Inaugural Teri Li Education Award, Rachel is due!

Inaugural Teri Li Education Award

Last week I took my annual sojourn to the NASPGHAN (pediatric GI) national meeting held in Salt Lake City, and, the last meeting of my six year term as the President-Elect, President and Past President.  As you know, the last third of my term as President was truncated due to Teri’s catastrophic illness.  It was a heart-strings plucking experience.

It was like being amongst my large family.  Many of my former committee chairs and councilors came up to me and personally thanked me for the opportunity, encouragement and synergy they felt working with me.  Many others asked how I was doing.  Many good conversations.  Alan, the Distinguished Service Awardee from Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard mentioned me as ‘his patron saint’.  He is a model educator and also the chair of the Teri Li Education Award selection committee (in good hands).

We were able to establish a permanent endowment to support this award and now want to expand its platform to support pilot innovative educational grants …  NASPGHAN published the names of all 92 contributors in the Awards Ceremony brochure.

In my introduction to the inaugural Teri Li Education Award, I showed a picture of Teri and Jack and described her passion for education and for the young, both of which are evident in this award for education by a young (‘adolescent’) faculty member within 10 years of finishing fellowship (≈ < 42 years).  Jeanie was selected as the inaugural awardee.  She is a young star educator in our society who has already made huge educational contributions to our field.  Besides that, she is an Asian American woman and one who has endured a successful bone marrow transport in one of her children.  Teri would be triply proud of her.

I was given the opportunity to give the lead talk at the Annual Post-Graduate Course, on what else, Cyclic Vomiting Syndrome.

Old friends

The week before the meeting, Modena and Gary came up from Chicago to visit.  I hadn’t seen them for 6 years since we moved up to Milwaukee.  Modena and I go way back 39 years to the antiquities, both in medical school at Kansas U. and pediatric residency as the U. of Wisconsin.  It was a time of remembrance of shared experience and Teri.  At NASPGHAN, I had dinner with Phil and Joanie, Phil a fellow medical student at Kansas U. who went into pediatric GI.  We recalled 41 years of intermittently shared experience starting a medical student newspaper together and attempting to begin a medical student commune (5 couples).  Kids, grandkids and eldercare are common themes.  Hopefully we’ll be on the receiving end of the latter. 

Rachel is due!

Rachel is due today just as the hurricane hits the East Coast.  Jack turns 2 on Monday.  They are stocked up on water, food, generator, gas and prepared and in laws.  Becky checked up on them.  I was going to go but she advised me to hold off.  Stay tuned!

For those of you who has asked how to contrinbute:

NASPGHAN Foundation – Teri Li Education Fund

NASPGHAN

1501 Bethlehem Pike

PO Box 6

Flourtown, PA  19031

Thank you!

APAMSA unites us

Sunday was one of those quintessential crisp fall days for my drive back from Ann Arbor.  Blue skies with a few cumulus clouds scattered, the trees changing into their fall clothes, replete with shimmering, luminescent reds, oranges and yellows.

At Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, one of the delicatessens in the country, I bought a Sherman Rueben for the trip home and cookies for my nursing staff. 

I stopped at the Phoenix Restaurant in Chicago Chinatown to pick up my father’s favorite ho fun (beef rice noodles) and told the owner Eddie and daughter Carol about Teri’s passing.  Eddie said told me about a friend who also died of acute leukemia and said pragmatically, “Life goes on.”  Teri and I used to eat at the Phoenix every several weeks, the best dim sum in the Midwest, rivaling the coasts.  I picked up cha siu bao (roast pork buns) from St. Anna’s Bakery and cha siu hanging next to the dripping ducks at the BBQ King, just as we always did.  Memories.

Backtracking to a fatherly-sonly Saturday.

I was invited to speak at the national APAMSA conference as I continue on my mission to help Asian Americans succeed as 3^rd year medical students, and sequentially as physicians and professionals.  My usual topic is on educational profiling of quiet Asian Americans medical students during their clinical rotations as ‘passive’ with it pejorative effect on their evaluations, and ways to counteract it.  Ben said that his group felt my presentation was the best one of the conference.  No bias there.

It was so so unique and heart warming to be able to share this APAMSA experience with Ben who attended as a representative of Michigan State.  Ben has been to NASPGHAN annual meeting but this was a conference where he was an official attendee and we both highly engaged in Asian American professional development and health issues, he in the present tense, me in the past tense.  He experienced an adolescent APAMSA that I helped give life to way back in 1995 at this 19^th national conference.  He even listened to his old man say something that was directly pertinent to him.  Ben volunteered to provide feedback during a workshop exercise on leadership and I got to listen to my young man provide insight that the workshop leader acknowledged was astute.  Perhaps a father-son scenario a father could only dream about.  Wow, how cool is that!

Backtracking to a surprise Friday.

After driving from Ben’s apartment in Lansing to Ann Arbor, I met with Chris a friend and fellow pediatric GI who is the interim CEO of Mott’s Children’s Hospital.  We go way back and besides being constantly reminded of our Ohio State-Michigan rivalry, we resonate around the attitudes that we look up at the world as underdogs, have a strong sense of justice, and don’t take ourselves too seriously.  After asking me about what I wanted to do when I grow up … he suggested I consider looking at a potential global exchange position at UM that would place me in China part time.  It’s nice to be wanted.

I invited Ben’s MSU delegation (7) and our MCW delegation (2) to APAMSA to dinner at Kai’s Chinese restaurant in Ann Arbor.  We had about 9 or so dishes, and finished them all. It’s amazing how much these skinny Asian women can eat.  Afterwards, Serena (MSU) and I lit a 30 candle, ‘surprised’ (suspected it at the last minute) Ben and we all sang Happy Birthday to him.  I got to share lovely stories of how Teri busted him after he came home red-faced from a party and how the cops brought him home in handcuffs at 4 am just before the start of his freshman year (for TPing).  Ben has done well on parole.

Post-conference

I paid a visual tribute to Teri and Jack, highlighted her last teaching lesson and dedicated the talk to her as part of my plea for Asian American medical students to join the bone marrow donor registry.  Mike, one of the conference organizers of the APAMSA conference wrote to me, “Teri sounds like an incredible person”.  Teri is still making a difference.  

Pictures to come.