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Driven
by her heart
Physician
has devoted much of her career to serving the underserved. Now,
her battle against disease is personal.
BY
JOHN JOHNSTON |
JJOHNSTON@ENQUIRER.COM
The
doctor is in.
She's
in a 40-foot-long medical van - a community health center on wheels
- parked outside the Drop Inn Center.
Susan
Louisa Montauk, a dimpled, dark-haired, 58-year-old family-practice
physician, will spend a chunk of this cold January day treating
residents of the Over-the-Rhine homeless shelter.
She sees a woman who stopped smoking
crack eight weeks ago after learning she was pregnant, then began
panhandling in order to buy One-a-Day vitamins.
She
sees a man who developed foot sores because he owns only one pair
of socks. She gives him two more pairs.
She
sees patients with chronic problems such as diabetes and high blood
pressure, one with bronchitis, another who she will inform has tested
positive for hepatitis C.
The
shelter is filled with unsmiling men and women escaping the cold,
including Russell Bannister II, a tall 54-year-old with a salt-and-pepper
beard. He first met Montauk two years ago at the Mount Airy Men's
Recovery Shelter.
"She
cares. She's genuinely concerned about her patients," he says.
"There's just something about her. You trust her."
He's
visibly moved when he learns the doctor has cancer and will have
surgery in six days.
If
it comes as a surprise that one of Cincinnati's top doctors has
devoted much of her career to the homeless and other underserved
people, well, get ready for more surprises.
Montauk,
who has been listed in Best Doctors in America since 2002, dropped
out of high school in 11th grade because she was bored.
In
her 20s, while living in San Francisco, she tried her hand at making
furniture. She rebuilt the engine of an English car. Mostly, though,
she immersed herself in the world of improvisational theater.
She
worked with a dozen actors who performed on Bay-area stages. One
fellow in particular is worth noting because even though he kept
to himself, Montauk says he was "the most brilliant by far."
His
name was Robin Williams.
Today
Montauk, who lives in Fairview Heights, juggles many roles: doctor,
wife, mother and writer.
She
chats pleasantly. But when she writes, she often taps a deeper part
of her. And so this story draws not only on face-to-face interviews,
but also e-mails and messages she posted online for friends and
family after she learned her diagnosis.
She's
a professor of clinical family medicine at the University of Cincinnati,
so some of her writing is academic in nature. But she has also written
poetry. And she's working on a novel about a medical van that cares
for homeless people.
For
inspiration, she draws on her experiences of the past 5½
years. She devotes about a quarter of her workweek to the Cincinnati
Health Care for the Homeless Mobile Van, which visits shelters throughout
the city.
While
many people avoid eye contact with the homeless, "She holds
them, she touches them. She says their names. She touches their
hearts," says Kate Bennett, president and CEO of the nonprofit
Cincinnati Health Network Inc., one of nine agency partners in the
Health Care for the Homeless program.
Steve
Knight, shelter team coordinator for the Drop Inn Center, calls
Montauk "heroic" and says she has long sought "to
get a better distribution of resources, so those who have least
can have a little bit more."
Her
presence makes a difference, he says. When a mentally ill woman
at the shelter "didn't want a damn thing to do with us, and
said it in much stronger language," Montauk was able to calm
the woman and explain that she would get needed hospital care.
She
was raised in a socially conscious, working-class family that "taught
me in words and deeds to help those who were not being treated fairly
in my classroom, on the playground or in society."
Her
mother was a draftsman. Her father's job as a hotel chef meant frequent
family moves: Long Island, Chicago, Detroit. Her parents divorced
when she was 11.
There
was mental illness on her mother's side, and it was discussed openly
among family members as they tried to make sense of it.
On
the West Coast, where her father settled after remarrying, Montauk
in the mid-1960s became active in the racial equality movement.
She picketed Oakland, Calif., restaurants that barred blacks.
Her
father and stepmother opposed the Vietnam War, so they cut Montauk
some slack when she dropped out of high school to devote herself
full time to the peace movement. Thanks to advanced courses she
had taken, she still earned her diploma in evening school before
age 18.
She
enrolled at the University of California-Berkeley and came close
to earning a theater degree while also working with ancillary groups
of the Committee Workshop, a legendary San Francisco improv company.
"I
knew I was a good actor and a good technical director, but did not
feel I was good enough, or had enough passion, to go through what
my friends were going through to try to stay in the profession,"
she says.
"At
27, as I thought about what I wanted to do, I was finally mature
enough or experienced enough to realize that I could be a doctor
if I wanted to."
She
enrolled in a California junior college and loaded up on math and
science classes. But to concentrate on medicine, she knew she'd
have to remove herself from her theater network. So when a friend
moved to Cincinnati, she came along, and earned her undergraduate
degree from UC a year later.
She
was 30 when she started medical school at Ohio State University.
She completed residency and fellowship programs in Columbus, then
returned to Cincinnati.
Her
non-stop schedule this day begins in Montgomery at a center that
treats people with attention deficit and mood disorders. Then she
meets the homeless van at the Interfaith Hospitality Network (IHN)
Family Shelter in Lower Price Hill; eats lunch while driving to
Maple Knoll Village, where she's a staff doctor; and ends up at
the Drop Inn Center, where her 12-hour work day ends about 8 p.m.
Pam
Sala, a case manager at the IHN shelter, deals daily with people
at the end of their rope. Many are "desperate, and they don't
trust anybody."
Montauk
"just loves them all, and helps every one of them. They know
that and they feel that. She radiates that."
People
struggling with mental illness open up to Montauk, Sala says.
"They
tell her everything. It's just amazing. They'll come off (the van)
and say, 'I have never told anybody that in my life, but I told
her, and now I'm going to go to counseling.' They're proud of themselves.
"As
cliché as it might sound," Sala says, "she inspires
me to be a better person, and to want to give more than I thought
I could. She makes me understand we all have these capabilities
(to give)."
As
Montauk leaves the shelter, Sala and other staffers hug her and
wish her well. They know she won't be back to work for a while.
In
October, not long after being diagnosed with rectal cancer, Montauk
wrote:
"No
question I have fear at times. It hits me in waves. But I am learning
to use it to help me in this confrontation. I am not a statistic.
I am a human being in crises who is surrounded by an incredible
amount of love, caring, support and expertise. I will be OK."
She
began chemotherapy and radiation that month.
By
the second week of December, she was back to work a few hours week.
She felt well enough to go full time the three weeks before her
Jan. 22 surgery.
She
kept writing, too:
Dear
Cancer,
Thank
you for showing me the power of energy work and guided imagery.
Thank you for the great instruction on what my patients go through.
Thank you for helping me search for what is truly important between
two souls. Thank you for teaching me how much laughing can restore
and writing can heal.
You
can go now.
She
knew in medical school she would be a family doc, one who would
carve out time to work with underserved people.
In
the early 1990s, when few family physicians were working with AIDS
patients, Montauk welcomed them. She was part of an AIDS hospice
team that evolved to focus on home-care.
She
was also in a group practice with doctors who were supportive of
her work, but in time she grew increasingly frustrated with insurance
companies.
"I
felt stifled in terms of the kind of patient care I was being asked
to do. I just felt like I could not see the number of people they
wanted me to see." So she left the practice and jumped at the
chance to work on the homeless van.
She
dismisses the notion that she has sacrificed personally in order
to work with the disadvantaged. She's paid well, she says, but acknowledges
that if money were her motivation she could change focus and exceed
her current annual income by $80,000 or more.
For
many of her patients, health-care is not the highest priority.
"They're
trying to get a job and a home. That far exceeds worrying about
their blood pressure," she says.
"The
major mental health issue I see by far is anxiety ... I don't just
mean they're stressed out. They've had lives of post-traumatic stress
syndrome, abuse that they went through as children, as young adults.
And they've never gotten help for it."
Her
surgery on Jan. 22 lasts three hours. A few days later, Montauk
learns a dozen lymph nodes have tested positive for cancer. She'll
get chemotherapy at least four months, maybe longer.
I
am not a statistic.
I
will be OK.
The
day before surgery she's asked what she still wants to do. "Write
more," she says.
Writing
can heal.
In
her unfinished novel, a female doctor works on a medical van. The
story is laced with truths borne of the author's work with the less
fortunate, work that has deepened her belief that there but
for the grace of God go I.
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