23
COM Outlook . Summer-Fall 2014
who was 1 of 10 women comprising
her class of 165 students.
Because the medical school had an
affiliated hospital located across the
street, Dr. Wallace was able to im-
merse herself in a field of interest re-
lated to pediatrics. “We had to deliver
three babies in our second year, and
I loved it,” she revealed. “In fact, it is
the number one thing I have loved
most in my career, and it is the only
activity I miss from my practice days. I
ended up delivering a significant num-
ber of babies before I graduated, so I
thought I might become an OB/GYN.”
Once she earned her D.O. degree,
Dr. Wallace completed a rotating in-
ternship at Lakeside Hospital in Kansas
City—an experience that allowed her
to deliver many more babies. As she
delved deeper into the OB/GYN spe-
cialty, however, she realized it wasn’t a
lifestyle choice she embraced. “I want-
ed to have my own kids, so I decided
I didn’t want to be on call at 3:00 a.m.
It wasn’t until almost the last month
of my internship that I decided family
medicine was what I really wanted to
do because I got to see sick—but not
gravely ill—kids. Plus, I would be able
to deliver babies and do manipulation,
which is an immediate gratification
discipline in medicine.”
After working in a private family
medicine practice with a husband-
and-wife team for about two years,
Dr. Wallace ventured out on her own,
opening a solo practice that brought
her great fulfillment. “I delivered two
or three babies every week, did office
surgery, and practiced OMM,” she
explained. “At that time a family prac-
titioner did a fuller scope of practice,
and since Kansas City was semi-rural
where I was located, I did my own
tonsillectomies, dilation and curettag-
es, and numerous other procedures.”
Grappling with HIV/AIDS
and Rape
As the early 1980s progressed, a
new and catastrophic scourge was
terrifying the global landscape and
baffling the world’s greatest scientific
minds. What would come to be known
as HIV/AIDS was ravaging its victims,
which seemed to include a dispropor-
tionately large percentage of gay men.
Experienced physicians who had dealt
with everything from polio to cancer
were at a loss to explain the unknown
epidemic that was claiming thousands
of lives. So imagine how it felt to Dr.
Wallace, a compassionate physician
who had only completed her intern-
ship training several years earlier.
“During that time, a quarter of my
practice consisted of gay men even
though I wasn’t doing any special re-
cruiting for that population,” said Dr.
Wallace of that devastating stretch of
time. “In 1983-84, my patients began
to get very sick, but I had no idea what
was going on. Being a new physician,
I really questioned whether it was
me who was killing them. But then I
read an article in the science fiction
journal
Omni
about this mysterious
disease that had been identified in the
gay bars and baths in San Francisco.
That was the first time I was informed
of the potential of HIV and AIDS, so
I quickly came to recognize it as the
virus that was killing my patients. As a
result, I became the de facto expert in
Kansas City on HIV because there was
a big gay male population—and I had
the most hands-on experience.”
In addition to working with HIV/
AIDS patients, Dr. Wallace had de-
veloped a reputation as a rape care
specialist due to her successful estab-
lishment of a rape crisis center while
doing her internship training at Lake-
side Hospital. “During my internship,
I worked with one of the hospital’s
nurses to establish a rape crisis center
at the hospital, which became one of
two rape crisis centers in Kansas City.
“Between the HIV and rape pa-
tients, a large portion of my practice
involved extremely traumatic cases,”
added Dr. Wallace, who served as the
center’s director. “Early on, my gay
male patients died, with about a third
of them committing suicide, while the
other two thirds often died of ane-
mia—not HIV. At that time, physicians
did not want to touch the patients
because they didn’t know if it was con-
tagious or how it was transmitted. We
had to gown and glove, give the pa-
tients plastic utensils, and treat them
Dr. Wallace
performing holistic
healing during a
medical outreach trip.
