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Today's Featured Biography

 
Debbie Schuhmann Schumann

I could summarize my life since B-CC with 13 moves through 6 states and finally back to Bethesda twenty years ago. That’s the short story.

I guess that B-CC was an improvement over Western Jr. High, but I never felt particularly excited nor loyal to either, and I didn’t even feel a great bond to my classmates. (No offence.) At B-CC it seemed to me that the tuned-in kids had gone to Leland, while the friends that I had made at Western went to the new Whitman which didn’t serve my neighborhood by Friendship Heights. The redeeming feature that both offered were good teachers, smart classmates and a great music program.

With weak ties to my classmates and neighborhood, I was hell-bent to get out of Maryland. Smith College gave me a good education and basis for independence with little distraction from the opposite sex. Next stop was Yale: a graduate program in pharmacology. Being in classes with the medical students made me want to go to medical school instead of pursuing a PhD in science. University of Maryland School of Medicine was the next stop and over the next ten years I made Baltimore my home with med school, residency and ophthalmology practice. I also took a one year internship in Boston and finished my ophthalmology training in Detroit. At the end of training I moved back to Baltimore, got married and tried to get an ophthalmology practice going.

Breaking into the ophthalmology private practice scene in Baltimore turned out to be too difficult so in 1982, two months after giving birth to my daughter, Jessica, my husband and I found positions for our two careers in Cary, North Carolina where I opened my own practice. Coming from Baltimore, Detroit, Boston and Bethesda, our new home in Cary was a let-down. I was also tied down with a baby/little kid, a business with employees and a husband who traveled a lot internationally. Somehow I made it through those years. I won’t bore you with my experiences in the profit-driven medical-industrial complex that I navigated for twenty-five years. In my opinion the glass ceiling that I encountered was clear without being transparent and gave me a headache from butting my head into it. I totally retired at 55 and divorced at 57. Around the same time my daughter moved to Europe and both parents died. Quello che non ti uccide ti rende più forte. (That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.)

While my so-called career as a physician didn’t turn out like I had anticipated, I became involved in advocacy work with Physicians for a National Health Program, whose idea is to expand improved Medicare to all Americans, “Everybody In, Nobody Out”. During most of my career in medicine I wouldn’t have had employer-based coverage if it weren’t for my ex-husband’s job in corporate America. Now I qualify for Medicare which is terrific. Younger folks have Obamacare the effect of which is shifting more and more costs onto patients, especially when they are sick.

I am fortunate to have a wonderful house and garden in Bethesda not far from Westland School (formerly Western Jr. High) where I learned to play the violin. My home is equipped with a music studio where I play alone or with friends, practice for open-mike night and record music. Besides the violin, I sing and play other stringed instruments including guitar, bass and mandolin. Since retiring, I have spent a lot of time studying languages: Italian, French, Spanish, and now German because my daughter has a career in the policy side of Environmental Science in Vienna, Austria. As Meg Taylor wrote that she is, I am grateful for the education that I got in Montgomery County Public Schools. Our generation was truly blessed with the post WW II advantages provided to the middle class.

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