The Healing Power of Time

In a young life filled with trouble, the worst times were when she sat by helplessly as her little brother’s chest seized up with asthma.

“There were times when my brother would have an asthma attack and throw up blood, and I thought, my brother, my little baby brother, was going to die,” Nikki Pinkerton recalls. “That’s why, as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a doctor. . . . I was driven.”

They say what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, which would make Nikki Pinkerton a lifter of 300-pound, dream-crushing weights.

She grew up poor, raised in part by an ailing grandmother, discouraged by an insensitive and ignorant guidance counselor, set back by teenage motherhood and temporarily disabled by a life-threatening condition.

Now it’s her turn. At 34, the one-time high school dropout will take her bachelor’s degree in biological sciences with honors from Cal State Fullerton this month. Then, in the fall, the Anaheim mother of three, who was offered 15 full scholarships to top medical schools across the country, will attend Yale University. Her husband, an Anaheim police detective, will quit his job and the Pinkerton family will move to New Haven, Conn., while Mom becomes a doctor.

It’s a rare mother who gets to hear her 16-year-old call her “amazing,” but that’s the way Pinkerton’s son Nicholas, an honors student himself, describes the woman who has spent the past several years sitting with him and his siblings in the evenings, doing homework together.

“I’m extremely proud of my mom,” Nicholas said. “She’s a full-time student and a full-time mom. She takes care of us, takes us to soccer practice and gets all A’s.”

It’s a life Pinkerton fashioned for herself out of unpromising beginnings.

“My parents were divorced and I was raised by my mom and my grandma,” said Pinkerton, born Faith Monique Rodriguez. “My mom worked as a retail sales clerk. We lived in an apartment on Topaz Lane in Placentia and things were beyond tight. We didn’t have medical insurance and we simply couldn’t afford medical care.”

The family lived on the minimum wage earned by Pinkerton’s mother, Faith Toon, who is one of Pinkerton’s biggest fans.

“Even when we were so desperately poor, living from paycheck to paycheck and things were very hard, Nikki, my first-born daughter, always was the protector,” Toon said. “She never told me how frightened she was.

“She always had empathy and wanted to be the healer. When she was about 6 years old, she found a little baby bird on her way home from school. It had a broken leg and she insisted that we nurse that bird. So, we learned what to feed it and how to fix its leg with a splint.”

A Dream Revisited

When Pinkerton was a sophomore in high school, she sought advice from her guidance counselor. Her mother and grandmother had never attended college so the counselor surely would provide the guidance she needed about applying for medical school, scholarships and other higher education information.

The session with the counselor was devastating.

“He told me, ‘Some dreams are just too big for some people,’ ” Pinkerton said. It didn’t matter that she was maintaining a 4.0 grade-point average and taking a full load of accelerated courses.

“He told me that my mother was too poor to pay for college, much less medical school, and that I should try to find something more suited for a girl of my modest background,” she remembers.

At 16, with her hopes crushed, she dropped out of school. A year later, after passing an exam for her high school diploma, she married her childhood sweetheart and, soon after, was pregnant with son Nicholas.

Her husband, Brett Pinkerton, joined the Air Force and the couple moved to Ogden, Utah, where he was based. There, they had their second son, James.

Nikki Pinkerton raised her sons, worked at a stock brokerage firm and all but forgot that old doctor dream.

Then, during her third pregnancy seven years ago, after the family had moved back to Orange County, she was stricken with idiopathic thrombocytopenia, a life-threatening condition that destroys blood platelets and induces early labor. To reduce the chances of dying, an abortion was highly recommended.

Instead, Pinkerton opted for medication that stopped her from going into labor prematurely and spent the last two trimesters in bed.

“I was afraid and I knew I could die and lose my daughter but, what can I tell you? I’m a mom,” she said. “I already felt her kick inside me and I just believed that everything was going to be OK.”

She gave birth to Mandy, now 6, and emerged from the episode with this revelation: “Life is just really short and really precious and you have to do the things that you want to do because you just don’t have that long.”

So, with the support of her husband and children, she went to Fullerton College and later transferred to Cal State Fullerton, where she has a 4.0 grade-point average.

Besides her full course load, she conducts research at Cal Tech through the Minority Access to Research Careers program, examining the development of the nervous system of chicks and quails.

She said she plans to do cancer research at Yale while becoming a physician, possibly a gynecologist or pediatrician. Afterward, she said she hopes her title will give her a voice in health care reform, her chance to change the system that left her grandmother, who suffered from diabetes, and brother without medical care. Her grandmother died two years ago; the brother whose life she feared for as a little girl is 29 now and a Cal State Fullerton history student.

“Medical care is a basic human right and the doctor takes care of people, regardless of income levels, and asks questions, affects change,” Pinkerton said. “That’s what I’ve envisioned a physician was from the onset.”

Behind Her 100%

Her husband said that he and the children always knew her desire to become a doctor had to be fulfilled.

“We told her, ‘We know what you really want to be so do it. Go for it. We’re behind you 100%,’ ” said Brett Pinkerton, 36, who recently was named Anaheim’s Officer of the Year. “She’s obviously done very well at school, but the most amazing thing is that she’s able to study, do research at Cal Tech and be the team mom, member of the PTA, project coordinator at the kids’ school parties and somehow find time to get into the kitchen and make dinner. . . . She’s phenomenal.”

Her story is one of dedication, determination and inspiration, said Cal State Fullerton professor Robert A. Koch, Pinkerton’s mentor.

Becoming a scientist and a physician “is too hard a job to do if you’re not driven, and Nikki is very driven,” Koch said. “It’s something that comes from the depth of her being.”

Pinkerton has never met her father, a university professor in San Diego. But even that is about to change. They recently have been in contact, and will meet for the first time just days before her May 31 graduation.

Pinkerton will deliver the commencement address. She plans to share her story and her dream philosophy, which goes like this:

“I believe that dreams are like dandelions. . . . If you have ever pulled a dandelion from your lawn, then you know that unless you dig up the entire root or kill the soil surrounding it with the most powerful of poisons, the dandelion eventually will sprout again because dandelions, like dreams, are almost impossible to kill.”