Tonsils And Wild Bill

Photo 2008: Uncle Bills House In Yuma

I was about 13 or so and found myself not in the smoky city in Pennsylvania, but far far away. I had gone out west for the first time in my life.

I saw real cactus and a clear blue sky like I never knew existed!  I was in Yuma Arizona, and I had come to get my tonsils out.  Free.  The Dr was my uncle, better known by the local townsfolk as "Wild Bill". 

Wild Bill didn't really look much like a surgeon or a Doctor.  He drove a dusty old Jeep, wore clothes covered with the same desert dust, even had built a log cabin way out in the desert near Ferguson lake. And yes, he did have a house in town.

Day before the surgery Uncle Bill took me to see an autopsy, saying it would toughen me up yes but it would also help teach me compassion and appreciation for the miracle of life.  And at that time, I thought I too wanted to be a Doctor. 

The autopsy was of a young black woman who had died needlessly Bill said. "Cause she didn't want to go to a Dr.", he paused. "Maybe she thought she couldn't afford a Dr".  Then he gave me a long lecture about how many young MD's applying to work in his clinic sometimes cared more about money first and maybe helping folks second.  It really bothered Bill that they had it the wrong way around cause in Bill's words "a doctor shouldn't worry about how much he'd make.  He should worry about his patients and how best to help them".

And he said, "If they ask me about how much they will make before they ask about what medicine they will practice, I won't hire them". 
Alas, tonsil day came.

We went in the back door of the hospital, I don't remember which. I lay down on the table.

An anesthesiologist was there and the drug of the day was ether.  "Boy, you need to count backwards from a hundred".

Ninety nine, ninety eight, ninety seven, … I didn't get far. I was out like a light.

Photo 2008: Carport Behind House

 

Bill's carport was behind the house.  Somehow he and goodness knows who carried me in from the carport (picture as it looked in 2008).

I woke up laying on a bed in the back bedroom of wild Bill's house with a heck of a sore throat.  When I tried to complain about the pain, Bill's comment always was "A little pain won't hurt you boy. Its time to be tough.  Its time to be a man."

A dinner we'd have something he didn't buy in any grocery store.  Words I would hear would be "Be sure to spit out the buckshot". 

Ducks, geese, deer, fish and more graced Bills table.  And my Aunt Helen was a great cook and incredibly kind and tolerant person.  She met Bill when she was a nurse and still took his calls at home, telling more than one caller how to handle their problem until Bill got home and could call them.

And yes, many of his patients had his home number, which after all was in the phone book.  That's the way Bill wanted it.

A few days after my tonsils came out I found myself hanging on for dear life, bouncing up and down like a tennis ball, On across the desert went Wild Bill clutching the shaking steering wheel with a white knuckled grip.

He somehow pushed that old jeep at what seemed like a hellish speed across the rocks, ditches, ravines and faint trails in the rocks and sand.  There has no road to where we were headed.

We were on our way to a cabin he had built "upriver".  He said the 40 foot logs he built the cabin with had been shipped down from Oregon.  Later I found myself fishing on incredibly beautiful backwaters of the Colorado and later jumping in an old wooden barrel the stood outside Bill's cabin that was full of rainwater (for a quick soggy and a bit smelly bath). I note that Bill let that water out and refilled the barrel with well water for his bath.  From then on I took my bath in those backwaters, rattlers, water moccasins and all.  In those days when you fished upriver, you caught all the bass you could legally carry.

The air was clean, the stars were brilliant and I knew I was in God's country. A few years later I lived in Arizona and attended the University of Arizona in Tucson, where my Uncle John (another MD) lived.

Over the years I went back to see Wild Bill many times.  But not enough times. 

Sometimes we'd make a rough journey with Bill's friends down into Mexico to fish in the Gulf of California where seals and whales frolicked and wildlife in the water was like it was a thousand years before pollution. Sometimes to Bill's log cabin on the backwaters of the Colorado, but on every trip, my ears were graced with Wild Bill's tales of hunting and fishing trips and his scorn for some of the younger generation of MD's that cared far more about money than their practice of medicine and their patients. 

Photo: Wild Bill (Wm A Phillips) Copyright Yuma Sun

In 2009 at age 96, Wild Bill earned the President's Distinguished Service Award from the Arizona Medical Association.  Bill passed away in December 2009, still living in the same home where I had been as a boy.

They don't make many men today like Wild Bill Phillips.