Healthy Ambition

Bob Egan, age 45 and a brand-new med school grad, proves it’s never too late to go for your dreams.

“You’re crazy, but go ahead and be crazy.”

That was Arlene Frank’s blessing for her husband, Bob Egan, as he entered Wayne State’s School of Medicine in 1994 at age 40.

To that point, a sometimes frantic life mixing work and school had earned Egan a certificate in emergency medicine technology from Oakland Community College in 1982, an associate’s degree in nursing from Wayne County Community College in 1985 and a BA in biology magna cum laude from Wayne State in 1993.

“I’ve seen his persistence to just keep going with incredible odds,” Frank says. “He just has this vision of what he can do and what he has to do -- that there never would have been any choice that he could have done anything different.

“During his second year of medical school (1995), his mom died and that really threw him back,” she continues. “He took two years to do his second year of medical school. For some people that might have just been too much. He persisted and kept going with a family and with all the regular things that happen to people.”

In June, Egan received his MD with cumulative honors. This month he begins a three-year residency in family medicine at Troy Beaumont Hospital in Troy.

“I’m not sure there was any one thing that motivated me,” says Egan, dismissing any inquiry about his philosophy and faith. “I’d been working in hospitals for 24 years and, over time, I just decided I wanted more than what I was doing.”

His father died when Egan was 3, and this youngest of six grew up in Allen Park both rebellious and responsible. When he graduated from southwest Detroit’s Holy Redeemer High School in 1971, at the tail end of a turbulent era, he was admittedly still aimless, but entered young adulthood with more heartache than teen-age angst.

... Egan is candid about both the drive and the self-doubt that still propel him.

“My self-image is not based in reality,” he says wryly. “The reason I chose nursing instead of medicine at the time I was making a choice back then was because I didn’t feel I had the wherewithal to get through medical school. ... Over the time I’ve worked in hospitals, I’ve been constantly disproved. It takes a while for the self-image to catch up, and I’m not really sure it has. That’s part of what drives me.”

Juggling studies and family life became even more involved as Egan took on the role of student coordinator in the WSU branch of Student Physicians for Social Responsibility during his second year in medical school. He served as a student facilitator in a medical ethics discussion group, a volunteer in a clerkship pilot program and a freshman student tour guide. ...

Musing about what the future may hold for her husband as a physician, Arlene Frank recalls what happened during a medical crisis in her family.

“Last January,” she says, “my dad got very ill ... Bob ended up taking my dad to the emergency room and stayed there until my dad was admitted and then went there every day for as many hours as he could to be there with him to help out, to make sure my family understood what was going on in the hospital.

“That was the first time I had an up-close glimpse of what Bob’s physician qualities were going to be. ... He was this incredible person dealing with humanity in a way that I would want my own physician to deal with me.”

Written by Maureen McGerty

Originally printed in Wayne State magazine, Summer 1999