8 minute read
PEOPLE
from Fall 2021 Issue
Good Doctor Bhavna Lall is among the first faculty members at the new UH med school.
Trial by Fire
Having survived the crucible of helping start UH’s med school during a pandemic, a founding faculty member insists ‘healthcare is a human right.’
By Ray Dennison, Photo by Jhane Hoang
“W e’re calling it the Fauci Effect,” says physician Bhavna Lall, describing the surge of incoming medical students since the pandemic began. Just last year, the University of Houston College of Medicine opened its doors, with a unique public-health mission and goal to improve primary care in underserved communities, accepting 30 students in its entering class. Now, with the pandemic showing the critical importance of just such missions and goals, those numbers are on the rise. It’s a major accomplishment for the UH system, and part of an ambitious long-term plan to make the university one of the most prestigious in the country. But it sure was a crazy time to open a school, Lall recalls of summer of 2020. “We started at the height of the pandemic, and it was fascinating for these students. To be in your first year and to experience a once-in-a-century public health crisis. They really had to adapt to the challenges.” As classes shifted to Zoom, both the new students and the school’s seasoned faculty were faced with unprecedented challenges. Not only did the professors step into overdrive with their students, but they and Houston’s entire medical community also took on new roles as public health experts and community representatives. “This year we really got to use our voices to actually make a statement,” Lall says. “So many people in our profession have risen to the cause, and that’s something I am proud of. In public health, we all knew a pandemic was coming, we just didn’t know when. Now, we have all been put into roles we never thought we could take on. We were called to give the facts and break things down for the public, and I hope we helped over the last year. It’s been crazy.”
Lall completed her bachelor’s degree at Washington University in St. Louis, where she grew up, and got a master’s in public health from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Then she continued on to medical school at George Washington in D.C. She did her residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital and bounced around the globe working in international public health. She’s provided critical care in Thailand, Uganda, Austria and the U.K., and she also worked on public health initiatives in the Caribbean, Zimbabwe and Botswana. She even worked with the Peace Corps and the World Health Organization. To put it mildly, she’s an expert.
Just two years ago, Lall was working at Massachusetts General in Boston when she got the offer to come to Houston as one of the founding faculty members of UH’s new medical school. “I chose Houston because it was a very diverse place with a lot of change that you could actually make,” she says.
She lives in West University and is adapting to her new home, but she can’t help noticing what she sees as glaring inequalities in the city. Even before Covid, thousands of Houstonians were dying from treatable chronic ailments because they had no insurance, while, just a few miles away, cutting-edge research and top care was being delivered daily to those who could afford it in the world’s largest and best medical center.
“Houston’s diversity is amazing, but it needs to be addressed systemically,” she says. “The city cannot just be diverse in name.” She wants to see action, too, with things like better programs and government assistance to support and empower all of the region’s varied communities.
Despite the challenges, there is hope. “The future is bright. The new students at UH are interested in changing the world. They’re incredibly diverse, both ethnically and in life experiences, and they want to change access to healthcare and resolve inequities,” she says. “We are all taking our lives one day at a time, but I will continue to promote healthcare as a human right, wherever that may be. It’s about community, country, the whole world.
“What happens in India, for example, will be in Houston in two weeks. Houston, America, we’re not bubbles. There are so many people pushing for change, so many people wanting to work. Houston has such momentum. I am inspired and motivated by that.”
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Power Couple Lynn and Oscar Wyatt at home in River Oaks, summer 2021
Oscar Season
This fall 97-year-old Oscar Wyatt, the war hero and oil tycoon who squired the queen of Houston society for six decades, will do something he’s never done before: He’ll take the spotlight himself. By Jeff Gremillion, Portrait by Jhane Hoang
n a sunny corner of the River Oaks home he shares with his internationally famous socialite wife, Oscar Wyatt laughs easily and makes guests feel welcome. A photographer here to take his portrait this morning remarks how jovial and funny he is, as when he intercepts a question intended for wife Lynn with the timing of a seasoned stand-up. “Why did you marry Oscar?” an interviewer asks. After three full beats, with the query hanging in the air
Iin advance of Lynn’s reply, he belts out in comical mock exasperation, “Oh hell!” — and the room erupts in laughter. That’s just about all he’ll have to say today. After a stroke a few years ago, Oscar, now 97, is more mellow and less boisterous and talkative than he would have been in his heyday as one of Texas’ most notable — and at times controversial — oilmen. Back when “gruff” and “abrasive” were among the most typical words used to describe him. He’s “a throwback to the independent oilmen of another
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era, the ones who dug out a fortune virtually with their hands and fought hard to expand it,” said Gov. John Connally of his friend Oscar in the late politician’s memoir, noting the rise of Oscar’s Coastal Corporation and his rough-and-tumble international deal making. “He isn’t the kind of fellow who has to look at a horseshoe all day before he pitches it.
“Often blunt and sometimes profane, he is a man capable of surprising warmth and sentiment and charity,” said Connally. The former governor joined Oscar on a trip to Iraq in 1990 during which the oil tycoon is credited with convincing Saddam Hussein to release a group of American hostages.
It turns out that Oscar is many things. Not just a magnate who had raised himself from poverty. Not just a former Aggie lineman and used car salesman, among other things, who took out an $800 loan against his truck to start a company that would later be worth billions. (The loan story prompted Henry Ford II to weigh in, in a 1986 letter. “For over 80 years, Ford Motor Company has produced quality products for the motoring public, and I have heard many accounts of the uses to which our products have been put,” Ford wrote. “Some have been unusual, some even bizarre. But none equals what I have heard about your 1949 Ford.” Ford went on to note his dismay at the rather modest amount of the loan secured by “such a fine automobile.” He added, “Obviously, the loan was over-collateralized.”)
Besides the storied business success, Oscar is also an accomplished aviator who was an active pilot for some 70 years. It wasn’t until his stroke in 2008 that he left the cockpit.
His history in the air — which included unmitigated heroism in the second world war — is being honored at the Lone Star Flight Museum’s “Broad Stripe and Bright Stars” gala on Dec. 4. Although it’s hard to believe, given that Lynn is roundly considered the queen of Houston society and has thus been honored dozens, maybe hundreds of times at various fetes and fundraisers over many decades, the museum ball will mark the first time Oscar has ever been individually honored at such an event.
Lynn surely feels the time has come. “But he just never thinks about himself like that,” she says. “He never talks about himself, never brags about himself.”
This is part of how she answers that question about why she married him in the first place him back in 1963. “I’d never met a man like that,” she says. She was impressed by his takecharge nature, his worldliness, his imposing stature and the fact that he was 11 years older. “You could name any country, and he’d already been there. He knew how to solve every problem, had an answer for everything. I felt so safe with him.
Of the decision to honor Oscar, Lone Star Flight Museum President Doug Owens, himself a retired lieutenant general, says that Oscar’s “distinguished service as a decorated bomber pilot in World War II is something to be recognized and honored by us all.”
Indeed, Beaumont-born Oscar’s war heroics in the skies of the Pacific Theater, coming after teen years spent crop dusting farms in Navasota, are movie-worthy. Connally described them in his book. “He was flying a cargo of munitions out of Okinawa in 1945 when his plane caught fire and had to crash-land,” wrote the governor. “His flight suit was burning. He couldn’t see. Both his legs were crushed, his jaw was broken, and he had seven
Soldier’s Story From left: Oscar Wyatt as a young military pilot in World War II, and with Lynn at a society wedding at the Met in New York in 1988.
