Inspired To Heal
Stories of clinicians, educators, innovators, and researchers who built or led programs of excellence in government health institutions. Each guest has excelled in clinical medicine, program building, or public health. They persevered and succeeded through a clear vision, collaboration, and a passion for the mission of government-run health systems. Their stories will inspire those seeking change in their own organizations.
Inspired To Heal
Healthcare Behind Bars & Beyond Borders (Part 1)
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In Part 1, Dr. Jack Raba recounts his transformative high-school volunteer experience at Cook County Hospital, his return to Cook County as a student at Northwestern Medical School. Seeking to build clinical confidence, he took a year off to work in hospitals in Mexico and Guatemala. As a physician-in-training at Cook County Hospital, he and his colleagues grappled with the ethical dilemma of physicians going on strike. Hear about the brief incarceration of the strike organizers and Jack’s accidental escape from Cook County Jail.
Epilogue provided by Ken Brucks, longtime friend and sometimes rival on Christ the King basketball courts.
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Introduction
SPEAKER_02Welcome to Inspired to Heal, where I interview innovators, educators, clinicians, and leaders in government-run health institutions. Season one focuses on former staff at Cook County Hospital, Chicago's SafetyNet Health System. I'm Bill Trick, your host for Inspired to Heal. Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Jack Raba. I worked with Jack as a doctor at Cook County Hospital, and I always found him humble and approachable, and only later did I realize what an adventurous life that he had led. I've split this podcast into two parts. You are listening to part one, which includes his early life through residency and his detention and escape from Cook County Jail, and then his first year as a doctor in Alaska and Guatemala. In this episode, you will hear the following medical terms. PT PTT is a blood test to determine how long it takes for the blood to climb. It helps the healthcare team make decisions about whether a patient's blood is too thin and they are at high risk for bleeding. A CBC is a complete blood count. The three major components of a CBC are your white count, or WBC, which are the cells that are used to fight infection, a hemoglobin concentration, which lets the doctors know if your blood count is too high, which can cause problems with clotting or too low, which is anemia, and a platelet count, which if too low puts a patient at risk for bleeding. The medicine cumidin is mentioned. It's also called warfarin, and it's an oral medication used to prevent blood clotting in patients who have a high risk for having blood clots. In part two, he returns as the medical director for Cook County Jail. Jack, welcome to Inspired to Heal and great to have you on the show.
SPEAKER_01Thanks, Bill. It's a pleasure to be able to talk with you. So it's good to see you again, too.
SPEAKER_02I'm going to start with your upbringing and
Cook County Hospital Beckons & Abortion Rights
SPEAKER_02the life events that led you to a career at Cook County.
SPEAKER_01Sure. So I grew up on the south side of Chicago. I was uh born at St. Bernard's and my parents lived in an apartment that was demolished by eminent domain so that Dan Ryan could be built. I then moved to the southwest side of Chicago with my family. I went to a high school that really encouraged junior and seniors in high school to do something of service. You pick it, it wasn't graded, it wasn't mandated, but it was so strongly encouraged that three friends of mine and I would catch up Western Avenue bus and head up toward Cook County Hospital as juniors and seniors. We had no appointments, we had no chaperone. We just walked in. It was a different time. Security was zero. And the elevator operator, our first visit, said, What do you want to do? He was our gate control. And I said, We'd like to just sit and chat with people who are sick. Where can we go? And he took us up to ward 24. Years later, that's the ward I was my first rotation as an intern at County Hospital. I can visualize it to this day, and I actually have pictures from 19 oh early 40s, that old pictures of counties wards, and that's exactly what it looked like in 1964-65. Four rows of metal beds, a wide open ward, crowded beyond belief. You had to hop over one bed to get to talk to another man. It was just informal chatting. We weren't preaching, we weren't selling anything. The ward looked like something that was not what I was used to. I'd been in the hospital myself once or twice as a child. This place looked different. It looked shabby and it looked crowded, and it it lacked privacy. There were no barriers to sound, no barriers to view. So it made a huge impression upon me, and it that visual memory stuck with me forever. At first year college, I was studying to be a Catholic priest, and I was bused down to a parish right across the Eisenhower from Cook County Hospital. And all I had to do was visit a family once a week for a couple hours. I didn't have to teach them anything. I could do whatever I wanted, and I just tutored the young children in this Puerto Rican family. But as I got off the bus every time I could look across and see the county hospital as it was, and it brought back that memory over and over again. Eventually I changed my mind about being a priest, decided to focus on the physical needs, not spiritual needs of whoever I worked for or with. I eventually got in Northwestern Med School, and there were a number of service projects that we were involved with, giving diphtheria shots. It again showed me neighborhoods of need that I had not seen in my growing up. I think what really formally made me decide that there was no other place I was going to go for residency, but Cook County was a third-year medical school rotation when I was assigned to the obstetrical unit to help with deliveries for a month. I'm sure I delivered around 50, 60 women that month in a very unusual setting where there was no family to support the women. They did early labor on a ward, were shifted over to a labor line, and the women were, as they started to crown, they would move down the hallway, and I would deliver under the supervision of a third-year Obi-Gaini resident. When I showed up there the first day, I was supposed to meet the chairman, Dr. Augusta Webster, and nobody showed. You know, Gregory Pack out. Finally, this older gentleman with a long white coat with a little limp walked toward me and by me, and then he turned around and said, What are you doing here? And I mentioned I was waiting for Dr. Webster, and he said, She's in the operating room. Come with me. And we went down through the tunnels that I had never seen before. We walked to the morgue and we walked into the autopsy room. Lying on the table was the body of a 14-year-old girl. The pathologist had made the abdominal incision moments before we walked in. As we walked in, pus was oozing out of the belly along the surgical incision. And Dr. Lash looked at me and said, almost a quote, he said, This is why our society must provide safe abortion services to all women, but especially to poor women. At that point on I was going to county hospital. There was just no way after I would go after what I've seen in the wards and seeing these issues about safety and and I I think it just uh forever impressed me that there were people concerned and willing to take the extra step to make people safe. And it also changed tremendously my viewpoint is the tyranny of and can be when you see a horrible, horrible abortion, a backdoor abortion like that, an illegal abortion at that time. And I don't think I mentioned that, but the cause of the septic peritonitis was a perforated uterus from a botched backdoor abortion. And that changed my mind on women's reproductive rights, no matter what my f religious background might or might not have been. It just made it really clear we needed choice, not bans and barriers to abortion. When the time came for me to put my name on the choice of what's my ranking of residencies, it was Cook County Hospital. I had a few others down there, but I would have rejected them. And I had already known I was going there. So that's why I ended up at Cook County Hospital. Jack, what was the year or the decade that we're talking about? It would be about 1972. I think I was the only medical student Northwestern who chose to go to Cook County for that rotation. That summer there was an opportunity to work at the Chicago Maternity Center on Maxwell Street, which did home deliveries. I would go out with a very experienced Obi-Gany nurse. We would go into the homes and we'd deliver women on a kitchen table at their house. I did the delivery, and the nurses were highly respectful of letting me do the work. It was anxiety-provoking, not because we were in some of the rougher neighborhoods and projects and carried our bags up 12, 14 flights to get to some of the rooms where women were in labor. But I knew that something could go wrong, and I certainly wasn't a full-fledged obstetrician when I was on call there. You'd spend 24 hours every other day for the summer. I would go up to the third floor of the maternity center and practice placing forceps on a doll's head, so I knew how to do it when it happened. And indeed, there were four or five times that I had to use forceps, and it really brought me into neighborhoods I had not seen. And those were the same people who were using Cook County Hospital. And it just wedged in my mind that I knew who I was going to serve, and it um there was no other place but Cook County.
SPEAKER_02Going from studying to be a uh a priest in the Catholic Church to seeing the reality of a 14-year-old who had died from an abortion, was it that one singular event that really made you feel that having safe access to abortions was the right thing for our society?
SPEAKER_01You know, I think at that point in my life, I virtually had no knowledge about the magnitude or the access to or non-access to abortion that was occurring in the United States. I think there's a life of a neighborhood where I wouldn't have known about abortion. I don't remember it being talked about. I don't even remember, even during the six years I was in the seminary, four of high school and two of college, that it even came up. It wasn't an issue. This may have been the first moment that it dawned on me that this lack of access to care had major morbidity mortality issues for a population of need. And when Lash said, you know, he said it pretty clearly that especially poor women were at risk for this, for having the illegal, botched, unprofessional, unsafe abortion. That was early on in my life and my eyes were still being opened, and I'm still was pretty innocent in many ways. I think it was slightly more innocent time. At some point I decided I was more suited to do something else besides being a priest. I transferred him to Michigan and got in Northwestern. I still to this day think I was lucky to get in. I think now the people with the grades I had wouldn't be accepted in med school. I have no idea why I was selected. Maybe it was part of the service that I was engaged with in high school and college, maybe.
SPEAKER_02Well, we're fortunate that you did get in and that you did have that exposure to Cook County, which was, as you mentioned, service for your high school. And that public service led you into a career that I'm guessing you have no regrets.
SPEAKER_01I have no regrets. Lots of things happen by accident in your life, or maybe you're in position to make a choice. I think many opportunities opened up only because of experiences that I've had up to that point. Going to County was a major experience for me, and I never regretted one day there, even though I will tell you the dean at Northwestern clearly said you're wasting your career. Why are you going there? It's not that I was their stellar student.
Medical School Sabbatical in Mexico
SPEAKER_01Bill, I also took a year off from med school, which is another interesting argument. Uh the dean was very clear he didn't want that to happen. And I thought it was because he was worried about me not coming back or losing some skills. He told me very clearly, you're if you're not back within a year, you're out of here. What I did was hitchhiked to Mexico, learned Spanish, talked my way into a job at a Red Cross hospital in Cuernavaca, translated for English speaking patients. Eventually, even though I was really had only barely finished my third year of med school, I eventually they put me to work in their emergency room. It's I kind of hard to believe, right? What I got good at doing was just basic suturing and things in the emergency room. It I ended up sewing back on 14 ears when I was in that emergency room, and it turned out that some of the young men who came in from rural areas to work in Cornovaca would uh get a little drunk on the weekend, and if someone insulted your wife or daughter or sister, they cut off your a person's ear. Seemed like every weekend I was sewing two ears back on, and thank God they didn't come back because I don't know how many of those ears really made it. But getting to Cornavaca allowed me to hear about the Bearhorse Clinic in Guatemala that I'll tell you about later, or now a couple that had been down in Guatemala had gotten sick and gone to this clinic in Chima Tanango, and they said there's a doctor who is overwhelmed. I wrote a letter immediately down to Carol Bearhorst, and he said, Come on down. Within a week, I was down there. He had 110 bed hospitals staffed by himself and around. This is not an exaggeration, 100 to 200 patients a day in the outpatient clinic. His notes weren't long, as you might guess. And the reason I took time off Northwestern, I didn't think I was ready to be a resident. I didn't think I had the confidence yet to be a resident. First day, he said, your job is to make rounds on patients twice a day in this 110-bed, very simple, basic hospital. He said the clinic will overwhelm me. If you have any problem, just come up and grab me and I'll come down. So there I was, the guy who lacked confidence making rounds on 110 patients, hoping that not anybody died. I think everybody learns that in their own way, that even if you aren't sure of what the right thing to do is, be diligent, keep going back. If things don't work, you change the course of treatment, you get help. I got extremely confident. I hadn't even got into senior year. That was an international experience that I wish I could tell every medical student, as much as you think over you're overwhelmed and you're not going to be good enough, you do get better with time as long as you're diligent and conscientious, is more important than having the best mind in the world. Don't tell patients that they think it's probably the other way around, but it really is. And thank God the body does heal itself. This was a Cachikele tribe or a clan of the Mayans. And they wouldn't go to the Spanish hospital in Guatemala City because they were still the conquistadors. They still had fear of them. If they were going to die, I had to let the family know. Otherwise, I had to personally pay for their funeral. And that was like five dollars bill. Don't but that was a lot to them. But it was pressure to let them know that we can't do any more. Bring grandpa home. It was a great six months. I learned a lot. Whatever you've talked to people about doing international medicine, uh they're not saving that population of people. Maybe the surgeons can change people's life, but I think you you learn a lot, maybe more than we offer. It does allow you to compare what happens in the United States to what happens in other countries and what really impacts on health.
SPEAKER_02It sounds like a year away from medical school was one of the most impactful parts of your career, and you learn more during that year than you probably did in the other three years of medical school.
SPEAKER_01I think that's true, and confidence has a lot to do with what you feel about your skills. I don't want to say that I walked out of uh Northwestern afraid or depressed. I wasn't. I didn't feel I was ready to go to Cook County Hospital. I wasn't ready to do what I thought an intern had to do. Those experiences were extremely useful for me.
SPEAKER_02When I hear about your experiences, and I know about the time that this was, it makes me feel that you have a mix of inspirations from maybe Albert Schweitzer to uh Jack Kerouac. Is it possible there was a little beat generation in you, or was this all really about the service?
SPEAKER_01I think it was about the service. I know it was a different time, but I was a pretty innocent, straightforward person. I don't think anybody would call me a beat pick. Maybe the day I came home with my hair a half an inch long and my dad said, Go get your haircut, you know, that may have been a that may have been about that. Albert Schweitzer was somewhat of a role model, but as I read more about Schweitzer, I realized, and and I people wrote about that too, that he did a great job in Africa. It was a great service to many people. But those who know public health said the minute he left, everything went back to the way it was before. I think it was sobering to me that we should never brag about what we do in whatever setting we're at. We help people one at a time, maybe, and maybe we count on people like your wife and others to hopefully make some major public health changes in this country and world so that people wouldn't have to seek out the care of a physician as often or if at all for certain problems. So I think I became more public health-minded by going to other countries too.
Eminent Domain in Chicago
SPEAKER_02The other historical event that you mentioned was eminent domain and the destruction of your neighborhood. Were you old enough to have an awareness of what was happening and ha how that felt to you and your neighbors?
SPEAKER_01No, I was way too young. I was four years old when the apartment building got knocked down. I didn't have that sense of what the impact would have been on the neighborhood. I mean, as we know now, even from uh learning about the riot at Tulsa, how eventually they ran their highways through black neighborhoods and divided neighborhoods and destroyed neighborhoods that existed and without any real input from the community, with zero input from communities. And we probably did it ourselves with the Eisenhower and with the Dan Ryan. Sometimes I think now driving through those routes, once in a while you see it make a curve that it shouldn't make a curve, and you wonder whose home or whose church would have been affected, and they modified it just to get around that one area. I don't think that happened in black and poor neighborhoods. I think they just went through them, period.
SPEAKER_02Right. One of your interesting experiences that I've heard you talk about was being in the union
Housestaff Union: Cook County Jail Incarceration & Escape
SPEAKER_02and how that eventually led to your incarceration at Cook County Jail.
SPEAKER_01I just again I want to say that I was pretty innocent about issues. I had no one in the family who at that point was in a union or or had been in a union. I s was in a neighborhood on the south side where there were a lot of city workers, and they were in the unions. That didn't uh seem to have any impact on me at that point of my life. But when I got to Cook County Hospital, I worked hard as an intern. I learned and I offered whatever I could, and I adapted to be in a county hospital. They were at that point with people like Burt King and Ron Chansky and Nick Rango, they were already pushing for unionization. Cook County Hospital simply wasn't Northwestern or University of Chicago or Rush. It didn't look that way, it didn't act that way, it had huge deficiencies in access to care. You couldn't not perceive it. I sense that everyone who went there at that time truly wanted to leave Cook County in a better shape than when we arrived. I wasn't one who was pushing for a union. I really wasn't. But they did form union. They were unionized probably in late 74, early 75. There were a lot of political factions among the House staff. People had different ideologies and beliefs on who should be president. I was the somewhat unwilling compromise candidate that offended no one who worked hard, and the groups decided that uh put my name on the ballot, and the other ones essentially dropped off, and I was elected president. And it wasn't because I was a major vocal advocate, but I think people just sensed I was a reasonable person. Within a month or two of my being the president of the union, we uh started setting up our first negotiations for the contract. That negotiation went on for three months, it hit a wall, it wasn't going anywhere. And and Bill, if you read our demands, you would say this is the naivest union you've ever seen. We thought it was going to be two or three negotiation sessions. It was simple. What's wrong with asking for Spanish and Polish and Interpreters when you couldn't talk to your patients. What's wrong with asking that PTPTTs, liver enzymes, and C B C B C's and WBCs could be available twenty-four hours a day, not just until four o'clock in the afternoon. What's wrong with asking for curtains around the beds in open wards or having crash carts in every ward or having a clerk cover a single ward because the clerk is a rate limiting step for paperwork. There was one light switcher, was a two for the open wards. So when you would admit someone, they would go into an admission ward, but then they'd be shifted over to their home ward. Every time you go see someone on those open home wards, you had to put the lights on. And it woke up every one of the 35, 40, 50 men that were on the male ward then or the female ward. Toilets were gang toilets down at the entrance to the ward. There was one tub, one shower. Is there anything controversial about that that I said? Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02Well, you know, it strikes me that your demands were really about patient comfort, patient safety. It doesn't sound like you were asking for improved conditions for the house staff. It was focused on patient care.
SPEAKER_01Eventually I think we pared it down to the 40s just to be more practical. But they were all basic, and I think only two of them briefly talked about issues that might impact on the resident's life. One was a very modest salary increase. A couple of the surgeons who were married with two kids said it would be nice if we got an extra hundred bucks a month or something. It was 38 or 40 of those 45 were all patient care directed. We were getting obliterated in the news by the leadership at the hospital and the editorial boards of the Sun-Times and the Tribune because they said we were greedy young docs who wanted to make more money. In a year, we'll be out making triple that as an attending or in a private practice. Why would we throw that away now for an extra thousand dollars a year? Why would we even think of doing that? And the editorials changed their tone a lot. So anyway, we hit a wall, they stopped negotiating, and we gave them three, four-week warning that we were going to strike. It was the hardest ethical thing that I think many of those docs had to decide. And the vote was extremely high, like 400 to 4 or 400 to 9 voted to strike. To this day is an ethical dilemma, Bill. I mean, it really is it to think you're doing something good if you're taking away care from a needy population to make that population's care better. Who are you to make that choice? And we got some heat from our physicians of color. Yet they all went on strike. But it was quite a difficult issue morally for us to do that. And it shouldn't have gone that long. 18 days was a long, long time to be on strike. Spent a lot of time into communities and Spanish-speaking news and media and telling them we're trying not to go on strike, but if we are, it's going to be this date. And if you can delay something or get it done now, get it done, get some more medicines now before in case this happens. And when it happened, the amount of people showing up at the emergency room decreased quite significantly. So the deal was initially that any patients that were in the hospital, every one of us had to continue taking care of them until the last patient was discharged. We had two or three teams of our more experienced third-year residents in each one of the specialties that would be in-house 24-7. Make rounds, write your notes. If you can't have time, come on out and pick it for a little bit. Go back in and make your follow-up rounds, write your notes. Make sure you check out with the people on call who are there, what needs to be done at night. So anyway, Bill, a long time it was going nowhere. Both sides agreed to a federal mediator, and we encouraged the administration of the hospital put attendings on the negotiating committee for the administration. You know what really helped a lot was that the federal mediator was on cumadin. And he was like knocked out of his chair when he heard PTPTTs weren't available if he walked in that hospital and he was bleeding and they couldn't do that test. He was shocked.
SPEAKER_02PTT is a laboratory test to see how thin the blood is and whether or not you should dose the cumadin or hold it.
SPEAKER_01That's correct. And this gentleman was very savvy of his own care, and he absolutely got up and walked into the other room and talked with the negotiators on the other side. And he said, You've got to settle this and settle this now. And he used that personal example. Anyway, I think that it was the first step toward getting a new Cook County Hospital. They really felt that it brought such media attention to the gaps in service and equipment and physical plant issues and no air conditioning and no privacy and no access to bathrooms and showers and a lack of certain equipment. I think it had to be done. So the strike's over, the house staff has voted to accept it, and then the next day the judge sentenced six of us to jail at Cook County Jail. The house staff called for another vote and wanted to change their vote. We talked them out of doing that, and you know, the vote was final and we're done. Six of us went to jail, and I was pretty comfortable in going to jail because all interns in medicine and family medicine had to do one month their internship year. I had just spent a month there recently. So I was very savvy about how the jail worked. I was knew the officers, I knew the nurses, I was very comfortable with the environment. We were given our own cell in the oldest building on the compound. It was real primitive, but I don't think it was dangerous at all. There was an incredible concern that one of us might get hurt.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_01If something happened. Anyway, it was I think you're asking me once your escape. Yes, my escape area. Yeah, I know, I don't. So it's over Thanksgiving holidays when I'm incarcerated with five other people. It's uh the after late afternoon of Thanksgiving Eve, the day before Thanksgiving. And they say which residents never did, but two residents called in sick. They called over and asked if any one of us would volunteer to cover the jail. It's a highly illegal now and unacceptable to have inmates provide health care. However, it was it was an unusual moment. And I'm the only one that said you would do it. I took off my prison garb and I was given surgical greens and I went to work and it was it was busy. It can be extremely busy then. You didn't just manage the people who were in the jail or the new admissions being admitted. You also had all the police would bring in injuries that they thought didn't need to go to a hospital of people they had just arrested. It could be gunshot wounds to the leg or arm, it could be stab wounds that they thought was not so bad, cuts that they thought that they didn't have to bring in. You were getting sicker people than you might guess. And you're busy. I was up all night, I was comfortable there, I kind of knew the role and how you get meds, and the nurses were very hardworking.
SPEAKER_02And your year in Mexico and Guatemala probably prepared you for a night.
SPEAKER_01Many things. Many things. You'd have to be ready to deliver a baby, see an asthma attack, see a fractured jaw, see a pylonautial cyst with a major abscess that need to be drained. That was the routine, and plus whatever the police brought in. Anyway, I was up all night and I was um dressed in my greens, and uh happily the two residents on the day shift showed up. We did a you know a sign-out round with them. You know, these people are up in the infirmary I admitted who need follow-up. There's a couple of people are waiting to get labs this morning. These two gentlemen, they're scheduled for chest x-rays or abdominal film, what you do when you're a doc, you hand it over to someone else. I think this is the reason why hours of residence had to be eventually downgraded to more workable, because I was so foggy and so I just I wasn't I was just doing what I did on remote control. I walked to the bars that are electronically open at the entrance to the medical unit, and I waved to the correctional officer in my cervical greens, and it's cold outside, it's Thanksgiving Day. I I walk out and I'm looking for my car. And of course I was brought there in a paddy wagon, so there is no car. It doesn't take long, I'm not that foggy. But truly, I I didn't walk out on purpose. I just walked out like I did the month or two before. I just waved and he recognized me and I didn't have a badge, and I just walked out into the parking lot. And then I thought, you know, it's Thanksgiving Day. My parents live on the south side. It's pretty straight shot from the jail to go about five miles south. And I'm a very good hitchhiker, I thought. And I actually went out there and put my thumb out for about 10 minutes and nobody stopped. So that should have been a clue that they're no one's gonna stop in front of a jail for somebody. That's all. And then I realized that contempt of court, which is what we were put in jail for, but that's not a felony, it's not even a criminal charge. I didn't understand that difference, but but I did know that escaping from jail was a felony. That I knew. And so I knew how to get around to the Ginny Barn. That's the old women's unit that we were kept in. The Jitty Barn. Ginny Barn. Ginny Barn. Yeah. It was the women's unit until they built a new one. It was very old. It looked like a Jimmy Cagney movie, maybe three levels, a big open courtyard with a roof over the top of it. One officer would pull a lever on each floor on each side, and all the cell doors would open, and all the cell doors would close. They'd yell at you, pull your fingers and feet back, and really an old, old, old building. But the good thing was one of its entries was separate at that time when the women had been there, so they had a door from the outside, outside the jail. So I walked around, I had seen that door, and I banged on this huge. It looked like the door in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy's banging on to get the wizard, and the hatch opens up, and a captain, a really nice professional the shift captain was uh Captain Meyer uh Leonardson, and all I could hear was, Oh my god, I'm gonna get fired, coming out of his mouth. And he opens the door and pulls me in and says, I retire in three months, Jack. They knew me from the last time my months I was there. He said, Promise me, don't tell anybody, your family, nobody, until after I retire. And I kept I kept that promise. And because it was the rule, if you let someone escape, you're either suspended for a month or you could be fired.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Negligence. So anyway, I went back in, and that's how I that's how I escaped from Cook County Jail and begged my way back in.
SPEAKER_02There must be a little Kerouac in you somewhere, or Paul Newman and Coolhand Luke. Didn't feel at all like that though, huh?
SPEAKER_01No, I didn't. I don't uh you know, I I I don't get in too much trouble, Bill. That's all Kerouac and that stuff. He got in some he was he was at the edge of trouble. I uh
Gold Caddy, Arnold Palmer Story
SPEAKER_01I learned later that there was a little side of me that I really shouldn't be, and I thought I was a little funnier than I or I was too honest sometimes. I caddied for Arnold Palmer when he won the Western Open in 1963. I was a high school sophomore at Beverly Country Club on the South Side. It was a real honor to be an innocent cherubic little me. Big deal to be caddying for the number one golfer in the world. We had a couple practice rounds and the fourth hole, the real startup of the tournament, he'd asked me the distance and he asked what club on this hole, and I said, uh easy seven, and he hits it a little bit, hits too much grass, I think. And I remember 14. And he hits it on the fringe of the front green, and he says, Wrong club, son. And I said, All due respect, Mr. Palmer, but I could have put a seven-iron on. And and he tells me, he then says, I'm fired. And I I'm kind of the hero of my neighborhood, and I'm fired. And anyway, I walk up, I wipe a tear away, he doesn't see it, he tells me not to talk to him, so I didn't next hole, he hits something, and he asks what what club, and I said, Again, you told me not to talk to you. Anyway, he wins the tournament. He changes his mind, doesn't say a word, just says, See you tomorrow morning, and what goes on and wins the tournament. And I did the same thing when I was a med student at children's hospital where I was assisting at a pediatric surgery, just pulling the retractor. I slipped and I said, Whoops, and Dr. Sherman says, oops, is not in the vocabulary of a surgeon. And then he says he says an F bomb. I don't know where this is gonna go. And he did something which he didn't like, and I, of course, said, which I hope you wouldn't have said, which is Dr. Sherman, you know, fuck is not in the vocabulary of a surgeon.
SPEAKER_02There's some naivete there.
SPEAKER_01And he kicked me out of POR, and but he welcomed me back the next day. Anyway, moving on from that.
SPEAKER_02You knew different surgeons than I knew.
SPEAKER_01Yes. He forgot about it, moved on. But uh after
Post residency in Alaska & Guatemala
SPEAKER_01residency, I went to Alaska for six months. I worked at Fairbanks in a private hospital. A lot more staff support than we would have gotten at Cook County Hospital. Actually, if I had known better as a resident, I would have been even more aggressive what we asked for at Cook County when we went on strike. And then I went back to Guatemala for six months. I'd made a promise that I'd come back when I was a real doctor to the same clinic in the highlands of Guatemala. It was a pleasure to go back there, and I think if I had stayed for another three months, I may never have left. It was that interesting, and their health needs were different, and it just amazes me what makes someone healthy and what is unhealthy traits. And there weren't that many unhealthy traits in the Kachikalideans.
Epilogue with Ken Brucks
SPEAKER_02After my conversation with Jack, I spoke with Ken Brooks, a longtime friend of Jack's, and sometimes rival on the basketball courts.
SPEAKER_00We're in the seminary together, and it's funny when you look at people who are in the seminary and they're doing what I would call priestly work. Jack would be a great example.
SPEAKER_02And I hear that he had a nickname.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah, his nickname, after all the wonderful things he did, his nickname was Saint Jack.
SPEAKER_02You told me a story about how Jack helped you when your mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness.
SPEAKER_00She wound up at home. Jack was living in Oak Park. I was uh serving at uh St. Catharine St. Lucie in Oak Park, and I asked him one day, my mom's kind of sliding a little bit here, and I wish you could go out and take a look at her and give me your professional opinion on how she's doing. It was like a 50-minute drive, and you know, Jack is one of the busiest people in the world. He went out, he went into the room with my mother by himself, and he examined her and then talked with my sisters and my father a little bit. We were driving back to Oak Park, and I asked, Well, what what do you think, Jack? And he said to me, She she was really kind of in worse shape than I anticipated from your description. She could live a few more months, maybe, or she could die tomorrow. Well that was kind of a surprise to me. I thanked him for his visit, and then I went back to the rectory. Then that evening I got a communion host from the tabernacle. I drove back out to my parents' place and um I gave her communion. My two sisters were there, my father was so upset, I think he was in the next room. My two sisters and me had a hard time pulling her up, getting her to sit up so that she could receive communion, which she gladly did. And it was a beautiful thing. In the Catholic Church, they call your final communion viatica. And to be able to do that was really a wonderful feeling and and a story that still lives. So I go back and the next morning I get a phone call from my sister that in the middle of the night my mom had died. She said, In the middle of the night, she sat up in bed and she said to my sisters, Do you see her? She said, Mary's here for me. She put her head back down and she passed away. When you look back at his history, he's a man of courage and grace and compassion, and he was a darn good basketball player, too.
SPEAKER_02You've just heard part one of the Jack Raba interview. Please join me next week as we hear about Jack's return to Cook County Jail as the medical director, his public health initiatives, his attempt to reveal use of excessive force by law enforcement, and his enduring legacy to improve correctional health care throughout the United States. For this and all other episodes, visit inspired to heal.net, where you can find information relevant to the interviews.
SPEAKER_01Inspired to Heal podcasts are for informational purposes only and should not be considered as health or professional advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of the host or the guest's current or past employers.
