But it was his eyes with their mournful, haunted look that arrested your gaze and your heart, squeezing out its joy and leaving one breathless.

      Everyone in the hospital knew him as Jake.  But to myself I dubbed him The Schmoo, after the then-famous caricature of the late '50s portraying a doleful face half hidden by a wall, its banana nose hanging over it, eyes transfixing the viewer with a cocker spaniel mournful and vulnerable look.

      His name was Polish, with lots of C's and Z's bunched together in uneasy tongue twisting fashion.  Jacob Schmuleswiszky hence his nickname Schmoo.

      His childhood pictures revealed a happy kid.  Bright eyes, a mischievous dimpled smile, holding the pitchfork in a Polish hayfield, like the little devil he had been.

      We met at the hospital where I was starting my three-year Radiology residency.  His role was that of assistant to the director who interpreted most of the x-rays.  The Schmoo's job was to look over his shoulder and correct any oversights, not that the director welcomed this graciously.

      I had begun my internship a year earlier with the intent of training to become an obstetrician gynecologist.  One month into that part of the internship had revealed that being rudely awakened at 2 AM from a sound sleep and the warm bed and dragged into a "scrub room" with its harsh lights by the OB resident so as to clean hands and nails for 10 minutes prior to a delivery, challenged even the most dedicated.  I decide to quit.  It would be a fateful decision and a bitter pill to swallow as I much later realized.  I had dissociated myself from clinical medicine, losing the personal intimate contact of patients in need...