Today is a special day. Elena celebrates six
decades of life. Let us look at where she started. Her father and mother bought
a plot of land on a shell road. Dad built a house with some help. They were
humble. They did not own a car. When other people had television, they had only
a radio for many years.
When Elena was 15 years
of age, the Argentina military staged a coup and took power. People started
disappearing. One's worst nightmare was to have the dreaded green Ford Falcon
pull up in front of your house around midnight. Two weeks after the coup, the
Torello family faced their worst nightmare. The green Ford Falcon pulled up in
front of the house. There was the dreaded knock on the door. The father
answered the door. They were expecting arrest followed by torture and death.
The secret police asked for another person. ID documents were produced. The
thugs went through their house. They broke into the house next door. A pregnant
woman was hauled off and never seen again. (Years later it was found out
that the arrested woman was kept alive until she gave birth to her child. She
was then murdered.)
Despite this trauma,
Elena finished high school one year early. She was accepted to the University
of Buenos Aires Facultad de Medicina. She finished in 1984 with an Honors
Diploma. Elena completed a residency. She became a cancer doctor.
At age 40 Elena
came to San Jose, California to start life with me. She had to start her
medical career over literally "from scratch."
Elena
took three highly-competitive tests to qualify for her California medical
license. She scored in the top 5% of US medical students and aspiring foreign
doctors seeking a US medical license. She got accepted for her residency at the
Kaiser Permanente hospital in San Francisco, At age 42, she started a rigorous
residency program where the average person accepted was 27 years of age. It was
three years of hell including 36-hour workdays. She finished and got hired by
Kaiser. At the end of March,2021, she will retire.
I can only say one thing.
"South America produces some very tough women!"
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