Ok....
Yet another attempt to start blogging for me...maybe this one will take off. For those of you that don't know me or those of you who feel you don't know me as well as you should (he he), My name is Bryan D. Hubbard. I am a surgeon in Los Angeles and I do trauma and I work as an indentured servant for The Department of Health Services at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center. Those of us who work there like to shorten that mouthful of a title to "The Gulag", "The Ranch", "Rancho Honor Farm", or simply "Shit's Creek".
I was born in Philadelphia and raised in a suburb of Philly called King of Prussia (weird name, maybe we'll discuss it in a later blog). Most people who've heard of my little town when I tell them where I'm from their faces light up and say "Oh yeah, the place with the huge mall". Yes, that was our claim to fame; for a while the Plaza and Court at King of Prussia were the largest mall complex in the United States until they built the Mall of the Americas in the midwest. Forget that the area is rife with history; George Washington spent his winter "vacation" at Valley Forge which is walking distance from my high school and the Zero Gravity toilet for the first space shuttles was designed at G.E. labs on "The Hill", two very distinct claims to fame for my area.
After a very decidedely surburban upbringing in KofP under the watchful eye of my parents, when I became of age (the magical age of 18, old enough to die for your country, vote for idiots for president, but oddly too young to order a beer legally) I ventured off to Morehouse College in Atlanta GA. Atlanta was very different from KofP which was mostly working class white suburb; Atlanta is a mixture of rednecks, country boys, transplanted New Yorkers, Chicagoans, and Angelenos a jumbled up in a city run largely by black folks. It was exciting and I learned alot and grew alot. I stayed in Atlanta after I graduated from Morehouse, I went across town to Emory University School of Medicine. I had wanted to be a doctor since the age of 5 and I was finally doing it. So, needless to say, Atlanta produced alot of lasting memories including the oppressive humidity and the red stains from the ubiquitous Georgia clay in all my white and light clothes. During Med School, for some crazy reason, I was gripped by the idea that I wanted to become a trauma surgeon. I ended up matching in surgery residency at the now defunct Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center, which is located in between Watts and Compton, possibly the most dangerous slice of real estate in the L.A. Area.
More in the next installment about what I like to call the King Wonder Years.
