They're Good Medicine for Each Other
From the San Diego Union Tribune - July 15, 2003

Who woulda thunk that C. Michael Wright and the former Tabita Madec would be joined in a long-lasting union and partnered in an endeavor dedicated to serving the greater good of mankind?

Certainly not most folks who knew the two way back when.

Come on, C. Michael was a big-city rich kid from a broken home in New York. For long in his early days, he didn't really know what he wanted to do with himself.

But he was always shielded from storms by a strong-willed, well-connected matriarch well-versed in the rules and effects of Big Apple-style snobbery.

Untested Tabita, by comparison, was a poor girl, eight years C. Michael's junior. From a wildly broken home in Paris, she was Einstein-smart and deeply determined that even the man she'd love would know she couldn't be won easily.

These two – C. Michael and Tabita – had no firsthand connection with a long-term relationship. And rich boy, poor girl living together happily ever after works only in fairy tales and other kids' flights of fancy.

So how were the two going to make it together? Friends and relatives were full of all that kind of skeptical reasoning.

But now, a quarter century and three nearly grown daughters later, C. Michael and Tabita Wright, 53 and 45, are still going, even stronger together – thank you very much.

What's more, both are doctors, trained in and graduated from the same medical schools in France and New York. He's a cardiologist, she's a radiologist, and they work together at a clinic they established in University City four years ago.

The LifeScore clinic's fundamental goal is promoting preventive health care through education, early detection and treatment. The Wrights maintain a patient list numbering more than 11,000.

Many of them are like the patient who underwent successful cancer surgery after the Wrights discovered a lung tumor during a routine heart exam.

"I wouldn't be here writing this letter if I had not come to you for a heart scan," goes part of the patient's letter, published on the clinic's Web site. "Thank you for my life."

Says Tabita, her French accent still pronounced after nearly 25 years in her adopted homeland: Practicing medicine "is a job I feel really good about – I help make people feel better – that's ultimately why I'm doing this."

Adds her husband: "This is teamwork and we're saving lives with it – I love it."

In retrospect, it would hardly have taken a scientific genius to see this dual partnership spring up that first day in that anatomy class in that med school outside Paris. Both Wrights spied each other from across the room. Both liked what they saw, although C. Michael didn't know, straight off, that the feeling was mutual.

"I kept telling myself, 'I've got to get to know this woman,' " he recalls.

Says his wife, for whom he was the first boyfriend: "I (eventually left) telling myself this is the man I'm going to marry."

And long before the Wrights did that three years later and eventually earned medical degrees at New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine in 1981 and '82, they came to love the healing art.

At first, Tabita was enrolled at med school in her native land, not so much because she wanted to be in school, but because relatives kept saying she should become a doctor.

C. Michael, however, who, following his undergraduate years at Georgetown University, had come to Paris "to find himself," was certain from day one that he wanted to be a doctor.A close family friend, who was also his greatest mentor, encouraged that notion, and C. Michael became inspired to immerse himself in the study. He seemed to eat, drink and sleep doctoring.

Eventually that transferred to his wife.

Just seeing and hearing how passionate he was about his medical studies, says Tabita, led her to take a deeper look at what she'd gotten into. When she did so, she more fully recognized the nobleness of the profession.

"I always say, though," she notes, "if Michael hadn't been there, I don't know if I'd have stayed in medical school."

But now, people who know them can't think of the Wrights being anything else but good doctors together.

Copyright 2003 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.