Doctor JB [00:00:03]:Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the Hope for Med podcast. I am your host, Dr. J B, and today's featured guest is Ron Jacobs. He is a respiratory therapist who recently retired after over 49 years in the profession. During his career, he worked as a staff therapist, a supervisor, a department head, an educator, and had a long standing involvement in the AARC, the national professional organization for respiratory therapy. Welcome to the show.RT Ron Jacobs [00:00:35]:Hi, nice to be here.Doctor JB [00:00:38]:So, Ron, I love starting this show, learning more about you and your background. So could we start from the beginning? Can you please share with my audience your origin story?RT Ron Jacobs [00:00:50]:Okay. It actually started out pretty nondescript because it was not a career choice. I was in high school. I always knew I was either going to be a scientist or a physician because that was the direction I wanted to be in. And I was thinking about medicine and healthcare. I was actually in my freshman year of college, dating a girl whose father was a surgeon. And I asked her about being an orderly, and he said, Why don't you try to be an inhalation therapist? You don't have to go to school for it. The hospital can train you, and you can see a lot of what doctors do without having to get the education certification or even a license. And luckily, through connections with my dad, I got hired at 18 at a small community hospital in Buffalo, who was just expanding to the night to the evening shift. Back in 1972, it was called Inhalation Therapy. It wasn't even thought of as a profession that might exist ten years from when I went into it, so hence, my parents were not really happy with that. But I did it as a summer job and as a semester break job. It helped me pay for college. I did my bachelor's in chemistry, and because I had thought about healthcare, I minored in psychology so that I could understand a little more about the human aspect, because when it comes to medicine, you've got to have compassion and humanity to go with it, or at least I always felt that way, and, of course, humor. So when I graduated from college, I went back to Buffalo, moved back to Buffalo, and started working at that same hospital full time while I was in graduate school. And by now, the field had been called Respiratory Therapy. So for those of you that didn't know inhalation Therapy, in about 75, the name changed to Respiratory Therapy somewhere along the way after I met my wife there. But somewhere along the way, we were talking about medical school because I was in graduate school. And she realized I hated my research because part of my research in graduate school involved killing animals, even though they were mice and rats. I don't like killing anything. I mean, I don't even like killing a fly. I'm not really good at that. So she suggested I drop out of graduate school and go to the community college in the area, get my degree in respiratory therapy so I could make a career of it. And after discussion about being a physician, she said she didn't want to be married to a doctor because she wanted to be married to someone who would have a life and be part of the life of her kids. She knew me. I would be the kind of doctor that would work 20 hours a day, seven days a week. I would have gone into neonatology or intensivist for ICU, something where you're constantly on call and you constantly have to be available. So that would have been me. So I thought about it, and I decided to follow her recommendation, got my degree and started my career there, which probably worked out very nicely. I mean, we left Buffalo. I ended up at a hospital where I became their supervisor for their NICU, because I always love babies. That's where I got my supervisory experience, or initial supervisory experience. A job opened up back in Buffalo at our major trauma center, where back in the 80s, they were hiring the very first respiratory therapist to run the respiratory therapy program. I applied for it and we got the job and we moved back to Buffalo and they took over as a department head. All of this and in the background all of this time, I had been a member of the American Association for Respiratory Care, and that's our national professional organization. But I bring that up because I'll talk about it later. But it's really important for people to stay focused regardless of what's going on in their job and regardless of what's going on at the particular facility they work at. From there, the medical director I worked for at Erie County Medical Center, which was the hospital, got me hired at the University of Buffalo as a clinical instructor of medicine. I always liked teaching. Even in my undergraduate degree I would do presentations. I actually got to be one of the small group presenters for a course where there'd be a major lecture twice a week and then break into small groups. So education was something I really liked ...
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