Dr. Robert Gore’s Tenacity and Talents in This Time of Coronavirus Are Medicine for the Soul By R.L. Witter Photo: Dr. Ian Summers
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n a cloudy Saturday afternoon, Dr. Robert Gore was doing paperwork in an AirBnB he shares with a colleague. “This is the fourth bed I’ve slept in this week,” he explained. He had been at a different one the day before, but there were “sanitary issues” so they had to find other accommodations. This one seemed cleaner and it was close enough to check on his wife, Hibist, who is pregnant with the couple’s first child. Over the phone Dr. Gore sounds upbeat, he laughs freely and I can hear it in his voice when he smiles and tells me to call him “Dr. Rob.” I am amazed he has any energy at all or can find a reason to smile. He’s been living apart from his wife for more than a month now, in an effort not to spread the COVID-19 virus to her and their unborn child. Dr. Rob reflected on the past few weeks and compared it to his experience working in Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake noting, “all sorts of similarities and parallels and differences and one of the things that I forgot was how tired I was working during the earthquake and it’s the same thing I’ve felt during the first few weeks of COVID-19. Unsettled, stressed, I don’t have my routine.” It’s hardly the glamorous life many imagine for doctors. An emergency room physician at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, one of the first COVID-19 designated hospitals in the area, Dr. Rob is drawing upon every strength, skill, and ounce of energy he has. But he’s seemingly where he belongs, where he is meant to be. “I always knew I wanted to help people,” he explained. He contemplated teaching, Foreign Service, and for a while architecture. His path to medicine seems simultaneously accidental and destined.
Becoming A Doctor
While attending a running camp as a teen, Dr. Rob suffered an injury and was sent to see an orthopedic surgeon. Thank-
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The Positive Community Spring 2020
fully, he didn’t need surgery, but he was fascinated by Dr. Answorth Allen. “I was shocked because I had never had a black doctor before,” he recalled. Allen was fresh off his residency at the time; he would eventually work as a team orthopedist for the New York Knicks and the New York Mets. But first, he was going to help young Robert Gore become a doctor. Gore remembered, “He said, ‘You want to be a doctor? Okay, we’re going to help get you there,’” He decided to attend Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he was repeatedly told about leadership and how it was not just an option, but an expectation of a Morehouse man. “There was this thing inside that made it doable. People who looked like me had done it before me and had blueprints on how I could do it.” Gore did it. He finished at Morehouse and went directly to medical school at SUNY Buffalo. Dr. Rob received more than just a medical education in Buffalo. His mother’s family has lived there for six generations. He wasn’t just a young doctor there — although he was often greeted with “Are you old enough to be a doctor?” In Buffalo he wasn’t just treating patients. “These were my grandparents’ neighbors; they shop at the same supermarket, they knew my family. Patients would say, ‘You’re Ora’s grandson’ or ‘Bonnie’s nephew.’” From Buffalo it was straight on to Cook County Hospital in Chicago for residency. Dr. Rob’s father had grown up there so the other side of the family took their turn looking after the young doctor and giving him the lay of the land. He heard repeatedly, “County Hospital is where you go to die.” Acutely aware of healthcare disparities and a healthy amount of distrust for doctors and medical professionals in the black community, Dr. Rob leveraged his familial relationships to change minds and hearts. “Patients gravitate toward a doctor or healthcare worker when the worker is genuinely concerned about their well-being,” he explained. www.thepositivecommunity.com
