Patricia Thompson has gone from developing houses to developing a calling to help and heal.
By ELIZABETH BETTENDORF
Published October 17, 2003
BAYSHORE BEAUTIFUL - Dr. Patricia Thompson arrives home from H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center after three days of caring for people who need her so much that the routine stuff of life sometimes eludes her.
Like activating the voice mail on her personal cell phone.
Like what she'll eat for dinner.
Like remembering what her house looks like.
"The day I moved in, it was like I was seeing it for the first time," she says, smiling wearily at the memory.
Earlier this summer, Thompson, exhausted from a rotation at Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital where she was finishing her residency, toured the 1940s house in South Tampa with her husband, developer George Thompson Jr.
"I remembered thinking this is going to be ours,"' recalls Thompson, who until the mid-1990s worked as a general contractor and real estate agent and built houses.
"I was so tired from my rotation that when I got home a friend called and asked about the house and I said, "I don't remember.' "
When the family moved in July 1 - right about the time Thompson began a fellowship in oncology at H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center - she saw the light peach-colored house on Bay Villa Avenue with fresh eyes. It had pretty hardwood floors, a living space upstairs perfect for two of their teenage sons, Phillip and William, and a first-floor bedroom for their 7-year-old daughter, Alexandra.
It was perfect.
Even for their brawny and tenacious Siamese cat, Tati.
Of course, the Thompsons knew how to pick a house.
Patricia helped her husband build Thompson East, a 72-home subdivision on Bearss Avenue between Interstate 275 and Dale Mabry Highway. Her father-in-law, George Thompson Sr., developed Culbreath Isles and Culbreath Bayou, two of Tampa's most upscale neighborhoods. And the family is hard at work on another luxury development, Boca Royale Golf and Country Club in Englewood.
"You deal with so many parts of life as a contractor," Patricia says. "I think I took those contractor skills with me into my medical career."
Few people would have bothered to start a new career so late.
Now 43, Thompson just finished her residency in internal medicine on her path toward becoming an oncologist. She started medical school seven years ago.
"I started late, yes," she says. "But I didn't want to be 75 and say, "I wish I had."'
She admits that becoming a doctor was definitely a calling. It had to be. Her daughter was 3 weeks old when she started.
Her sons were 12, 10 and 9.
She had to relocate from Tampa to Miami, keeping the children with her and seeing her husband on weekends.
In reflection, Thompson says this: "My husband is an angel. You need the support of someone like this if you're going to try something like medical school. I owe it to him. He knew how much I wanted to do this - he got it. And he said, "We'll figure it out.' It takes somebody special to go through this with you and George is that special."
The two met in 1981 in a Spanish literature class at the University of South Florida. Thompson is an Argentina native. George loves Spanish. He waited an hour while she searched for her car in the massive USF parking lots. They ate dinner at Bennigan's on Fowler Avenue.
They married in less than a year.
She dreamed of being a doctor, but "life happened," she says, pregnancies, babies, her work as a contractor.
But the dream persisted.
She traces it back to childhood when she used to follow her father - a Fiat executive with a deep social conscience - into the Buenos Aires slums. Her father served on the board of a local hospital that routinely sent a team of doctors and health care workers out to teach hygiene and vaccinate the poor. She remembers changing diapers, holding babies, and later, when she was old enough, giving shots.
After she was married, she finished her bachelor's degree in Spanish at USF in 1990. She wanted to work, but her English skills were still so-so.
When her husband offered her a job filing in his office, she leaped at the chance.
"I wanted to work," she explains. "But I didn't have many choices because I didn't speak the language well."
She quickly mastered the filing job but found office work tedious. She decided to pursue licensing in general contracting and real estate. She built eight houses in Thompson East, but didn't stop there. By the mid-1990s, she was also juggling premed courses part-time.
Years later, after she finished her residency, she would reflect on how the organizational and people skills learned as a general contractor would help her in the medical profession.
Both licenses were "so hard to get" that she continues to keeps them both active.
"She's very dedicated in anything she sets her mind to," says Donna Guemmer, a Tampa real estate agent who has lived in Thompson Estates since 1979 and been a friend of Patricia for more than 20 years. "Anything she has ever taken on she has done full force and completed. She's warm, compassionate and very caring. She's always been that way, which gives her a wonderful bedside manner, I'm sure."
Thompson's desire to help cancer patients grew out of a medical school experience. First, she was assigned to the case of a child with leukemia, "which got me fascinated," she recalls. Then, she was assigned to a woman in her 30s undergoing chemotherapy for esophageal cancer. She was particularly struck by something the woman said one day when Thompson reached out to hug her. The woman started crying. "She said, "You're not afraid of hugging me. My friends and relatives don't seem to want to touch me because I have cancer,"' Thompson recalled. "After that I knew this was where I was supposed to be."
Becoming a doctor at midlife was lonely: There were few other students in her medical class the same age. And she was moving toward a specialty that doesn't always have happy endings.
But the calling to help cancer patients lingers to this day. She's weighing several areas of focus, including specialties in breast and renal cancer.
"Just being a doctor is a responsibility," she says. "You do it because you want to make a difference. I'm not saying there aren't cases that don't affect you. But just making the quality of life better for someone, making them feel a little better, taking the pain away, that's well worth all my training."
One Monday night in early October, Thompson pulls into her driveway as night falls. While her husband warms up pork chops and spaghetti in the kitchen, she curls up, exhausted, on the china-blue and white sofa.
"When we were first married, George couldn't cook at all," she says. "But since I've gone to med school, he's gotten very, very good. The kids say he makes a mean strawberry shortcake."
As she talks, Alexandra draws pictures and chatters and climbs in and out of her lap.
Smells of dinner cooking waft from the kitchen. Patricia's ready to fall asleep, but she knows she will start all over again tomorrow.
Tati, the cat, leaps onto the soft cushions. Each time, Thompson patiently shoos her to the floor.
Each time, the cat jumps back up.
"This cat is just like me," she says with a wry smile. "She doesn't give up."
