Class of 1970 Commemorative Biographical Book

P H I L I P D E N N I S O N S T I E G

Continued

and surgical. That summer before the fourth year I spent at Mass General Hospital in Boston splitting time between surgical dog labs, and the radiology department, meeting in the radiology department Everette James and Dr. Angel who would in several years come to Hopkins and Mercy Hospital downtown. In my fourth year I spent as much time as possible at Hopkins Radiology under Dr. Martin Donner. Dr. Donner had suggested that I take a surgical internship to make that critical decision between the two specialties, as surgical anatomy is the basis for radiology, and he would hold a radiology residency slot open should I so choose. As Dr. Shumway was doing heart transplants at that time at Stanford, I went to Stanford as a surgical intern 1970-71. I did get to scrub with Shumway as a lowly grunt and was captivated. In the end I decided that my true interest lay with radiology. In my last month of internship together with many of my fellows, I received an induction letter from the Army. With the Vietnam War still going strong, they needed more docs. Hearing that the Surgeon General’s Office operated a few hospitals in the U.S. with on-the-job specialty training programs, I wrote to that office and requested assignment to one of their hospitals in the radiology department. With unbelievable luck they assigned me to a 1600-bed Surgeon General Hospital in Phoenixville, PA (next to Philadelphia and Valley Forge). I quickly called Dr. Donner and he assured me that he would hold my Hopkins residency slot until I finished the Army. The Phoenixville hospital was a primary treatment center for soldiers returning from Vietnam. 1971-73 were spent with two board certified radiologists in a department of three. By the end of the first week I was assisting at fluoroscopy cases and by the end of the second week I was doing them. The first month I assisted with the carotid, cerebral and abdominal angiography, and by the second month I was gaining experience with catheters and doing them. I found that I was not meant to follow orders without question in a military environment. Fortunately, my fellow radiologists were not career Army and forgiving. I do thank the Army for a formative experience in radiology. 1973-74 I joined Dr. Donner and his team at Hopkins Radiology (three-year residencies back then). My Army time gave me great preparation and I thoroughly enjoyed my three years. Ultrasound was in its infancy. We had one of the first CT head scanners (body was yet to come, and MRI a while

away). Interventional radiology was just forming its own department and very exciting. In 1975 on a nuclear medicine rotation, I met my future wife, Rosemary Longo (second to chief tech in the Nuclear Medicine Department.) She and other Hopkins radiology techs had been selected years before to train in this new modality and help form the new Department of Nuclear Medicine. It was love at first gamma ray emission and we were married by April 1976. My internship at Stanford, just south of San Francisco, had made me decide that 13 years on the East Coast was great but now was the time for a new adventure. At the 1975 RSNA (Radiologic Society of North America) in Chicago I met my new partners to be in Ukiah, CA. Not only were they looking for a radiologist, but it so happened they were looking for a nuclear medicine technologist to start a new nuclear lab at the hospital. They got a two-fer! Ukiah lies 2 hours north of the Golden Gate Bridge on route 101, and hour north of Santa Rosa. The town is situated where the wine country ends, and the major redwood groves begin. We spent 13 wonderful years there (1976-89) and had our two children, Philip Jr. and Sarah. In the early 1980s practice volume slowed and we were offered a two-year sabbatical in Saudi Arabia which the senior partner had planned but could not take due to family emergency. My job would resume when we returned. With a 4 and 5 year old we took the opportunity for travel which we had not dreamed of at that age. The first year, we spent at a Saudi Army base hospital in the Western desert near Jordan, and the second year, we were at a Saudi Air Force Base hospital in Dhahran on the Persian Gulf. We were given housing with other expats (Canadian, British, Swedish, Australian mainly) and the children went to international schools nearby. A totally fascinating immersion into an extremely different culture. It was very restrictive (no tourists then, permission slips from local prince were needed to travel out of town) but we learned so much. Lots of rugs and copper pots came home of course. During vacation time in these years we traveled nearby—i.e.: Egypt, Jorden, India, Kashmir, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, limited excursion to Canton, China allowed then. Came back to Ukiah and job in 1986 to build our dream home with Saudi profits. In mid-1988 our hospital announced one morning that it had merged at midnight with the competing hospital in town who had their own

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