Leukemia Regattas, Topsiders, and Heart Attacks

Regatta is a misunderstood word.   Brooks Brothers and Tommy Hilfiger ads denote stern blond faces looking seriously in an understated effort.  The smile is just a little short of joy, a little more than a smirk.  We are racing, we are one of the elect (in the Jonathan Edwards sense of the Elect).  How can a doctor from Jamestown, New York  with crooked teeth, compete with these model citizens?

On the water, when we encouter another sailboat, we are racing.  The lazy afternoon turns into a friendly joust.  The winches are adjusted so, the sails are not allowed to luff.  Many comments about the boat, the crew, the tack come to consciousness.  We remain silent as the boats travel towards an imaginary mark.  We marvel as they passes us, and try to readjust.  If the boat is motoring, we feel pity.  Such a sacrifice to time and schedules that they have to use the iron sail.  With a quick wave, we round the mark, allow the sails to gently fill, and broad reach home.  


Deltaville hosts the Southern Chesapeake Bay Leukemia Regatta every summer.  Leukemia and lymphoma are hidden diseases, difficult to diagnose and devastating in impact.  These diseases do not discriminate.  Old and young are equally affected, often robbing people of their vitality in their prime.  Despite the small size of Delataville, the community  raises funds for research that is equivalent of large cities.  We have tried to participate each year to help the cause, but we are not regatta people, we are not racers.

For the Regattas, the unsuspecting guests and crew have two important rules.  They must know how to use the head, and they must wear non marking shoes. Topsiders' only function is to not mark the deck of boats and to maintain some sort of traction.  They are good at not marking the boat, but they are terrible at keeping feet dry.  The modern sailor wears what is functional and seldom cares what is on his feet except that it be somewhat clean and not malodorous.  His feet remains incognito.  Style usually does not play a role.


In high school, when Topsiders were the vogue, I too saved for these special shoes that meant that you were one of the "in" crowd.  In the fridgid Southern Tier winters, they were the worst shoes to  wear.  They were uncomfortable, had no support, and the soles dissappeared with the melting snow.  To wear them without socks was pure stupidity.  The ugly "duck boots" were more practical.  We were not in Newport, this was Jamestown, the unofficial Swedish capital of the New York, with average snowfall of 140 inches.


High school has framed my thoughts recently because of "facebook" and the explosion of the social network among us middle age adolescents. The readership somewhat frames the author.  I think of how far I am removed from high school, but at the same time, the old awkwardness prevails when I think of past relationships.  Perhaps high school becomes hard wired in.


Mitchell Anderson was the quintessential Jamestowner.  He was the golden boy.   Face framed in blonde hair, brothers and sisters at Phillips Exeter, he was the local boy who would go on to Williams College.  He wore Topsiders.  He was the boy we envied and emulated, but would also compete against to be class president.  Much to my surprise, as there were more common blokes like me, I would actually win that contest.  The campaign was "Let there be Coke..." with some expletives thrown in.   These memories are in the back waters of my mind.    A painful understanding how immature and young I was at sixteen sometimes still surfaces.  Never push your kids to go to college early or grow up too fast.

Leukemia Regattas are an odd collection of boats.  We are in the "cruising class" which means pretty much rank amateurs.  Our first race was a crew of four with the most concern revolving around lunch and proper beverages.  We stayed away from the melee at the start, afraid of ramming into another boat.  Starboard tack, barging the line, line honors were foreign concepts.  I tried to read the North U's "racing tactics" the night before.  You cannot sail fast from reading a book.  There is the need for touch and feel and instinctual reflexes that has to be developed as well as to be taught.


We had a great time.  We felt an organic connection to the other boats on the water trying to harness the wind in a fair and foul fashion.  The boats were like schools of fish, turning in unison to an unknown signal.  We limped in near the end, glad to finish.

We have raced for our friends and for our dear neighbor, Susan, who would lose her life to leukemia.  Randy, her husband, has indirectly introduced us to sailing.  Being a lover of water, he organized a boy's outing to Tangiers Island.  We gleefully trailered our powerboats to the Little Wicomico River and made a rhumb line to Tangiers.  While roaming around Tangiers looking for a restaurant that would serve hotdogs, we spotted two sailboats majestically coming into Parks Marina.  Compared to our runabouts, they seemed like  the proper vessel for the Bay.  Once an interest is sparked, middle life obsession can be fueled.  We learned that there are no hotdog stands in Tangiers.  Mama Crockett's Chesapeake House does sell clam fritters that taste remarkably like potato fritters.  You just cannot tell the children.


Sailing in a regatta with a experienced crew is very much like working in the cardiac cath laboratory. Cardiologists are blessed with tools to avert crisis.  The most devasting of maladies, a heart attack, a STEMI, can be treated quickly if the patient can arrive at our hospital within 12 hours of symptoms.  If they arrive within four hour of symptoms, there is usually no damage.  The cardiac cath team is on standby, and called to Code AMI.  Within thirty minutes,  no matter the time of day, the cath lab team goes to work to open the infarct artery.  A critically ill patient, gasping for breath, and having agonizing visceral precordial discomfort, can improve to telling jokes and wondering about the next meal in a matter of minutes.  Of course, every case is different, and there are some very difficult arteries to open.
The poor oncologists had no such easy task, and they are truly the scientist-physicians trying to apply novel clinical trials to new situations.  They have very little fun, I think.


What is remarkable about our cardiac cath team is the mutual coordinated effort.  It is an organized cacophony, a race to open the culprit artery before the dreaded 90 min door to ballon window, and before nasty consequences of an heart attack arise.  The problem is that the 90 minutes starts when the patient arrives at the ER rather than our cath lab door.  Oftentimes, the patient crashes when the artery is opened, as the starved muscle revolts against the fresh blood supply.  It is almost like smoldering embers igniting when oxygen is re-introduced.  The well oiled team is a thing of beauty, anticipating problems before they occur.   Speech is reduced to words, the nurses and technicians handing you the proper instruments before they are requested.  The cases have shape and purpose, and everyone is focused to achieve the best outcomes.  These teams are difficult to train and more difficult to maintain.  They work at the expense of their personal sleep and ease, ready to jump into the fight at a moments notice.  Hospitals should treasure their cardiac cath nurses and techs, hardy people in the true medical regatta.

Every summer regattas have been unique.  There have been races in rain and thunder.  The races in calm are most dangerous as no one can control their boats.  Two summers ago, we had beautiful wind.   Song of the Wind, sprinted around the marks only hampered by her inexperienced captain.   If only it were the cardiac cath lab...

We now look at the beautiful ads depicting sailor models with amusement as there is no authenticity.  We race not to be like anyone in a glossy magazine, but to raise funds to stop a devastating illness.  We race to be part of the sailing community and the local community of a sleepy town.  We race wearing our odd colors and odd shoes with the only stipulation that they leave no traces behind.  We invite you to race with us next summer.  You need only to bring non marking soles.  We 'll teach you how to use the head.

N.B.  some photos by Robin Newland, photographer extraordinare

First Crossing...A valentine to my wife and daughter

"Memory is an accomplishment..." William Carlos Williams

Looking back, it was foolhardy.   At the same time,  it was the right thing to do.   April 2004, the kids were young, it was Spring, it was Virginia.  Why not cross the Bay?  It was Spring Break, and we had a new boat.   

The water was cold, we had no experience, but we were hardy.  We were skiers, and we knew cold weather.  Instead of Florida or to to Colorado corn snow, we trooped off to Onancock, our first trip across the Bay.    Joan looked at me with quizzical eyes, and gathered the kids in ski hats and jackets.   I did not really think about hypothermia or kid overboard scenarios.   We had learned man overboard  figure of eight retrievals.   It worked in Captain Tom's dinghy last summer.  We did not acknowledge dad overboard situations, but I was confident of my footing...



Onancock is a hurricane hole, almost seven miles inland on the Virginia Eastern shore.  The winds are fierce at the entrance, but the trip up river is magical, transformative.   It is a picture-frame like journey, farms and low slung houses are at the river's edge.  Inviting.  There are well marked sand bars.  At low tide, the people of Onancock walk on water.   We would return to Onancock many more times in the future, but our first crossing, like first love, would set the table for future appetites.

Our first born, Miju, is an incredible child as are all first born children.   She was born into the world when her mother was on call, finishing an OB GYN residency in Norfolk.   As Joan went into contractions,  her pager also went  off.   No rest for the weary.  Not to play favorites, modern residency programs make women and men take equal call even if they are in labor.   It is another story for another day.   

First children do not come with manuals.   Medical schools do not teach parenting.  They do not really teach about life anyway.  There are no "how to raise baby courses", and we do not need a license to create babies.  Keanu Reeves laments in Parenthood, that we need a license for everything except conceive children.  If we are blessed, the most complicated of all creations, the human infant, can be born in the most hapless of circumstances.    If we are lucky, our mothers help to raise them.  If we are fortunate, our children also raise us.


At the birthing,  I was helpless.    The world compressed into the room.  There was only the hospital bed, the sweet sweaty forehead of my love who was in labor.  Lamaze classes seemed like an old sermon gone awry.  Where was the painless delivery?  Let there be pharmaceuticals!

Miju seemed more surprised then scared when she entered the world.  She looked around, and her countenance implied, "Well I am supposed to cry...".   She looked wise.     She was beautiful.    Her head was made oblong by the birth canal, but her lips were  perfectly formed.   Her mother's estrogen was shaping her femaleness.    

I was an intern at that time at the Medical College of Virginia, and commuting the 90 miles door to door from Norfolk and Richmond.   Newly wed,  my first and only job, first kid, I really did not know any better.  It did not seem daunting to be on call at the hospital every third night, work through the day, and drive back home.   Fritos kept me awake on I-64.  I got fat but I was happy.


The lights over Newport News shipyards were my friend.  The Salt Ponds and Willoughby Bay beckoned.    People boating on the water seemed like alien species compared to my life.    "Oh brave new world that had such people in it.". How wondrous they were basking in the low light of the afternoon.   Barbecuing off the stern, the breezes waifing the smoke away.    I meandered into another lane, as I strained my neck to catch the last glimpse,  before being swallowed by the Hampton Roads Tunnel.


Everyone dreams of the next step, the next grade, the next opportunity.   In the flurry of the moment, I could not really look forward to finishing training or moving up the hierachary of medicine.   Each day was formative and exciting and tiring.    Miju was a great sleeper and seldom cried at night.  Even if she did, it would fall on deaf ears, as both Joan and I were exhausted.   But the glimpses of the people at leisure, on the water, living in the moment, would tickle my subconscious.  

I look at those days like a blurr, and wonder how we got through it all.   I wonder how we had five kids, but cannot fathom life without each one.   We cannot sleep until the last kid is home.  Even when they are away, our final thoughts are their well being.  They are just as vital to us as air and breath.  My father once told me that a parent's love and longing is not reciprocal.  I did not understand until I too became a dad.

Just as we neared Onancock  sound, the winds built to  20 knots, the weather helm rose over 20 degrees, the boat heeled, our lunch innards shifted, and Miju, now an astute teenager,  suggested calmly,  "let's reef  dad."




Reef we did, and the gray sky  was less menacing.    Song of the Wind righted herself.   Speed increased.  Water rushed by, but it was father away.  Sometimes, we are forced into situations by forces beyond our control.   We take the wrong fork and find ourselves on the black diamond slopes instead of the friendly greens.   We do need a little of luck and fortitude, but we need more an open mind and a will to accept changes.   How we get down from the steep slippery slopes can shape us,  just as the situations that got us there. We need to listen to our kids just as our kids need to heed our advice.

Onnanock wharf gave us a souvenir, a new shape to our Delta-imitation anchor, as we kissed the piling a little too vigorously.    A lesson well learned.     As we walked the town, the Charlotte Hotel was just forming it's reputation and the fancy Bizzottos Gallery Cafe was empty of clients.  When asked, how do you stay in business, the surprised owner asked us to come back in summer when it would be most difficult to get a reservation.  These are two wonderful places to treasure and to return to anytime of year.

Crossing the Bay, out of land sight for a while, is a journey of hope and promise.   A hope that the winds are fair, and a promise of landfall with delightful gastronomic adventures.   We have traveled to Onancock by car, but it is not the same.   The same meal is less delicious.


Experiences need not be dangerous or frighting to be in our long memories.  Accomplishment does however entail some hardship.  Being a father,  I want life easier and better for my children.   The difficulty is how to raise resilient people without causing too much hardship.  How do we given them confidence without foolhardiness.  How do we teach them when to reef the sails?  How to cultivate meaningful love?

The answer just might be in listening to our children and forging a common strategy.  I wish it were more simple. 


"The child is the father of man."  --William Wordsworth

First storm

The Bay has swift thunderstorms that arise in  summer afternoons.  They are usually predictable and abate quickly.  Usually.   In our land lives, we close the windows, go inside, and wait it out.   Out on the water, we are exposed, vulnerable, and usually humbled.  Inside a storm, we are engaged.   Fully alive.  In the moment.  There is nary an extraneous thought except in the present.  There is sometimes regret and a hope for the future.   Time changes from a chronometer to event driven occurrences.  Memory become limbic.

Five years ago, Joan and I, with Noah,  went to Crisfield for a Hunter group rendezvous.   It was a beautiful summer week.   Our trip up the Bay was uneventful. We had no real cares except to decide when to motor or when to sail in the slight breezes.  Destinations and deadlines put a cripper usually on sailing.  We have tried to avoid it.   Dangerous decisions are made when we have deadlines and  schedules to keep.  Sailing is a kind  escape from our metric world.

 Noah and his friend Jake, two peas in a pod, happily engaged in some secret bond of nine year olds, utterly carefree.     How wonderful would it be to  be frozen in development as a nine year old...The problem of education would be how to de-evolve, how to retain fresh insight.   No storms intercepted our journey North, and we rounded Janeway island, into the artificial harbor of Crisfield,  Maryland.

The sail rendezvous was a warm and fuzzy event, filled with good, earnest people.     We met Mike Harker, one of the bravest men in the world, but he seemed lonely without a family.   His pictures of foreign ports were always with a different crew.   Gary Jobson reminded us to "sail fast" but his message was that of participation and not necessarily winning races.  We found community in fellow newbies and received good advice from the experienced cruisers.  Crisfield did not disappoint as the crab capital of the Bay.  I am deadly allergic to these crustaceans and admired their carnage to usually nice people.

We turned towards home after a few days, glad to be back on the water.  The sky was dark. A Bermunda "High" was off the coast, and I had to be on call in two days.   For Joan, this trip South was to be watershed of sorts, as she would not rely on my meteorology again.   After all of the great cruising stories, I felt a Pyrrhic confidence, as we left our slip, only to lose our dingh.   We returned briefly to retrieve.   This omen was ignored by a nerdy sailor who had confidence in science but trusted also the "art of medicine"

The air was different.  It felt heavy.  There was moisture.  A dense calm prevailed.    

There were no other boats leaving.   The Tangiers Strait, normally busy, was empty. 


These are signs that I now look for.  The swells were longer and more deep, and then, the winds came.  This was no summer thunderstorm, but one of those mini tropical "events" driven by the low that was now over the Southern Bay.  Rather than minutes or hours, we would be in its clutches for the day and in our memories for decades.  Like first love, this was our first "storm," imprinting our emotional responses and filtering our future rationality.






The wind shreiks in the shrouds, making a bone chilling howl. It is not musical.   Our course was due South, and with a headwind now over 35 knots, we made very little progress.  Song of the Wind bravely shuddered, rising with each wave, and crashing into the trough.  Cruel fate would have the wave length at 7 second, the perfect pounding rhythm.  Difficult to eat or sleep or go to the head.   Auto pilot more of a handicap.  Basic life functions reduced to perseverance.



I was a beginner.   Not yet skilled in dealing with extreme wind and waves, our bow slammed into the waves.  We should have been approaching at an angle and  then bearing off into the troughs.  We relied on the Song of the Wind's backbone, and hoped that the storm would be brief.    In prior brief flings, the thunderstorms roared over us and were gone.  This time, we were engaged, about to be be married.   We were in the narrow Strait of Tangiers, we could not run for a port or safe Harbour.  

As we passed the Eastern Tangiers entrance, thoughts of making the channel tempted us.  With Joan with the mal de mer, the boys looking at me like I was the Son of Sam, it is a easy solution, run for port.    I realize now, the salty move would have been to go back to Crisfield.   I had a destination home,  and it seemed like defeat to return when we just bravely left.     We did resisted the temptation of Tangiers, as the shallow and long approach,  broadside to the wind and waves, probably would have been disastrous.

We pushed on toward deeper water and the wider Bay.  The Southern Bay near Deltaville  is a wonderful body of water.  There are some areas outside of Cape Charles that are over 100 feet deep.  The military have decorated some spots with ordnance and nifty warning on charts denote 'bombs" below.  In deeper water, the waves became longer, and Song of the Wind became more playful, now sledding down the waves, and then slicing her nose into the next rather than slamming down indignantly.   We were very happy with the folks at Huntermarine who built the boat, because she was sturdy and kind to us, even if we were a little foolhardy.  

As we neared the Windmill Point marker, Joan was exulted and exhausted and somewhat mad.    The boys were hungry.  The clouds parted and  a lovely July evening with a cool breeze greeted our return to Deltaville.  Hardship transforms itself into stories when a victory of sorts is at hand.

After the trip, I  tried  to intellectualize and read every book on heavy weather sailing.  There is no  true consensus about what to do.  "Real Sailors" would note that a Cheaspeake storm is childs play compared to the rigors of the Gulf Stream and at  Ocean.  It is a matter or perception and preparation and size of your vessel.





Our kids are as different as there are different boats cruising different shores.    Each is capable in their own way.  Their temperament is almost inborn.  Reuben's determination is steadfast as the first week of his life when he clug onto the nipple that gave him sustenance.  He was the smaller discordant twin.  When he ruptured several foot tendons in his first race of his senior year, stepping into a rabbit hole, he still limped to the finish probably doing more damage.    Mark, his larger twin, has a joy of life, infectious in creating fun, and a fragile heart despite a tough guy countenance.  He does not know that he seeks our approval, but he does, even when he is afflicted by senioritis.  

We go through "storms" with our kids, and remember that we are all in the same boat together.   The shared memories of joys and hardships become the connections, the web that holds us.  Love is born of both temperament and aptitude and also a little luck.   We have to weather the storms of life to cultivate our love and our togetherness.  We hope that the lessons are not too harsh, and that our kids have a sturdy vessel to negotiate the voyage.  As Jack Mable salutes, "Fair Winds!"

Heeling and Healing

We ignore natural treasures in our backyard and travel thousands of miles to see another monument to nature. Living in Richmond, Virginia, a stone’s throw from the Chesapeake Bay, I never thought much about the Bay except as a vague concept, a resource to be protected, a resource that limited our backyard pool construction plans.

As a Cardiologist with five children and a spouse who practices child psychiatry, our days are often a blur of schedules and appointments. Struggling to make the kids soccer practice and be at the piano recital, has strangely made for a passive child rearing. Instead of teaching my son to play the piano (if I possessed this talent), we outsource our children’s education to others and then become an attendant at one of their performances. The backyard pick up baseball games of my youth have been replaced by organized athletics tournaments, and the parents role is to be the taxi driver, cheerleader, the purveyor of snacks. These are of course good experiences, but I had wondered if they are somewhat empty of the interactions that I want with my spouse and children. Am I missing the natural beauty of my kids?

Medicine is a wonderful profession. However, the “healing arts” are seductive in that the practitioner is not aware of the passage of time. All events at the hospital are urgencies, and the problems of another person’s heart often has time precedence to the matter of my own family. For the kids of physician-healers, an orphan upbringing, is the result of too many missed dinners and events. As a child of a physician, I wondered if my parents thought we were not as important as other people.  Their patients were subverting our family time due to medical emergencies.  One emergency is fine, but a childhood of emergencies makes for adult insecurities.

At the urging of my young son, we were abruptly introduced into sailing on the Bay. We wanted to do an activity together as a family, something that we have never done before that would make us interact together rather than be participant observes. The nearness of the Bay, and the beauty of sailing made for great project for a family vacation. Instead of the Dude Ranch, off we went off into Deltaville. I did not realize at the time that Sailing might become a middle age obsession for me and a source of healing and balance.

Deltaville is a sleepy town that claims expertise in all aspects of sail. If a boat cannot be fixed here, it cannot be fixed.” The main street could be from the play “Our Town.” We met Captain Tom through word of mouth. He is a tall, striking man who has a Captain Ahab quality. I think this diffidence is obtained because he is hard o hearing. He took our family of seven on a special project. Teach the egghead parents with their kids (seven to seventeen) and make them competent to cruise. I think he was rather brave to take on this project, especially given a time table of three days.   Off we went off to charter.

My own sailing experience was one humbling afternoon on Hatteras Sound when I took my newlywed wife, our infant daughter, and my mother-in-law out on a Flying Scott. I reasoned, how hard can it be to sail, man has done it a hundreds of years. A hour on the water turned into four hours of agony as I did not put the center board down, and we were not able to tack into the wind to return home. Bladders bursting, we were finally rescued by the teenage boy on a Jet Ski. Since that time, I have been a Power Boater with a “head” on board. Thus it was with some trepidation that we embarked on this course.

What an eye opener. Never underestimate the intelligence of fifth graders. For the teenagers, the ASA course was a ho-hum experience, something that Mom and Pop thought up. They may have enjoyed the learning but it was not “cool” to talk about it.  The preteens were open about their emotions, and took to new tasks with a gusto that was brilliant. I had the lowest passing grade, too caught up in my own preconceptions to learn new things quickly. The language of sail is a different dialect, a jargon filled cadence of humble terms. Left and Right have special meaning, and it’s great fun when Dr. Mom and Dad cannot tell left and right.

The water has special charm. Thunderstorms roll in from the distance, and life has a immediacy that makes our sense sharp. We are alive with our loved ones, dependent on each other to make it through the storm, and relish in the beauty of the afterglow. Captain Morgan and Coke has never tasted this good before.

To make a sailboat run fast, we must balance the sails. Too much on a windy day, and the boat heels excessively creating drag and weather helm. “Reefing” the main magically rights the boat, and your speed increases. Less heel, faster boat, and life is great. The fury of headwinds is transformed into calm when we hove to. It seems like a different day and weather system, but it is the same ocean, the same climate, just a different orientation. Running on a broad reach versus beating to weather is night and day, and a good metaphor for life and child rearing. No Chinese mother technique of Amy Chau.  More force applied means more force returned. Going with the flow makes for smooth passage.  The harder job is finding the right groove, the right Gulf Stream to hitch.  

We have been sailing now for six years. Weekend trips have united our family. I have more of an appreciation of my children as capable people rather than my progeny to worry about.   I am in love with my wife. As a “healer” we often tack in the wrong direction with our family. Sailing has enabled our family to heel together, and bask in wonderment of the Chesapeake. A common task at hand, mutual respect, creating self reliance and independence as well as interdependence, these are the lessons learned on the water.   "The oceans do not discriminate"

and we gain balance in our own lives. Just as Ulysses found after his journeys, the most natural wonderment that we possess is in the beauty of our family. We should all heel more together.