Stephen Segall:  

tly assaulted by the state of Missouri for lawfully and in good faith prescribing controlled pain medications in a community with a tremendous need and no other physician willing to adequately treat these patients. At this point, I my license is threatened, and I expect to be at least censured for practices that are commonplace in more enlightened states like California where I learned to treat pain without legal difficulty. I have become disillusioned with and disgusted by the Christian church in this country that now intends to impose its Dominionist ideology on all at the expense of freedom and the environment. I consider it, along with the neoconservatives that own the Republican Party, to be un-American and antidemocratic. I feel that democracy in the US has died and been replaced with a fascistic, theocratic plutocracy that embarrasses me and is a threat to the world. This government serves corporate masters and is contemptuous of citizens’ rights and needs. We have seen our last honest, free elections, and I am anxious to leave America for a more liberal and enlightened land when feasible. I have been divorced twice. My first wife turned my children against me and we are still estranged to this day. My second wife received an inheritance of $300,000 just prior to our divorce. She got to keep it all, but our community wealth was divided and I had to pay her thousands a month in alimony. My one great success is my third marriage. Lesser successes include having been granted the gift of a keen mind, having a great mother, having served thousands as a physician, becoming an accomplished guitarist, travelling the world, making a good living and have lived in interesting times. For these things, I am grateful. Workplace My first job was at a McDonald’s in Inglewood at age 15 making $1.35 an hour as an apprentice and then $1.65 per hour, the minimum wage in California in 1969. There, I predominantly worked the register and picked up the lot. Occasionally I made shakes, but fries and burgers were specialty work that I never did. Between high school and college, in the summer of 1970, my father got me a job in a factory in Gardena called Panorama Aluminum where sliding glass doors and windows were made. I worked a drill punch some of the time and nearly avulsed off my thumb. I also did tedious close work sitting at a table and snapping thousands of metal bearings in axles into plastic casings that would be screwed into the outer surface of sliding doors and windows. This was my only factory experience, and it was hot inside and the days lasted forever. My co-workers were mostly non-English speaking Mexicans, probably illegal immigrants. This was my first exposure to a foreign culture where it was appropriate to lie about how many times you came to orgasm the night before, but never to joke about someone’s mother or sister. Of course, the Army was a three-year job, but that is covered in the military section. But I learned a lot working there as a computer programmer in a data processing unit. I learned that if I worked under a superior, he would often be stupid and spiteful. Also, I learned that office work, particularly cubicle office work, wasn't for me. It was then that I determined to try for medical school upon discharge despite my poor grades in the period at UCLA before enlisting, from October of 1970 to the winter of 1971-72. I didn’t work again until the six-week break in 1978 between my undergraduate and medical school days, both done at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. I was a dishwasher and bus boy at a cafeteria steak house called Bonanza. I was hired several weeks in advance of my start date, and with a beard. But when I started, they told me the beard had to go or I did. It was too late to find other work for this short stretch, so it was this or nothing. I was filling three job vacancies and actually doing a good job of it, keeping the dishes and the tables clean. I had a week to decide whether to shave or quit, and I quit. This was largely because my manager would spring an unexpected large task on me near quitting time, a tremendous psychological burden when one is counting the minutes to a phantom quitting time. This woman needed to replace me with three others. Again, I saw the stupidity of some middle management, a valuable lesson. I was self-employed in private medical practice in Canyon Lake and Murrieta, California (two solo offices) from 1984 to 1993 at which time I quit the California HMO scene and took a full time, salaried position in an excellent hospice corporation as a medical director. I doubt that I would have left private practice for the corporate world had Community Hospice Care not been so exemplary. Here, I learned the corporate ropes, a previously alien world to me. Additionally, I learned that a business could be generous with its customers and still be very profitable. But then disaster struck when, in 1995, Vitas, the country’s largest hospice chain, purchased CHC and turned it into the opposite of what it had been by slashing services to improve short term profits at the expense of long term profits and reputation. I had been working hourly, 32 hour a week, with Friday through Sunday off each week when Vitas got greedy in 1997 and tried to convert me to a salaried, six-day -50+ hour workweek. This lasted a few weeks at which time I quit them to re-enter private practice in Poplar Bluff Missouri in 1998. My first year was with a large multispecialty clinic that exploited its physicians. I left there after my one year contract expired despite their non-compete clause by finding a loophole in it, and set up solo private practice there in 1999 where I remain to this day. Military Because I had graduated high school so young (not quite sixteen at the time), I was relatively immature and undisciplined when I entered UCLA in the fall of 1970. And because I was allowed to move into the dorms starting in my first quarter, I was unsupervised and free to pursue my nonacademic interests (girls, poker and marijuana) at the expense of my education. After four quarters of progressively worse grades, I left school in search of the discipline and maturity that I lacked and knew I would need to graduate college and enter graduate school. The Army was the solution. I enlisted for three years as a computer programmer (72F) in April of 1972. Basic training was at Fort Ord, CA, just outside of Salinas near Monterrey. From there, I received my computer training at Fort Benjamin Harrison (now defunct like Fort Ord) in Indianapolis. It was the first time I had left California apart from a weekend in Las Vegas and a day in Tijuana as a boy. Next, I was transferred to an office building in Alexandria, VA, a suburb of Washington D.C. where I began programming for the government as a proud member of the Signal Corp. I needed a top secret clearance in order to work in the Pentagon where the military housed some of its massive state of the art IBM 360/50 computers and where I waited for computer time to test and debug the programs that I had written. Our task was to develop an underground computer communications system to be used by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to communicate with the White House in the event of war and disruption of surface communications networks. My specific task was to write code to evaluate the validity of incoming and outgoing messages by examining the messages header and trailer for proper syntax and thus authenticity. This eventually took me to Fort Detrick in Frederick, MD, and then Fort Ritchie, MD just south of Gettysburg where I remained until discharge in April of 1975. It was Fort Ritchie, just outside of the cave leading to the underground bunkers for the top brass in the event of an attack on the homeland, that the Army had its germ warfare research laboratories as well as our computerized communications section. And it was here that I met and married my first wife and where I became a zealous and energetic evangelical Christian. We worshipped at a Pentecostal church in Hagerstown, MD where we spoke in tongues and where, as a so-called completed Jew, I was a local cause celebrè. The Army was not fun for me as I bristled at the authority that I had turned to it to provide as early as basic training. I tested well and was originally thought of as promising, even to the extent that I was offered a spot at West Point at age 17, an offer that I declined because it would extend my military commitment nine more years. Four of them would be at the Point beginning in the fall of 1973, and I would then owe five more years of active duty as repayment for the investment in my education. I wouldn’t be discharged until June of 1982 making my entire commitment in excess of ten years. My refusal of the offer coupled with my defiance and independence was a great disappointment to my company commander who had originally seen me as a potential military leader only to realize that I did not belong in the Army any longer than the three year minimum. I agreed. It was in the Army that I discovered that I didn’t want to be an employee in a corporation, the fate of most military programmers who remained in computers after discharge. I needed independence and autonomy. Also, I wanted a job where I could work with people, not in a cubicle with a desk and a computer. Medicine seemed more the ticket, although my chances for medical school acceptance seemed remote given my 1.9 grade point average at UCLA. By the time of discharge, I was almost twenty-one, married, more settled, more disciplined (although not to Army standards) and more directed. This made it possible to succeed when I reentered college.