Economy’s ills spur free clinic’s growth
It was a regular, normal day for Z. Michael Taweh and his dad back in 1985 – if anything could be said to be normal in Lebanon back then.
“It was very difficult at that time,” Taweh said. Syria had invaded Lebanon 11 years earlier, “and there was a lot of tension among Christians and Muslims.” Then, without warning, even that tense and difficult normalcy was shattered. Taweh, only 17 years old, and his dad were kidnapped by the Syrian army. The elder Taweh understood the danger they were in, “but I don’t think I realized how serious it was,” Michael said. “If you were caught by Muslims, you were likely to be killed.” And the same held true for Muslims captured by Christians, he said.
Taweh and his dad were held by the Syrians “for no other reason other than on our passport it said ‘Christian,’” he said. Not only that, but “I was wearing a cross on my chest. That gave it away.”
Then, 18 hours later and inexplicably, they were released, shaken but unharmed.
“That one event pushed my father to make a final decision to relocate,” moving Michael’s mom, two older brothers and two younger sisters with him to Ohio, “where two of my father’s sisters lived.”
The Taweh family remained in Ohio for about a year, then moved to New Britain in 1987, where Michael began attending Central Connecticut State University. “I did a double science major of biology and biochemistry,” he said. “I always wanted to be in the medical field since I was 11 or 12 years old, and had it in my mind of going to medical school. I still don’t know why. My parents didn’t even finish high school, so I didn’t have a personal influence from somebody I knew.”
The only inkling of where that desire to be a doctor might have been seeded was from visits to the family doctor when he was a child. Back then, family doctors did everything from routine examinations to minor surgery, “a lot more than a doctor does now,” he said. “It was impressive that one doctor cared for all these problems.”
Taweh didn’t know then, as he entered medical school, that he would do a lot more than any one doctor can do, that he would enlist more than 100 doctors and almost as many volunteers to provide free medical service, laboratory services and even prescriptions to uninsured patients – some 2,000 of them at last count – in the most unlikely of places – upscale, white collar, middle-class Newtown.
Love at first sight
Taweh attended St. George University School of Medicine in the Granada and did his medical residency at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, becoming licensed as a medical doctor in 1999. He joined a Newtown physician in primary-care medicine, moving to the town of 26,000 residents with his wife, Jocelyne, in 2000. “I met her in Lebanon,” Taweh said. “At the time, my parents had gone home for a year and my mother had surgery on her knee and Jocelyne was a nurse taking care of her. It was pretty much love at first sight.”
Taweh struck up a phone and mail conversation with her, and then returned to Lebanon a year later in 1998 to marry her. “We started a family soon after that, and about five months after we got married, Jocelyne was pregnant” with their first son, Kevin.
Taweh’s medical career blossomed. After two years at the Newtown practice, he moved to a group practice in Danbury and then in 2005 began his own Advanced Internal Medicine practice within walking distance of Danbury Hospital – where he had become a staff physician five years earlier – and a nursing home. “When I started my single practice, I changed focus a little bit from internal medicine and primary care to include geriatrics.”
But he may not be alone much longer. “Very few physicians are in solo practice now because the cost becomes overwhelming,” he said. “Unfortunately, the cost of health care is so high that solo practices are finding it very difficult, not to compete, but to maintain a high level of health-care delivery when the overhead is so high.”
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