Jane's Window: My Spirited Life in West Texas and Austin

10. Our World Explodes while I’m Washing Sheets

123 F OR eLeven yeaRS, D. J. and i led an active life in Fort Stockton with our three growing children and lots of friends. Our only major problem was D. J.’s never-ending medical practice. That part of our life was difficult for our whole family. His career as a small-town doctor who still made house calls required endless hours away from home. For D. J., there was no such thing as controlling his own time. Like most small town doctors, his life belonged to his patients, not his family. Typically, in the middle of the night, he would get a call from a husband . “Oh, doctor, please come!” Some patients had no choice but to knock on our door, because they had no telephone. Many nights at three in the morning, D. J. would hear banging on our door, pull himself out of bed, to find a frantic man standing outside. “Dr. Sibley, it’s my wife, her lips are turning wrong side out!” i always wanted to see that particular affliction, but D. J. never would let me come along. Usually, the man’s wife was hysterical—or pretending to be—in order to win a family fight, a disturbingly common tactic. However, it was one that D. J. was unable to evaluate until he examined the woman. To do that, he would get dressed, and follow the husband to their house. D. J. had developed a clever test to determine whether a woman actually was in distress. Usually, he found the man’s wife lying on the 10 a Our World Explodes while I’m Washing Sheets 124 C H A p T e R 1 0 bed, looking like death, totally rigid. First thing D. J. did was grasp one of her ankles and gently pull that leg to one side. if she reacted, then he knew she was faking. But, if she was truly hysterical and in an altered state, the woman would not move when he grabbed her ankle. if D. J. decided she had no significant medical issues , he said to the husband, “Don’t worry. She’ll be all right.” after that, he drove back home and tried to fall asleep for a few more hours. news of hysterical wives, car wrecks, and babies arriving in the middle of the night were common fare at our house. Just when our life was becoming more and more unfair, possible absolution arrived for us. Dr. ira Clark and his wife, who lived in Houston , vacationed every summer in our nearby Davis Mountains. He was charming and brilliant and had developed the Houston Medical Center . One of his patients was M. D. anderson, owner of the anderson Clayton Cotton Brokerage, the largest cotton finance source in america. Our family visits the Rio Grande, 1959. 125 O U R W O R l D e x p l O D e S anderson’s generous gifts funded the medical center that bears his name, which has the reputation as one of the best cancer treatment and research centers in the world. Dr. Clark suggested that D. J. come to Houston to become board certified in internal medicine. D. J. had taken that training years earlier during his residency, but he wanted to retrain before taking his medical board exams. He had begun to feel that the endless hours of his general practice were beginning to threaten his health. By practicing internal medicine, at least he would have more control over his time. Why, if that were to happen, then D.J. might even be able to have more normal working hours, avoiding those middle-of-the-night phone calls. a schedule like that would let him marshal his strength more effectively. D. J. then arranged for a young doctor to establish a general medical practice in D. J.’s Fort Stockton office, so D. J.’s staff could remain in place while we lived in Houston during his retraining. We could afford to take off a year because of the money we were receiving from an oil and gas lease. exxon had leased some acreage on our Coyonosa property. Our income from the lease was $25,000. in 1961, that money would support us for a year in Houston. Otherwise, we could not have made that move. We rented our house in Fort Stockton and drove almost seven hundred miles east...