In the very end, after 70 years on the stethoscope, 66 of those listening to the heart sounds of children, Dr. Albert Stein, 94, lifted the left middle finger of Batya Meyers and chased away all the ghosts that had followed her into Exam Room No. 6.
There was a white lump of flesh on that finger, hard as a dried bean, down near where the finger joins up with the rest of the hand. Before coming to Stein, poor Batya, who is 15, had been told she’d need to have her hand sliced open by a surgeon. She’d been told it probably wasn’t cancer.
And her mother, Miriam, who had been entrusting her five children to Stein since he picked up a subtle diagnosis on her now 28-year-old son that other doctors had missed, was taking Batya straight to the master. No messing around with her baby’s middle finger.
Well, breezing right through the diagnosis, a textbook “thickening of the proximal tendon,” Stein pronounced his prognosis and prescription: “It’s not a tumor or anything. You probably got it swinging from the rafters,” he quipped, a smile washing across his face. “It’ll go away eventually. Give it time. In the mean-time, wear gloves when it’s cold outside. And do warm soaks 10 minutes a day.”
And with that simple case, and that uncommon brand of common sense that has been calming parents and kids for the better part of a century, Doc Stein called it a career.
Batya was his last patient on his last day of 70 years as a doctor, and the last 60 of those in the West Rogers Park office of Northshore Pediatric Associates, surely one of the longest-running practices around.
Back when Stein started in pediatrics, polio was still a scourge. Penicillin wasn’t yet in the doctor’s black bag. Nor were any antibiotics, for that matter. Diphtheria, tetanus and polio vaccines were still years away; it would be decades before other vaccines.
Quarantine was a doctor’s first and last resort for the highly contagious, wholly un-preventable diseases rampant in the 1930s: smallpox, scarlet fever and whooping cough, a deadly trinity.
House calls were the order of the day, with two or three before Stein got to the office at 9 in the morning, and stretching for hours after dinner into the night. He easily clocked 15 or 20 a day. And he kept making them right through to at least 1990, a decade or two or three after nearly every other pediatrician in America.
He was there to diagnose in the early days of anorexia nervosa and now worries about what he refers to in its Yiddish name, “ess, kint disease,” or “eat, child!” disease, meaning obesity.
Until the day he retired, on the last day of January, his office manager made sure she scheduled an otherwise-unheard-of full hour for well-child appointments and an even more unlikely full half-hour for anyone who was coming in sick. He has never charged patients for calling after hours, something that plenty of pediatricians these days consider standard practice.
`The pure stuff’
The son of a tinsmith on the West Side, Stein decided on medicine after his sister’s boyfriend, a dentist, urged him to try dental school. He figured if he was going to go to school four more years anyway, he might as well come out a physician. “I didn’t want to work on the mouth anyway,” he said, spinning his story in between seeing patients on the last day.
While interning at Cook County Hospital in the 1930s, he took a turn in the children’s ward and never left.
“I don’t get a lot of older people with their symptoms that are exaggerated. You get the pure stuff from kids. I like that.”
Once before, a couple of years ago actually, Stein retired. For one night. He had walked out of the office at the end of the alleged last day, thinking he was hanging up his stethoscope.
But, recounts Pat Martorano, his office manager for the last 13 years, “he came back in the next day. With tears in his eyes. He put his arm around me and said, `Pat, I can’t do it.'”
This time, though, it looks official. A letter went out to 2,800 patients. His malpractice insurance expired at midnight Jan. 31.
A chocolate sheet cake, its right flank lopped off by midafternoon that last day, lay exposed on a table in the office lounge, further evidence, with its blue-icing “Good Luck,” that this round of retirement might stick. Stein, hair combed as if fresh from the barber, a dab of chocolate schmutz to the left of his lips, walked slow but steady from room to patient room, his spine bent ever so slightly in the stoop of old age.
A cane, tucked off to the side of his desk chair, was the only clue really that he had slowed at all. But it was the slowing down, Stein said, that had pushed him to thinking it was time.
“I have trouble getting around. I don’t go to hospitals anymore. I don’t see newborns unless they’re sick,” said the doctor, who was widowed in 1984 and who has two grown children, an ophthalmologist son, Robert, and a daughter, Deborah Frumkin, who is a radio announcer and producer at WFMT-FM, the classical radio station. “Physically, you can’t go on forever.”
Gifts and tears
So all that last day, the office was a stream of patients coming in to say goodbye. Bearing boxes of candy, and cookies and nuts. And long faces. A 13-year-old girl sent him a gift card for a Greek diner in the neighborhood. A 7-year-old brought in a check for $30. Many, who had been his patients when they were children and whose children were now his patients, came in tears.
Everyone had a story.
How he came to their houses on Friday nights and let himself in, knowing his Orthodox Jewish families could not open the door on the Sabbath, because he had a lab report they needed to know or a sick child he needed to see with his own eyes. How he recognized their voice on the phone even before they said who it was. How he could always remember what street you lived on when you were a kid, your mother’s name and how your dad made a living. How he opened the office on a Sunday morning if you had just adopted a baby from overseas and wanted her checked right away. How he always calmed a parent’s worst fears.
How he’d danced at their weddings. How he’d made special house calls for a toddler’s upsherinish, an Orthodox Jewish ceremony when a young boy’s hair is cut for the very first time. How he’d attended bar mitzvahs, given checkups before children went off to study in Israel.
“When I got the letter, my heart sank,” said Lakey Silber, a mother of three boys, who had rushed in after work to say goodbye. “I love him because he’s everything a doctor should be–so caring, loving, nurturing, warm, non-alarmist. I’ve been with him for 22 years. Caring, did you write down caring? He’s such a good diagnostician. He knows what you have before you walk in.
“I always told him I prayed for him when I light the candles on Friday night. That he should live a long life so he could take care of all his kids–including my own.”
———-
bmahany@tribune.com
