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It’s a small world after all

Alaska’s former chief medical examiner Franc Fallico died last week. This would normally be of only passing interest to me since I didn’t really know him. Except I kind of did.  Soon after I arrived in Alaska in the early 70s, back when I was still under the mistaken impression that I liked nursing, I helped medivac a patient from Barrow to Providence Hospital. As I walked down the hall after the patient was admitted, this doctor passed me by and I had one of those out of body experiences. I knew the guy. He had been dating a nurse, a friend of mine, from Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn which is where I’d been before moving to Barrow. I wondered just how far that plane had flown.

And then I went back to Barrow and forgot all about it and concluded that the guy I knew was probably still in Brooklyn dating Lula and I was just homesick and seeing someone who resembled him sent my mind down a wrong path. And then Franc got a lot of publicity for his stint in Grizzly Man as the doc who explains the autopsy and what it signified went on during the bear attack. And I saw that face again and heard the name again and read a little more deeply and darn if it wasn’t the same guy I used to know from Brooklyn.

In the end, we live in a pretty small world, no matter how big it looks.