wilson, DMD
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