Reserve Officer Dispenses Compassion, Advice : Walking a Beat Is Good Medicine for Doctor

Dr. Jordan J. Crovatin Jr. had barely finished clipping the shiny, coiled, purple-tinged umbilical cord on the newborn baby when the “code blue” call came in. An elderly woman suffering from pneumonia had gone into cardiac arrest.

Crovatin congratulated the baby’s 17-year-old mother, peeled off his soiled medical cap, gown and gloves and hurried down to the intensive care unit. There, he joined a team of doctors, nurses and technicians administering heart massage and electrical shocks in an unsuccessful attempt to save the older woman.

“Sometimes you just can’t save them. It’s sad, but there comes a place where medicine stops and God takes over,” Crovatin said, his voice matter-of-fact, as he walked away.

Crovatin, head of emergency services at Lake View Medical Center, had little time to dwell on the death. He had other patients to see on matters not only of life and death but such mundane things as a young woman seeking a prescription to relieve menstrual cramps and a little girl with an earache. Gulping black coffee, he went from call to call. Lunch was a cup of soup and a salad eaten between half a dozen interruptions by the pager, telephone and colleagues.

Ready for Action

By the time the weekend rolls around, one would think Crovatin would be ready to put up his feet and do nothing but relax or be with his wife and brand-new baby girl.

Instead, twice a month, Dr. Crovatin puts on a police uniform, gun and badge and becomes Officer Crovatin, an unpaid volunteer reserve officer for the San Fernando Police Department.

As Officer Crovatin, his customary assignment is walking a beat in the downtown San Fernando mall, but he also serves as the department’s medical adviser, trains officers in first aid and cardiopulmonary resuscitation and serves as a consultant in drug and child abuse cases.

“I like the excitement of it, the energy,” Crovatin, 46, said of the part-time police work he has done for the past five years. “You meet a lot of people. You don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

Crovatin has won the affection and respect of colleagues in the police and medical professions.

‘Very Well-Liked’

“He’s very well-liked and respected by everybody,” said San Fernando Police Sgt. Mike Harvey, until recently head of the reserve program. “He’s excellent on the streets. There’s not one person here at the station who knows him who has a bad word for him.”

Crovatin is “very, very unlike most emergency room doctors,” said Dr. Vinod M. Assomull, the hospital’s chief of staff. Not only is he a “fine emergency room physician,” Assomull said, but he’s also “extremely compassionate.” He takes special care to set patients and their families at ease, and track the progress of seriously ill or injured patients he treats after they leave the emergency room. “We feel very fortunate to have him with us,” Assomull said.

Crovatin’s dual role as policeman and doctor has helped make him popular with San Fernando Valley law enforcement officers, many of whom view Crovatin as having first-hand insight into the stresses of police work.

“Everyone knows Jordy. He’s kind of the policeman’s doctor. Cops from all over the Valley are always popping in to see him,” said San Fernando Police Detective Ernie Halcon.

Crovatin’s police expertise makes him keenly attuned to the needs of evidence collection. Matters of seeming insignificance in the emergency room can take on vital importance later in the courtroom. An oversight as simple as rubbing the wrong type of disinfectant on a drunk-driving suspect’s arm before inserting the needle can make a blood-alcohol test inadmissible in court, Halcon said.

Crovatin’s two jobs--and his sense of humor--sometimes make for an odd combination. His favorite thing to do as a police officer, for instance, is to ticket cars illegally parked in spaces designated for handicapped people, he said.

“The same people that he might go out on the street and arrest come into the emergency room and they’re on heroin and they’re totally whacked out, and he is amazingly compassionate,” said Peter Duffy, the hospital’s director of cardiopulmonary services. “I’ve seen him be swung at by a patient but I’ve never seen him get angry with a patient.”

Michelle Wassell, a 20-year-old Pierce College student, who said she views Crovatin as “not quite God but the next-best thing,” met Crovatin four years ago when she was brought to the emergency room with gastroenteritis. “Want some pot?” he asked her. “Yeah!” she remembers replying, at which point Crovatin flipped out his police badge, grinned at her and said, “You do, huh?” Later, when she complained about the hospital food, he shared his own sandwich with her.

Son of Waiter

The son of a waiter who emigrated from Trieste, Italy, and never got past the third grade, Crovatin became a doctor relatively late in life. He has, at various times, done construction work, sold shoes, washed dishes, waited on tables, embalmed bodies, driven a moving van up and down the East Coast and worked as a stock boy, meat cutter and delivery boy at a neighborhood market in his native Brooklyn.

Crovatin hated school, got mediocre grades and, at the age of 16, against the wishes of his parents, dropped out to join the Marines with a buddy. While working as a Marine helicopter mechanic, Crovatin went on rescue missions. After observing the doctors on these missions, he decided to become a physician himself.

He went back to school, studied intensively with a tutor and, at 21, enrolled in pre-medical courses at Long Island University. In between the time that he received his high school degree and went on to college, he played semipro football for the Allentown Chargers in Pennsylvania and tried out for the New York Jets. His dreams of a pro football career were short-lived: During the first practice scrimmage, he was tackled by then-Jets running back Ernie Wheelwright and knocked unconscious.

After graduation, American medical schools wouldn’t take him. “I was old and my grades weren’t that good,” he said. In 1967, at the age of 27, Crovatin was accepted to Universidad Autonoma de Guadalajara medical school. Everything was in Spanish. Crovatin, who had failed Spanish in high school, studied by looking up every word in his textbook in a Spanish dictionary.

Held Special Internship

Five years later, Crovatin was one of seven graduates of foreign medical schools chosen to attend a special internship at what was then L. A. County General Hospital, now County-USC Medical Center. That was followed by a residency at Medical College of Toledo and a job in the emergency room at South El Monte Hospital. He came to Lake View Medical Center in 1980, and became head of its emergency room last spring.

“I think he’d be a doctor whether they paid him or not,” said Vee Fasciotti, the nurse who supervises the hospital’s emergency room. “He sees himself as a person first and a physician second. He doesn’t think he’s God. I think what I like best about him is he doesn’t get paid for most of what he does. He’s probably the most generous with his time of any doctor I know. He doesn’t send bills a lot of times. He likes people.”

Fasciotti added that Crovatin is “no saint. He’s a son of a gun. He hollers and hollers and hollers if he gets angry at something we’ve done. He’s a volatile person.” But she quickly returned to praising him. “His virtues override his weaknesses,” she said. “His intentions are good and he works hard. He’s just as quick to give you a hug and praise.”

Joe Kohan, an emergency medical technician with Mauran Ambulance Service in San Fernando, said that although other doctors “ignore you or make you feel stupid,” Crovatin always treats ambulance workers with respect. “If you ask a question . . . he’ll explain it in detail,” Kohan said.

Crovatin is unpretentious, those who were interviewed agreed. He drives a Mercedes, but lives otherwise modestly in a rented Spanish-style duplex in West Hollywood. He typically wears blue jeans and cowboy boots to the hospital and surgeon’s scrub suits in his free time.

Invited to Wedding

When he got married, he invited the entire hospital staff, from the janitors up to the administrators, to his wedding.

Crovatin’s semimonthly job as a foot patrol officer mostly isn’t breathtakingly exciting. On one recent day, it consisted primarily of patting small boys on the head while telling them not to ride their bikes on the sidewalk, smiling at merchants and eating lunch.

But it has also included chasing purse-snatchers, prowlers and shoplifters, one of whom once hurled a large radio at him. He has never used his gun in the line of duty, although once he came close. A man robbing a jewelry store pulled a gun on him but dropped the weapon when other officers came.

His job at Lake View Center is in some ways more exciting, or at least more pressured. Called Pacoima Memorial Hospital until it reorganized under Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings in 1984, the hospital is situated in an economically depressed, high-crime area. Its emergency room patients often include victims of stabbings, shootings and drug overdoses. Crovatin works a four-day week but his 12-hour shifts can sometimes stretch into 14- to 18-hour days.

On one recent day, Maricruz Pasillas, 18, of Pacoima, went into labor before her doctor could arrive from another hospital so Crovatin delivered the baby, Pasillas’ second.

Crovatin ruptured the amniotic sac and washed Pasillas with an amber disinfectant. Then, speaking in the street Spanish he learned while attending medical school in Mexico, he told her: “Puja, puja, mas, mas! (Push, push, more, more!)”

Delivered Baby Boy

“M-m-m-m-m. Ooooom. Ooooom. Ooooom,” Pasillas said, panting and sweating as a dark-colored sphere--the baby’s head--appeared and disappeared. Suddenly, Pasillas yelped and whimpered and Crovatin pulled out an 8-pound, 2-ounce baby boy.

“Babies are great. Every time I deliver a baby I love it,” Crovatin said, happily.

Moments later, he was delivering another baby for Maria Espinoza, 17, of Pacoima, a first-time mother whose husband, a butcher, was waiting in the hallway. At Crovatin’s urging, Espinoza’s mother stayed in the room.

“Maria, when I tell you to push, you’re going to push out a baby. Think hard what sex you want. . . . Come on, here it is and--you got a girl! A baby girl! Look. Look at that baby. It’s calling for its mother!” he said.

“I have one that’s only 35 days old,” said Crovatin, who recently watched the birth of his own daughter--his first child--at Cedars-Sinai Hospital and, according to nurses he works with, he hasn’t stopped talking about it since.

“I want everyone to be as happy as I am with my daughter. We’re already talking about starting another and my baby’s only 35 days old,” he told Espinoza and her mother.

Crovatin said he and his first wife divorced a few years ago after a happy 13-year marriage, largely because he desperately wanted children and his wife didn’t. He met his second wife, a film student, while she was working as a nurse’s aide on the night shift, he said.

Variety of Patients

Other patients that day included a boy who broke his arm playing football, an infant who picked a bottle of poison out of a trash container and got it on his hands, eyes and mouth, and a psychiatric social worker from the building next door who tripped getting out of her chair and hurt her legs.

Daylene Miller, 4, of Pacoima, suffering a cough, fever, upset stomach and earache, was brought to the hospital by her mother.

“Wow, that’s red hot!,” Crovatin said, looking in her ear with a lighted scope and drawing back. “Hey, I think I saw a Cabbage Patch doll in there.” She laughed as he tickled her stomach, then gave her mother a prescription for antibiotics.

“When there’s nothing to be done, I am relaxed. Then when something happens, I have to run, like a car on a quarter-mile drag strip. It’s a rush. It’s a high. I like it,” Crovatin said.

On days off from the hospital and the police force, Crovatin sees private patients in his Beverly Hills office and serves as a state Board of Medical Quality Assurance commissioner, testing the basic medical skills of out-of-state doctors seeking to practice medicine in California. Sometimes, he works as a both a trauma surgeon and bodyguard protecting visiting politicians and foreign dignitaries. He’s also been a medical consultant on movies. Once, in a cameo role as a doctor in the movie “Yes, Giorgio,” he uttered the words: “It’s ready now. I think we should begin the operation.”

Political Ambitions

But all that is not enough. Crovatin dreams of someday running for the state Legislature, where he would seek legislation requiring air bags in cars, stricter pollution controls, higher medical assistance payments to the elderly and crackdowns on doctors who bilk and abuse the system, he said.

Crovatin credits his varied accomplishments to “hyperactivity. It keeps me busy, keeps me occupied, out of trouble. I have this boundless energy I need to channel.”

Driving home from the hospital one night last summer on the Simi Valley Freeway, Crovatin saw two cars collide and a man get thrown 50 feet into the air. Other doctors might have kept going, fearful of incurring liability, but Crovatin stopped to administer first aid to the 28-year-old father of two, who suffered a ruptured liver, spleen and other massive internal injuries. The man survived, and Crovatin received a commendation from state Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sepulveda).

When questioned about the rescue, Crovatin is obviously proud, but nonchalant.

“I think a physician has a certain responsibility. I have a specialized knowledge and I should use it for people.”