Another Nice Day: Just What the Doctor Ordered

On Saturday, Steve Bernocco celebrated Saturday.

On Sunday, Northridge celebrated Stephen J. Bernocco MD.

On Monday, Steve Bernocco celebrated Monday.

Today, while the rest of us fume in a freeway jam, stew over an unpaid bill and cuss the stone that stubbed our toe, Steve Bernocco will transplant a few flowers into a sunnier spot, take a few laps in the pool, rub a few tummies (Bernocco has a Ph.D. in tummy rubbing), touch up a few stained-glass panels, deliver a few babies, have a few neighbors in for drinks, tell a few outrageous jokes, bestow a few Bernocco bear hugs. . . .

Why? Hey, man, it’s Tuesday !

What could be better?

Toasting the Occasion

But back to Saturday. On Saturday, Bernocco broke open a couple of bottles of Moet et Chandon and toasted the occasion--Saturday--with his wife Georgia and a new friend. (To Bernocco, a new friend is just about anybody he’s met five minutes ago.)

Bernocco toasted the past: a ‘30s childhood on the Jersey coast; a wacky tour of duty with the Navy in Cuba, where his two sons were born and where the medical facilities sported huge green crosses because they were fresh out of red paint; the time his pants fell down in the middle of a delicate Caesarean section. (“No big deal,” Georgia said. “His pants are always falling down.”)

He toasted the future: a trip back to Villanova for son Greg’s graduation; maybe a quick visit to China; a dream he has, to work in a woefully understaffed clinic in a desolate area north of Port au Prince, Haiti.

Mostly, he toasted the present: “You couldn’t ask for a nicer day, could you? Anyway, I couldn’t. Except maybe tomorrow. . . . “

Tomorrow--Sunday--several hundred close friends and colleagues gathered at Northridge Hospital Medical Center to celebrate the man for whom the facility’s Maternal and Child Health Pavilion will be named, when the hospital’s new patient tower is completed.

‘Remember the Time . . . ?’

It was a splendid, happy affair: balloons and buffet, champagne and schmooze. Shrimp as big as your fist. Son Stephen Jr. down from Stanford. A lobby full of grinning faces, each of which seemed to be saying, “Remember the time with Steve when we. . . . “ Blazers and cocktail dresses impaled with big buttons reading “I (Valentine) Dr. (Teddy Bear) Nocco.”

A lot of love, a lot of fun. Underneath it all, a singular honor.

Bernocco’s cancer, his imminent death, had nothing to do with the tribute. His life has everything to do with it.

In a ceremony as short and sweet as Bernocco himself, David Chernof, former chief of staff, said the right things and concluded with a fond memory of one of Bernocco’s legendary tummy rubs.

Bernocco said the right things and concluded with a fond memory of Miss Church, his third-grade teacher: “She called me in one day and said, ‘Stephen, you’re not going to make it scholastically. Why don’t you become a plumber?’ Well, here I am. . . . “

A pianist broke into “Come to the Cabaret.” Glasses were refilled. Bernocco, who looks like a benign Don Rickles, rejoined his friends, working the crowd expertly, as only a man who loves people can.

Bernocco, 50, will never tell you why the pavilion is being named after him. What he’s done, he figures, is nothing remarkable, nothing anybody else wouldn’t have done.

Happily, a brochure published by the hospital staff fills in the gaps:

Villanova; Georgetown Medical School; the Cuba bit; obstetrics/gynecology residency at Penn. Off to the San Fernando Valley (Granada Medical Group) in 1967, then to Northridge, where his home became “a haven to people needing a friendly hand, a ‘hotel without a license.’ ”

Help for Those in Need

“The free clinic he opened for victims of the 1971 Sylmar earthquake and continued to operate for four years for illegal aliens who needed medical care,” the brochure continues. “The free medical care he continues to give to needy patients. The shelter he gave to his former neighbors from Granada Hills when they had to evacuate their homes because of the Van Norman Dam problem. The clothes he has given to almost total strangers. The arrangement to find child care for the children of his patients. The financial aid for a friend of his son who needed help to get through school. The money he has lent single friends who needed help qualifying to buy homes . . . “

It goes on, the brochure, and on, and nobody who knows Bernocco questions a word of it. Nobody but Bernocco. “I couldn’t read it,” he said Saturday. “I just scanned it. I figured if the cancer doesn’t take me soon, how the hell am I going to live up to all that stuff?”

“Come on, now,” said Georgia, a Jersey sweetheart he met over a game of kick the can, “that’s just the half of it. What about the generosity? Steve would give away everything he had if he had the chance--his clothes, an artwork, the silver service. You know, if somebody came along and wanted me , I wouldn’t be surprised if he gave me away.”

“I’m not real hung up on possessions,” Bernocco mumbled, plainly embarrassed. “I enjoy being surrounded by nice things--Georgia, for example--but if it could benefit somebody, I’d sell it. Or sure, give it away.”

Not Georgia, though. Georgia, he said, is “the thinker of the family. I just jump into things. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t, but once I’ve jumped, I figure, ‘Why not continue?’

“The Santa Rosa Clinic is just something I plunged into without really thinking about it. It was right after the earthquake and a lot of people, most of them Spanish-speaking, needed help.

“We got a trailer and went out there and found a lot of women were delivering babies out of garages, dying in childbirth. A lot of them were illegal and afraid to go anywhere else.

“I begged two beds from each of the area hospitals. Doctors volunteered. It was a beautiful thing. Well, most of it.

‘Irresistible Urge’

“There was this old ob/gyn at a nearby hospital I’d better not name. He wore the same suit for three weeks, with those funny little European lace shoes. I got so sick of that damned suit.

“Then I had this irresistible urge. I got a pair of nurse’s bandage scissors and cut off those crummy pants at the knees.

“When old ob/gyn came out of the operating room, he put on the suit. Well, he had these spindly legs and these little lacy shoes. . . .

“The next day they asked us to move our operations to Northridge. . . . “

Bentley the Butler--the world’s largest poodle--snipped the thread of the conversation, snatching a napkin off the patio table and loping off into a stand of bamboo.

“The kids turned out terrific,” Bernocco said, “but Bentley’s spoiled rotten.

“The kids, and Georgia, that’s what it’s all about. Even above church, above country. The most important thing in my life is my family.

“The cancer is an intrusion, of course, but my kids are raised, my wife is financially secure. So I’ve done what I really wanted to do. And you have to admit, it is a great day.”

Cancer in Remission

With the cancer--lymphoma--in remission, Bernocco is again a man in motion. He swims, skis, constructs stained-glass panels, reads voraciously, throws notable parties, gardens like a pro and plumbs with all the skill of an amputee. (The Bernocco toilet still leaks, long after Bernocco ingeniously transplanted a piece of his neighbor’s garbage disposal. It leaks, but it jingles.)

“Sure, I live each day as if it were my last,” Bernocco said, “but you can’t lay that on the cancer. I’ve always lived this way, ever since I can remember. There’s never been a day I haven’t been happy to roll out of bed, put my feet on the floor and get going. Well, not many, anyway. . . . “

In a rare serious mood, Bernocco recalled December of 1983: “My lung had filled up with fluid. I couldn’t breathe. I’d had to stop work for the first time in my life.

“I remember, we were watching the television, Pavarotti singing carols in Notre Dame in Montreal. Georgia and I had been there; a beautiful cathedral.

“I told Georgia, ‘You know, I just can’t live like this.’ ”

“He was so sick,” Georgia said. “They were using such heavy chemicals in his chemotherapy, massive doses.”

Half-Way Through

“I was simply going to stop taking the chemo,” Bernocco said. “I really wanted to die. This Christmas show was on television, and we both started to cry.

“Georgia said, ‘I want you to go on, to do it. You’re halfway through the treatment.’ I said I’d do it.”

“He hung in there,” Georgia said. “I knew he would. That’s Steve. And we’ve had some pretty good times since then. Some very good times.”

Including Sunday’s dedication party.

“I’m not all that sure why they’re naming the pavilion after me,” Bernocco said. “Yeah, I was chief of obstetrics/gynecology, and on the board of trustees, but I think maybe it’s because of the candlelight dinners.”

Candlelight dinners?

“It must have been 15 years ago. I thought how nice it would be, when a lot of people leave the OB unit at the same time, to have a nice dinner together, all the husbands and wives. Candlelight, wine, flowers, waiters. Everybody together.

“The trouble was, we treat all sorts of people at Northridge, the affluent and the not-so-affluent.

“Well, here would be this president of a bank and his wife in a Saks Fifth peignoir sitting down to dine with a guy fresh off a construction crew and his wife in bare feet and a hospital robe with nothing on her behind. . . .

“I thought it was a great idea. Still do. Not everyone shared my view. It petered out after a week or two. We still have the dinners, but for couples alone.”

As always at the Bernoccos’, what started out as an hour’s visit stretched into four.

Bernocco spun a few more hysterical but unprintable jokes (“I learn them from the anesthesiologists; honest to God, it’s like a MASH unit in there”), explained his love for obstetrics (“It’s the only hospital visit where you always bring home a present”).

He talked again about son Greg’s forthcoming graduation (“The whole Villanova glee club is going to sing”), about the clinic in Haiti where he hopes to practice.

Before his new friend left, Bernocco had made a tennis date and promised a merciless game of Trivial Pursuit.

“And hey,” he added, “did I ever tell you about the night I was supposed to lecture the nurses on herpes. . . ? Listen, I’ll tell you the next time I see you.”

Absolutely. Meanwhile, have a nice day, Stephen J. Bernocco.