Michael Wynn:  

So here is the capsule summary of my life since Palmdale High School: I left home about two weeks after high school. Moved to the San Fernando Valley, worked doing electronics repair and took a couple of summer classes at CSUN. Started UCLA in the fall. Hated it. Huge school. Dropped out after fall quarter and spent a bunch of time scratching my head about what to do next. Ran into Steve Nichols-Roy, who was going to Johnston College in Redlands. He suggested I come have a look, so I did. What an amazing place. I spent the next 3 1/2 years there studying whatever sort of struck my fancy. I was not a very disciplined student. The final degree was in "Social Theory" (whatever that is) with a minor in chemistry. I decided about half way through my junior year that I wanted to go to medical school. Took most of the rest of college to catch up on the prerequisits. Finished college and went to work in Southgate at LA Chemical Company on the order desk. What a dead end that was. In August, my father died and two weeks later I was admitted to medical school for the following fall. I moved home to Agua Dolce with my mom and went back to work for Buzz Scwartz in Tarzana doing electronics repair. July of 1974 I started medical school at UCI. The nice thing about medical school is that you show up, pay attention, and four years later you are a doctor. Weirdly simple. Mostly it is a four year vocabulary course. The amazing thing about it is that I really found my calling. Considering that the admissions process is essentially incapable of identifying those suited to the profession, I consider myself vastly blessed by getting in. In my third year, two things happened that have shaped the rest of my life: I met Vicki Allyn and I discovered surgery. I had had a six week rotation in general surgery as a medical student but had a miserable chief resident and did not enjoy the process at all so I hadn't really considered surgery residency. Vicki was a nurses aid on the gyn floor and I was a third year student rotating through gyn. She looked a lot like Ali McGraw and had a sassy, razor sharp wit. I was in love. Her mother was the head nurse of the burn unit and the girl-friend of the chief of surgery. I took a six week elective in the burn unit, partly to impress her mom. This is where I first came to understand the interaction of physiology with disease. Dr. Bartlett, the head of the burn unit, is unquestionably the most brilliant human I had ever had contact with. He has an amazing ability to simplify the most complexly ill human's problems back to basic physiologic principles--which then immediately clarifies the appropriate treatment. This lead to unmittigated hero worship on my part and my ingress to general surgery. I was never a particularly macho sort of human. Never good at sports, never aggressive in the company of manly men. Surgery, particularly trauma care, gave me the opportunity to get in touch with the assertive part of myself. Nothing like having a gunshot wound to the chest come in, taking a knife and slicing the thorax open and sticking your finger into the hole in someone's heart to teach you to be decisive and aggressive.... I stayed at UCI for my general surgery residency. Partly because it was easy and partly because I was not ready to be married and take Vicki to some strange place--also not ready to move on. Residency was five years of rediculously hard work. We all averaged about 120 hours a week in the hospital. You start as an intern--gopher in chief--and progress up the ladder to chief resident. Our program had a wicked pyrimid: 24 interns, 12 second years, 4 third through 5th years. The competition is intense and relentless. Definitely trial by fire. You get to the end and then you're done and they spit you out. Kind of anti-climactic in some ways. I stayed at UCI for the next six months as a research fellow in Portal Hypertension--think terminal alcholics. That was a very slow, calm period where I lived at the beach, exercised a lot and reflected on life. I figured out in short order that I don't much like doing research. I took a job in McMinnville, Oregon starting in January. Vicki and I were married on December 26th and left shortly thereafter to start our life together. McMinnville was a small town of 14,000 abo...Expand for more