By Dr. Mary-Frances Scully

I entered pre-med University College Dublin in the fall of 1973 so it is now 30 years since I first went to medical school. I am constantly fascinated by serendipity, how we all interconnect.

When I was five years old my adoptive father achieved a life long dream and moved our family to live by the sea in Howth. Howth was initially a fishing village developed from a monastic settlement just outside Dublin on the North Dublin coastline.

Fast forward to 2001, I work as a hematologist in St. John’s, Newfoundland and am part of the teaching faculty for the medical school at Memorial University. Late summer/early fall is a busy time of year. As a mother I am trying to get my son organized for the school year and as a teaching hematologist I am trying to get myself organized to participate in teaching the hematology course which runs from the end of August to mid-September in 2001. I had also signed up to evaluate two students for their pre-clerkship clinical evaluation.

The evaluation went well from my point of view as “the examiner”. Both of my students seemed to know exactly what they needed to do and performed well. I happily checked everything off my checklist. They passed easily. Although both students appeared poised and well organized it would not surprise me if they had told me that they found exams stressful. Certainly I found all clinical exams stressful as a medical student and resident.

Earlier that day I had dropped home to check up on our son who appeared to have a bad flu. That evening when I came back from work I discovered my husband very concerned as our son was in status asthmaticus. We all made the dash to the Janeway ER. Our son received great care. The next morning the brand new clinical clerk assigned to admit him to the pediatric service was Bethany Feltham, one of the students I had evaluated the day before. If Bethany was none to happy that her very first patient was the son of one of her teachers she did not show it. Our son received excellent care from the entire team.

I am very interested in hemophilia. Since 1998 I have been traveling with the hemophilia “team” to the Notre Dame Bay Memorial Hospital in central Newfoundland. The team and I have developed a very strong working friendship with Dr. Mohamed Ravalia, a senior family physician, Kim Osmond, a clinical educator, and many of the staff, patients and families in this area. Dr. Ravalia usually asks me to give a talk when I travel out to clinic.

Although there are other enthusiasts like myself who really enjoy studying the coagulation cascade, it is a rather esoteric topic so to break people in gently I usually try to include a few photos at the start of my talks. Walking in the hospital door I met Chuck and Bethany, two of our medical students who….. As a little joke, I often show a photograph of my father’s apartment building which overlooks the sea in Balscadden Bay. Our old family photo shows what we considered a major winter storm. To someone living in this province it looks like a windy day. Then I show a picture of the snow in our front garden during the winter of 2001 and explain to my audience that after living for the past 13 years in Atlantic Canada I have far more insight into what is truly a “winter storm”. Bethany and Chuck sat in the front seats during my talk and seemed really interested in women and bleeding.

After my talk I met Bethany and Chuck in the cafeteria. They asked me if I owned the apartment building in Howth (unfortunately I don’t). “Oh,” they said, “we recognize that apartment building, we’ve been at a party there. We had a friend from Newfoundland who stayed in an apartment there.” The pennies started to drop. My father, since the death of my mother, has lived six months of the year with our family in St. John’s and six months back in his apartment in Howth. One year we met a pleasant woman whose son was being sent to work in Dublin for six months. This young man was having difficulty finding accommodations in Dublin, which is now an extremely expensive city to live in. This lady and my father made an arrangement for her son to rent his apartment. Turns out he was a good friend of Chuck and Bethany, who’d all partied one night at my father’s apartment. They recognized the building from my slide show at the Notre Dame Bay Hospital. Truly, it is a small world.