Then I decided, based on that year leave of absence, that I want to do something beyond the rather boring experience in medical school and memorization constant. I think I described my experience in obstetrics to you, I won't go through that again. But actually, in the end, at the end of medical school, I enjoyed seeing patients. My one memory was a wonderful elderly woman, who I visited at her home. We had to make house calls and at the end, I was so impressed with her knowledge that I called her a smart cookie. She said, 'That's what you think of me, I'm a cookie?' That's how I learned to be very careful talking to people.

But after that, I did an internship in Seattle, which we loved very much. We got away from close-knit family. Seattle was so beautiful and different. We had two children by that time, and we had a wonderful year. I'd picked Seattle for the internship because of two very prominent neuroscientists, Chuck Stevens [and Bertil Hille] were working in Seattle. It was my first job and I thought naively that I would have a lot of time, I wouldn't spend all my time on the wards, that I can interact with them. That was not true. I never saw them, not once during the year, but I loved the internship and I felt I was going to return to New York after that year and work at Cornell with Fred Plum, who was one of the gurus of clinical neurology. But I got a notice from my draft board that I had to report for induction in San Francisco from Seattle at the end of the week for transfer to Vietnam, and that scared the crap out of me and Ruth.

So I called friends at the NIH and arranged a quick interview for a job at the NIH because that substituted for miliary service. It was the public health service and that served as my military commitment. That, by some miracle, worked out and I went from Seattle to DC, actually Bethesda. I don't know if I've described it, but the NIH in those days was like a university in a country place. Beautiful grounds spread over many acres between Wisconsin Avenue and Old Georgetown Road. Lots of places for me and the kids to play and walk. Ruth got a good job at the NIH in the neurosurgery group as a nurse practitioner.