A Close- Up Look At People Who Matter : Doctor’s Peers Honor Him for Volunteering

Dr. Steven Kamajian was getting ready to sneak out. A speaker at the awards ceremony was touting the accomplishments of one of the honorees, leaving Kamajian unimpressed.

“I do all these things too and nobody gave me an award,” Kamajian said to himself as he planned his escape from the function at the Anaheim Hilton two weeks ago. His wife of sevenyears, Caroline, persuaded him to stay for just a few more minutes.

But when the speaker started describing the winner’s education--college and medical school in Philadelphia--the story started to seem too familiar.

“I was totally faked out,” said Kamajian, who realized then that he was the winner of the Richard E. Eby Humanitarian Award given by the Osteopathic Physicians and Surgeons of California.

Kamajian, with the Wilson Medical Group in Glendale and Glendale Adventist Medical Center, was honored for 14 years of volunteer work, much of it in the growing Armenian community in Glendale.

Through the medical group and hospital, he has established free flu clinics, given first aid training to local youth groups and provided emergency health care for tent dwellers after the Northridge earthquake. He was also the primary care physician for a wounded Armenian soldier brought to Glendale last year.

“We’re doing what a lot of people are doing,” said Kamajian, trying to shrug off the praise. This may be simply what doctors do, but his drive to help others also comes from his grandmother, a survivor of the 1915 genocide of Armenians by the Turks. Historians estimate that 1.5 million were killed.

“We have the potential as human beings to be extraordinarily vile,” he said. As an Armenian, he had long heard stories of the genocide. In emergency rooms, where he sometimes operates on wounded gang members, he has seen horrors up close.

“I’ve tried very hard to give to any community I’ve lived in,” said Kamajian who came to Glendale in 1981 before there was an Armenian community there. Today, 20% of Glendale’s population is Armenian, and often Kamajian has to be more than a doctor.

“It’s impossible to be a physician in this community without being a family counselor,” he said. It’s not unusual for him to explain to recent immigrants that women have equal standing with men in America or to attempt to allay fears of government and police brought from their homeland.

“You learn a lot when you make house calls,” he said.

Glendale is a city struggling to become one community out of a wide variety of cultures, he said. “It has the same problems as any other urban area.” He takes issue with those who blame immigrants for crime and ethnic tensions in the community.

“The city has changed, but it’s because the world has changed too,” he said.

Kamajian is modest as he talks about his recent award, usually given to someone--not necessarily in the medical community--who has made outstanding humanitarian contributions. He wonders if all his patients would think so highly of him, because “the bottom line is you can’t please everyone.”

He’s still trying, though, even at the occasional expense of his home life. Kamajian volunteers to work overnight emergency room shifts two to three nights a week. That means getting only two hours of sleep on those nights, and also means giving up time with his 4-year-old daughter, Natalie.

Maybe it will make a difference on his gravestone, said Kamajian, who worked as a cemetery caretaker when a junior high student in Philadelphia. Those gravestones--some going back centuries--noted which were doctors, but very rarely would an epitaph read, “Here lies a good doctor, in loving memory.” Such a memorial, he said, may be something to strive for.

“I don’t care if someone might misspell my name,” Kamajian said about his epitaph. “I just want people to recognize that ‘he tried.’ ”