YOUR MIND
THE LAST DAY OF BUD WHIPPLE
Sometimes the most important lesson can be taught by a classmate .
BY JIM RICE ’ 77 , MD ’ 81
Jim Rice ’ 77 , MD ’ 81 , is an assistant clinical professor of OB / GYN at the University of Washington . His daughter , Katie Rice , MD ’ 11 , is also a medical school alumna .
“ HI , MY NAME IS ALBERT WHIPPLE . But you can call me Bud .”
This is the story of my friend Bud , the man whose death galvanized my UC San Diego School of Medicine class of 1981 and whose life taught us all how to give and grow in the face of adversity . Almost every detail of his last day is seared into my brain . It is one of my most painful stories , but by telling it , maybe it will help me let go of some of the grief I still carry to this day .
During our third year of med school , Bud and I had selected psychiatry at the VA San Diego Healthcare System as our first rotation . Most of us felt a bit anxious on the locked psych ward , but Bud felt right at home . He grew up poor in a rough part of Long Beach , and I remember him saying the patients “ were just like my home boys .” While I awkwardly tried to follow the psychiatry interview script , Bud would hand a patient a Ping-Pong paddle and go through all the questions in the course of the game . Then he would do his write-up , then play another game with another patient .
That was Bud — always smiling , always intently listening , always helping us all to laugh at ourselves .
One afternoon , Bud asked me to cover his patients so he could go home . He wasn ’ t feeling well — he had a pulsating pain radiating from his chest up his neck .
He assured me it was nothing serious ; he had gone to the emergency room the prior evening but they told him he was fine .
After finishing my shift I went jogging on the beach , but I had a very unsettled feeling . Bud was the hardest worker I had ever met ; it was not like him to leave early . At home afterward I was drinking water in the kitchen when our fellow classmate , Joanne Licking , came in and asked how our rotation went . She said she admired Bud — how he always kept a smile despite his struggles in life . Then she mentioned something new to me : “ Did you know Bud ’ s mother died just as we were starting medical school ? She died from a dissecting aneurysm from Marfan ’ s Syndrome .”
Alarm bells went off in my head . I remembered the slides showing Marfanoid features from our organ physiology class and I realized they were similar to Bud — tall and lanky , a sunken chest and a high arch palate with a jumble of teeth . I immediately went upstairs and pulled out my internal medicine textbook — I learned about heart murmurs associated with Marfan ’ s and differences in blood pressure between the two arms . The more I read , the more alarmed I became . I called Bud and told him I had just learned about his mother ’ s death . I wanted to come over and check him out , but he brushed me off again . So I changed tactics . One thing I knew about Bud was he always made time
54 TRITON | FALL 2018