From Olympic medallist to surgeon
Canwest News Service Edmonton
By Dan Barnes

To say that Debi Thomas lives in Illinois and works in Indiana is technically correct, but she also has a mobile home; her Toyota Prius. The retired American figure skater is now an orthopedic surgeon and the new job she took two months ago demands she commute from home in Chicago to a clinic in Terre Haute every work day; a round trip of 320 kilometres.

"No traffic. It's pretty. I get to see the sunrise. I call people I haven't talked to
in a long time," she said. "But I do have about 900 messages in my e-mail inbox that I
have to look at."

The voyage tacks 3-1/2 hours of travel time onto the incredibly busy schedule of a doctor who puts hips, knees and people back together and follows up faithfully to ensure they enjoy a full recovery. The 42-year-old makes the seemingly absurd daily trek for three reasons; she loves her work, she loves her son Luc who is firmly entrenched in seventh grade and does not want to move to Indiana, and the clinic position she left in Urbana, Ill. - her first real job as she likes to call it - required her to observe
an 80-kilometre, no-compete clause.

The only way to get it all done is to cram more activity into one day than most people would ever dare, just as Thomas did during a skating career that began when she was 10 and ended at 21 with an Olympic bronze, World Championship gold, silver and bronze, as well as two golds and two silvers from U.S. Nationals as proof positive of her incredible dedication. All the medals came within a four-year
window from 1985 through 1988.

"I don't think I realized how hard I worked and how hard the training I had to do to be a top level skater was until after the fact," she said on her cell phone, while making the drive home from Indiana recently.

"I did the whole skating thing while juggling school. I was too stupid to know it was impossible I guess. I look back now and think how the heck did I skate six hours a day and go to regular high school? Now you realize, oh my gosh. I've been trying to explain this to my son for years. I still don't think he understands how much work goes into performing at a very top level."

They say you take out what you put in, but it's not always quite that equitable in sport. Though Thomas was as prepared as she had ever been for a competition at the 1988 Olympics in Calgary, she blew her first jump combination in the long program and wound up third, behind Katarina Witt of East Germany and Canada's Liz Manley. That result still stings.

The work she put into education, on the other hand, was rewarded first with an engineering degree from Stanford University; she was a freshman there when she won the 1986 world title. She also graduated from medical school at Chicago's Northwestern University in 1997 and more than a decade later she is finding great satisfaction in her chosen career.

"I love this place. I'm really happy. The only downside is my poor son who says 'mom, you're not home ever.' I graduated from medical school in 1997 and got my first real job in 2007. It takes a long time," she said. "As a resident you're basically a doctor but you get paid peanuts. We don't count that as a real job. It's a job but it's a crummy job."

She was born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. but grew up in L.A. and it was there that she finished her residency, then did a fellowship before taking the Urbana job. It didn't work out, she got frustrated and had to leave. It was a great career move, since all the hard work is producing more satisfaction than frustration now and she is happy, though tired.

"During my skating career I knew that wasn't going to be the only thing I ever did. That made the disappointment of not really performing my best at the Olympics easier to deal with. I knew I was going to go on and do other things. It's hard to beat the satisfaction of winning a world championship, but it's different. When you do a really challenging surgery and it's successful, somebody who couldn't walk and now they can, it's pretty satisfying. You think I did that. It's a different satisfaction. You take people who are disabled and you give them their life back. It's satisfying."

But it's really only the beginning of the doctor/patient relationship and she follows through to the end. It's one of the reasons she hasn't been overly visible on the figure skating circuit in the past decade.

"Once you start doing surgery on people, they're your babies," she said. "You can't just leave
your practice. It's one of the reasons things are crazy for me. I think it's important to follow the clinical outcome, how you treat patients after the surgery."

She may not have known years ago how challenging that part of the job might become, but she always knew this was what she would be doing. As a kid, she repeatedly asked her mom for a doctor kit and as an adult she watched E.R. religiously on television.

"For as long as I can remember I have wanted to be a doctor. It never really changed. For a brief moment as a teenager, arguing with my mother all the time, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer," she chuckled. "That didn't last long. I absolutely love medicine. But it's not for everyone."

It's not for her husband Chris Bequette or her son, whose stomachs churn when she starts talking about sawing through bone.

"It doesn't bother me at all. You get to wear the spacesuit to protect yourself from bone chips. I can't ever remember being squeamish."

She isn't afraid of much, actually. In fact, when somebody presents a challenge as impossible, she
naturally takes it on. She has gone on making the best of things by squeezing every moment from every day. That's why she was doing a 30-minute interview on the way home in her Toyota, which does
not bear the rather famous vanity licence plate SK84AU she got before competing in Calgary.

"I'm sure it's somewhere. I wouldn't have thrown it away."

But she wouldn't have put it on her Prius either.

"No. I'm not skating for gold anymore. I'm slicing for gold," she laughed.