Talk about irony. Aron M. Green, M.D., orthopedic surgeon, had just finished his fellowship. “My first month on the job, I badly sprained my ankle running on an unfamiliar trail.”
Teenagers are famous for clamming up when an adult asks questions. But time and again the adolescents Keren Phillips, M.D., sees in the Monmouth Family Health Center prove they didn’t get the memo.
It’s said that just before you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes. But for a local physician who recently suffered a major heart attack, the flashbacks that came before he underwent lifesaving treatment at Monmouth Medical Center dated back just 13 years—to the birth of his son.
Elizabeth Maldonado had tried all kinds of medical treatments for the chronic back pain that had plagued her since 2005. She saw pain-management specialists who injected her spine with medications and prescribed oral narcotics. After three years of this, she was no better. In fact, she was worse.
Orthopaedic surgeon Michael Absatz, M.D., found in his work a dream combination of two loves: mechanics and medicine. “Orthopaedics was the ultimate form of engineering—engineering for the human body,” he says. Then his own body failed him.
