‘I almost walked out of medical school when they gave me a mouse to work on.’

Dr. Lillian Paula Seitsive came to California with her late husband, Dr. Morris Rood, in 1953. They opened an office in Northridge before there was a bank, a post office or a hospital. All that has changed, but Dr. Seitsive, a general practitioner, still keeps office hours four days a week. She and her husband, Robert Epstein, live in Northridge.

I was born in Manhattan in 1906 and was brought to Brooklyn when I was 6 weeks old. We had a very unfortunate family history. I had a very dear brother who was the last of four brothers; three had died. The reason I remember him so, he was such a great love. He just adored my mother. On Friday before the Sabbath he would bring long-stemmed roses for her. He would pick her up and swing her around. I still remember this as if it were yesterday.

And then he died. I was grieved. I was only 5 years old at the time. He was shaving, and he cut his face. He died of a skin infection which we could treat now. This was three weeks before his marriage. He was 22 years old. It was very traumatic for the family. My parents really wanted to go out the window together.

It left a tremendous imprint on me about illness. Another little brother had died of diphtheria. People don’t die of diphtheria anymore. Whatever it was in me that made me bond to these things, I knew there was something.

I knew I had to do something in which I would be independent. I would not be dependent upon another to hire me or fire me. I had to do my thing. Even as a child I felt I had to do my thing. I knew I wanted to be a doctor.

It was most difficult not having enough money. When I graduated from college I was 20 years old. I taught school for a year, but always with the feeling that this is temporary. “I’m going to medical school, and that’s all there is to it.” I earned enough money for the first year of medical school. My father had to take a thousand dollars out of his life policy to help me finish my second year. I worked selling millinery and carried bedpans as a nurse’s aide. The school gave me a scholarship for my third and fourth year. Otherwise, I could have dropped out. That’s why I feel so keenly about the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. It’s a humane medical school.

The only time I almost walked out of medical school was when they gave me a mouse to work on in the laboratory. I said, “No way! As much as I want to be a doctor, I will leave, but I will not touch that thing!” I could dissect anything else, even a cat. I almost got killed by my mother one day because I took a cat home and boiled him in the pot on the stove to make a skeleton. You know, like the dinosaur. That was the grossest thing I’ve ever done.

Medicine isn’t the only thing. There is a world out there. I go to lectures at the University of Judaism on Sunday morning, the theater and the music center, the philharmonic and the civic light opera. Last night I was at a meeting of the City of Hope. This is part of life and living.

I raised my two children, but I didn’t stay home. It was two weeks from the time I gave birth until I was back in the office. I went to deliver a baby in my ninth month of pregnancy, and they wanted to know which one of us was going on the table.

I could have retired many years ago, because I am going to be 81 years old in May. But then, my patient looks at me and says, “You’re not thinking of retiring, are you?” or “Go on a holiday, but please come back.” There must be some spark between us.

On Monday, I leave for Sorrento to be one of 25 delegates from the United States to the Medical Women’s International Conference. I’m going to fly to London, take the Orient Express to Venice. From Venice I fly to Rome and then to Sorrento. I’ll be back on the night of May 12, take one day to rest and be back in my office on the 14th. I used to go right from the plane back to the office. That shows I’m getting old.