Quadriplegic Battles System to Become Doctor

Packing for his move from Davis to Westwood, Peter Franklin carefully wrapped a framed baby picture he usually keeps on his mantle. It is Erin, the first baby he delivered as a student at UC Davis School of Medicine.

“It was one of the high points of my life,” said Franklin, 30, sitting in a wheelchair in his parents’ Newport Beach home Thursday. He lifted his elbows off his knees and smiled at motionless fingers. “ . . . And with these hands as functionless as they seem to be. . . .”

Franklin was a freshman at UC Santa Barbara in the spring of 1976 when his neck was broken in an ocean swimming accident. He was left a quadriplegic.

But on June 12, after overcoming discouragement and disability, he will be graduated in the top quarter of his class, thus earning distinction as California’s first quadriplegic to obtain a medical degree. He also has won a prized residency in internal medicine at Cedars Sinai in West Los Angeles, an event he called a “mind blower.”

Self-described as driven and motivated, Franklin decided to fight back two days after his accident when he realized that his injuries were permanent. After conquering his own depression, he said, he suffered what he now knows were “inappropriate” comments from doctors who told him his case was hopeless.

“I was a young man, 19; I had a severe injury, not a fatal disease. . . .” He still had wrist and arm action and normal feelings in his thumbs and fingers, even though they could not perform fine motor skills, he said.

He sat around his parents’ Westwood home for a year. Then chance meetings with household help--one who was an unemployed Ph.D in neuroanatomy and the other a child of a prominent UCLA brain researcher--rekindled a childhood ambition to become a doctor.

“My goal was to reach for the unreachable. The stars. I wasn’t going to settle for anything but the best.”

His connections helped him get a job at the UCLA Brain Research Institute, where he worked as a researcher for 2 1/2 years before deciding to enroll at UCLA.

There, some professors met his dream with derision, he said. One afternoon he drove his power wheelchair into the office of a microbiology professor, asking to transfer into the department. “I’ll never forget it,” Franklin said. “He said, ‘Come on. You’ve got to be kidding. How do you expect to do the lab work?’ ” When Franklin told him he hoped to go to medical school, the professor told him the idea was foolish, that he ought to accept reality and forget it. The professor agreed, however, to let him into bacteriology as a trial course.

With a UCLA-provided lab worker following his directions to scoop, stir and pour materials and place them in and out of microscopes, Franklin eventually finished first in the class of 100 students, he said.

He was graduated from UCLA with a 3.89

grade-point average and was accepted at St. Louis University as well as UC Davis.

Getting into medical school was difficult because of his disability, he believes. Getting through was more difficult, but not because of his disability. “I can do a complete physical exam and feel everything,” he said. He was required to only observe surgery, which he cannot perform, in medical school. One reason he chose to specialize in internal medicine is that it is the most intellectual branch of medicine, Franklin said.

With an attending physician standing behind him each time, Franklin delivered four babies “all by myself!”

In two years of seeing hundreds of patients in clinical work, none has objected to being seen by a doctor in a wheelchair, he said. “They all accepted me immediately,” he said. “It’s almost as if they feel they have something in common with me.”

His tragic accident and its life-enhancing aftermath have imbued him with a deep sensitivity and a special ability to empathize with patients, he said. “Empathy far and away is the most valuable and precious commodity of a physician practicing the art of medicine. I feel very strongly about that.”

Behind rimless glasses, Franklin raised his eyebrows in surprise at the notion that someone in his position might feel self-pity. He said he never felt sorry for himself or for others. His parents, Howard and Dorothy, raised him and his two older brothers to “give of ourselves before giving to others,” he said. Practicing medicine epitomizes that belief, he said.

“None of this would be possible without the support of my parents,” he said. They talked on the phone every night, helped him remodel his house to accommodate the wheelchair, arranged for housekeepers and visited once a month.

On Sunday, June 14, the Franklins expect about 60 people to help celebrate their son’s graduation at a brunch at the Newport Beach Marriott.

In becoming the state’s first doctor who is quadriplegic, Franklin said he did not intend to make a statement for the disabled. He refuses to be called a “quadriplegic doctor.” “I am a physician first, a man, a Californian who likes jazz and good wine. And oh, yes, just happens to have a disability.”

Still, many people do not believe in the capabilities of disabled people, he noted. “In my own way and my own time, I’m showing them wrong.”