Today is my dad’s birthday. He would be 78 today. I miss you dad. I thought today was appropriate to post this entry i had written a while ago and just haven’t scheduled to publish.
Growing up It felt like most people thought that my dad was a doctor. Big reveal he was not a doctor. He was what they call a physician’s assistant. The way he always described it was that he could do about 95% of what a Doctor does. The difference was that he needed a doctor to sign his chart versus a doctor being fully autonomous. The advantage of physician assistants is its two years of medical school versus four years of medical school to be a doctor.
My dad went through physician assistant School in the mid-70s. A few years after the movie and show MASH came out. Since I was born after the show started I cannot remember a time when he wasn’t watching it if it was on TV. I’m pretty sure that if i had ever asked ever he would have said that was his favourite show of all time.
For my dad I think it was more than a TV show. He enjoy it and thought it was funny yet I also think he felt the adrenaline rush of the glorified combat situation, even if it was a comedy. So much so that I remember during the first Gulf War he had offered to go into the field. I don’t know if it was at a field hospital or at Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany however I know he discussed it to some degree. Retrospectively I am not sure how serious he was. I think on some level he wanted to go however on another it was never going to happen. In the end it never did. That never stopped him from thinking of himself as Hawkeye. I’m pretty sure that means one of his friends was trapper. And remembering this particular Doctor friend who he worked many shifts together when i was growing up they were as funny together as Hawkeye and Trapper.