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Biography
As you've probably already gathered, my name is David Weingarten. So as
not to bore you to death, I'll keep this little autobiography short, a
sort of "David in a Nutshell." As the last few years of my life have
been the most interesting (in my opinion, anyway), they are the primary
focus of this story.
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I was born on September 6, 1972 in Hinsdale, Illinois, to Franklin and
Darlene Weingarten. At the time, my father was working at the University of Chicago
in Psychology. Shortly after I was born, he decided to go back to
medical school, having dropped out some years prior when he was
diagnosed with adult Measles. When I was three, we moved to
Knoxville, Tennessee, where my father did his residency in Family
Practice. When I was six, we moved to Portland, Oregon, where I have
lived most of my life.
I attended high school at Woodrow Wilson High School in Portland. I
graduated in June of 1990, and began my post-secondary studies
immediately that summer at the University of Oregon in Eugene. I began
my studies as a Computer and Information Science major, but quickly
realized that CIS was not the career for me.
Without any clear goal in mind, I sought direction at St. John's College
in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I spent two academic years at this tiny
liberal arts college, during which I pieced together an interest in
medicine. St. John's, however, did not offer the core classes required
to get into medical school. After a brief hiatus for financial reasons,
I transferred back to the University of Oregon, where I planned to use
my liberal arts education as a springboard to a degree in Biology and
Classics.
That plan was short-lived, for on July 3rd, 1993, I was struck by a car
while riding my bicycle. I suffered an open tibia/fibula fracture (the
bones of the lower leg), and spent a week in the hospital. Over the
next two and a half years, I was to undergo a total of five operations,
spending over seven months on crutches and nearly a year and a half in a
cast or brace of one sort or another. I would have loved to have
scanned in the x-rays for your perusal, but my medical providers somehow
lost them, much to my chagrin.
I applied to medical school in August of 1996. Applying to medical school in
the United States is a three-part process: a unified primary application
goes out through the American Medical College Application Service
(AMCAS), after which each individual school sends out secondary
applications, followed by interviews for the top applicants. After
sending in my secondary applications and going for an interview at
Oregon Health Science University (OHSU), I decided that I would fulfill
my long-time dream of traveling around Europe by bicycle.
I had hoped to be accepted to medical school on the first time around,
but I figured that if I wasn't, I would simply apply again for the next
year. I received my final denial letter for medical school while I was
studying Italian in a castle in the tiny villa of Belforte all'Isauro, nestled in the mountains near the
city of Urbino. My parents had called me to give me the "bad news." I
tried to feign disappointment, but I could not help but be relieved. I
was not ready to go to medical school, and I knew it. I needed this
time to revitalize my soul, and until that process was complete, I was
not going to reapply to medical school.
I spent the next three years traveling around the globe. I bicycled
more than 6000 miles around Europe, after which I flew to Egypt, where I
worked as a scuba diving instructor. Shortly thereafter, I flew to
China, where I worked teaching English. (A considerably more detailed
account of these travels is available on my old website, Just a Cyclin' Fool. It is
very candid and not always politically correct, so it's currently password
protected. If you want to read it, you'll have to ask.)
Throughout those three years, my career in medicine never left my mind.
It was a constant struggle, trying to decide when the time was right to
go back home and pick up where I had left off, to end my hiatus from
"the real world" of stability, responsibility and work. I considered
the possibility of never going back. I considered working in the travel
industry, the diving industry, the teaching industry. I thought of
dozens of possible career paths, but none of them felt as complete as
medicine. None of them, I knew, would fully satisfy me over the long
term.
My life took a number of turns during that time. To make a long story
short, I spent several months in Spain, and a couple months in Central
America before moving back to
the United States, at which point I began to prepare for medical school.
While I was preparing to re-take the MCAT and apply to med school,
I took a course in Spanish Medical Interpreting,
after which I started working for a local on-call interpreting agency.
Meanwhile, I volunteered in the ER of Legacy Emanuel Hospital and took
classes to become certified as an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT),
which I viewed as a stepping stone to more hands-on clinical work.
Shortly after my certification, I was hired as an ER Technician at
Emanuel, where I worked for about a year and a half.
I was accepted to the Tulane University School of Medicine, which I attended
for the first 2.5 years of my medical education. After hurricane Katrina flooded
Tulane with six feet of water, I decided to seek a bit of stability in my life,
and I transferred to Oregon Health & Science University in my hometown of
Portland, Oregon. As of November, 2006, I'm in the process of applying for
a residency in Neurosurgery, which I expect to begin in July, 2007.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my life in a nutshell!
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