Michael
Ain
Overcoming Obstacles
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64When
Michael Ain was a child, his parents taught him there was nothing
he could not do if he worked hard enough. Didn’t get an “A”
in math? Didn’t make the basketball team? “Try harder”
was always the answer. No excuses.
Their advice proved trustworthy as the boy grew up in his Long Island
home, attended the Phillips Academy Summer Session and then PA’s
regular academic program and sailed through an Ivy League education
at Brown University. His grades were good, and he was a competitive
high school wrestler and college varsity baseball player, in great
physical shape. He was a leader in his fraternity and in other campus
organizations, with awards for high achievement.
Then he decided to go to medical school and discovered he could not
get in.
“For the first time in my life, the rules my parents taught me
did not hold true,” Ain told an audience of Phillips Academy
seniors gathered in Commons in March. “I was being denied something
I really wanted to do, not because I didn’t work hard enough,
but because of other people’s thoughts and perceptions.”
Ain was rejected by 20-30 medical schools, he says, because of his
height.
Handsome, articulate, intelligent, Ain is 4 feet 3 inches tall. He
was born (to parents of average height) with achondroplasia, a form
of dwarfism. And even to medical school admissions officers who had
reluctantly learned to accept women and minorities for whom doors
might not have opened a few decades earlier, that seemed an adequate
reason to reject him.
At first, Ain was cocky. When one admissions officer told him he wouldn’t
be able to do the job physically, he challenged the man to a weightlifting
competition in the med school gym; the invitation was not accepted.
When told his patients would not respect him, he cited his receipt
of a PA prize given to the most admired and respected student. When
another interviewer called him a “midget,” Ain responded
by calling him a name we cannot print in the Andover Bulletin.
Although appalled by the widespread display of “bigotry,”
he told the students, he eventually got his temper under control and
reverted to his parents’ formula—more hard work. He returned
to Brown for a year, earning perfect grades in two graduate-level
science courses while also holding down a full-time job and writing
a research paper that was accepted by a professional journal.
When the year was up, he applied again to a long list of M.D. programs,
and this time he was accepted by just one: Albany Medical College.
The story does have a happy ending, but there were yet more battles
to fight along the way. He excelled at Albany only to be turned down
by two dozen residency programs in neurosurgery and even in the less-competitive
field of general surgery. Unhappily, he was funneled into pediatrics,
the only discipline where he could predictably be larger than most
of his patients. He liked the work but yearned for the challenge of
the operating room.
“I couldn’t even get into surgery programs that didn’t
fill all their spots; that’s how much nobody wanted me,”
Ain said.
Eventually, it was Albany again that offered him a desirable opening
in orthopedic surgery, which is sometimes considered the most macho
of the medical disciplines; Johns Hopkins Magazine calls it a “rough
and rugged medical specialty” requiring outstanding physical
strength. According to Ain, some colleagues excoriated Albany’s
chairman of orthopedics, Dr. Richard Jacobs, for accepting Ain, predicting
the little man would “fall flat on his face.” But Ain was
a star in the program, and later, when his small protegee was chosen
to give grand rounds in orthopedics at Albany Medical Center, Jacobs
seized the opportunity to highlight Ain’s success.
“He got up at the podium and lambasted all the people who had
doubted me and all the people who had told him he was nuts to take
me,” Ain says.
Today, Ain is a highly respected orthopedic surgeon at Johns Hopkins
Hospital in Baltimore. Married to a nurse, he has two young children
as well as a thriving medical practice. About one-third of his work
is devoted to treating adults and kids suffering from skeletal dysplasia,
which Johns Hopkins Magazine defines as “a grab bag of more than
100 different disorders, most of which cause short stature.”
By offering such patients empathetic treatment, excellent care and
an out-of-the-ordinary role model, he says, he is repaying a debt
for the opportunities that were given to him by his parents, Andover,
Brown and Albany.
—Theresa
Pease
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