Irene Linetskaya's Biography
Excerpted from Healing Journeys: Teaching Medicine, Nurturing Hope
Irene Linetskaya has an irrepressible energy, a zany sense of humor and a natural beauty; when she speaks, her words come tumbling forth, punctuated by giggles and embellished by her expressive hands. There is no immediate hint of her history in her demeanor, though a clue to her early years can be faintly detected beneath her American accent; there is an occasional staccato to her words, a tempo and lilt that give away her Russian roots. She was born in Kiev in the Ukraine, 60 miles from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. That fact meant little when she came into the world in 1977, but changed everything in 1986, when there was an explosion at the plant.
On April 26, 1986, Irene was at a birthday party when a reactor in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded. While Kiev residents knew the basics of what happened from the outset – there had been an accident at the plant – they weren’t told much more by the government, which wanted to keep the danger of the situation obscured. Irene remembers finding a mushroom “the size of my head” growing up from underneath the pavement by her home, but everyone was still drinking the milk and water and eating food grown in the area. Finally, several months after the accident, the authorities decided to send all the children in the city away; Irene was put on a bus and told she was going to camp.
She was gone through the summer. By the time she returned, her mother had died of cancer, her stepfather had left, and her brother was living alone in the family’s apartment. Irene moved in with her grandparents....
Despite all of the turmoil, Irene describes herself as a confident and independent child who loved her school, which she remembers as “excellent, strict, intense and science-based. Physics started in the fourth grade!” She recalls....
Two years after the Chernobyl explosion, things changed again. Irene’s grandfather was now very ill with cancer, but her grandmother didn’t trust Russia’s medical system enough to let him go to the hospital. She herself had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and the state was threatening to take Irene away and put her in an orphanage. And then – for these were the days of Gorbachev and glasnost – came a lucky break: the borders opened up, and Russian Jews claiming religious persecution were allowed to emigrate. The family eventually made it to Oakland, California, where Irene’s great aunt found them an apartment in the city....
Another key moment in Irene’s life came during this time when she saw her first pediatrician. “In Russia, doctors were a nightmare. We were all terrified of doctors. But my American doctor was young and sweet and considerate. And I fell in love with her profession. I was only 12, but I decided right then to become a doctor.”
In the eleventh grade, Irene’s biology teacher said, “There’s a program at Stanford for students who want to become doctors.’”
The more Irene learned about the Stanford Medical Youth Science Program, the more convinced she became that the program was meant for her, and she for it. “When I went through SMYSP, I was as plugged into it as they come,” she remembers. “I was so excited. It was the first time that I was really challenged academically, the first time I was in a college setting, the first time I was working in a hospital. I felt medicine was my calling, but my high school jobs had kept me so busy that I’d had no time to volunteer in a hospital, so I didn’t really have any firsthand knowledge about what being a doctor entailed.”
At SMYSP, Irene was given a job in the cancer radiation therapy department of the Stanford Hospital. In her words, she “freaked out.” “I said, ‘You can’t put me here; my whole family died of cancer.’ But I was told to give it a chance. The first day, they put me us in the waiting room to play with the kids, and there was this little boy named Max. He was about 3, he had no hair, and he had a brain tumor that was growing out of control. He went to radiation therapy twice a day, where they played him Disney tunes throughout the treatment. He would lie on the table and bop his feet up and down. It was so sad, but the prognosis was full recovery. Being surrounded by cancer was a tremendous challenge for me, but I stuck through it....”
Irene left SMYSP with a renewed conviction that she should – and could – become a doctor. Her dreams took on a tangible force, and her plans began to mold to reality. “I came back with so much energy,” she says. “SMYSP helped me know specifically why I wanted to be a doctor and how medicine made sense in my life....”
To learn more about Irene Linetskaya’s experience in SMYSP and to find out what she is doing today, purchase the book Healing Journeys: Teaching Medicine, Nurturing Hope at the Stanford Health Promotion Resource Center. All proceeds from the sale of this book go to funding scholarships for SMYSP graduates. You can also purchase this book at Amazon.com.