About

Conrad Theodore Seitz was born on April 26, 1954 in San Francisco.  His parents were graduate students; he studied psychology and she studied English literature.  His father’s name was Theodore Lee Seitz, and he died in 2015.  His mother’s maiden name was Greta Nelson, and she died in 1976.

Conrad’s father divorced and settled in Jacksonville, Illinois when Conrad was eight.  Conrad attended local public schools and MacMurray College in Jacksonville.  He took courses at the college while he was in high school and accumulated two years of college credit before graduating from high school at the age of sixteen.  His father was a professor of psychology at the college and his stepmother, Vicki Rux Seitz, was also an associate professor of psychology.

Conrad’s father became head of the department of psychology at the new division of the University of North Carolina at Asheville in 1974.  Theodore Seitz retired after a long term as head of the department and passed away at the age of eighty-six in 2015. Conrad’s mother died of uterine cancer at the age of 50 in 1976.  His father divorced again in 1973 and married an accountant, Martha Marshall, who is still living.  Vicki Rux Seitz retired as a statistician in the research department of psychology at Yale University and is also still living.

Conrad was admitted to Harvard College as a freshman in 1970, when he was sixteen years old.  He graduated cum laude, concentrating in biology, in June 1974 and went to the University of Illinois at the Medical Center in Chicago that fall as a beginning medical student.  He graduated from medical school in 1979, after spending some time at the University of Illinois School of Public Health, also at the Medical Center in Chicago.

He began a residency in Family Practice at Glendale Adventist Medical Center in Los Angeles in July 1979.  After a year he left to join the National Health Service Corps, fulfilling his medical school scholarship obligation to practice for four years in an underserved area as a general practitioner.  In all, he spent five and a half years in the upper Midwest.

He worked at NHSC sites in Rosebud, South Dakota on the Sioux Indian reservation, and in other small towns in South Dakota, Wyoming, and in North Dakota.  These towns started with Sundance, Wyoming, then Philip, South Dakota, Martin, South Dakota, and finally two and a half years at Hazen, North Dakota.  All of these towns had populations of less than two thousand persons.

In January 1986, having completed his service obligation, he moved back to Los Angeles to work for CIGNA Healthplans of Los Angeles.  He worked for CIGNA for two and a half years, including a time as chief of a four-man clinic in Alhambra. Thereafter he worked in the San Joaquin Valley, at Visalia, Orange Cove, Fresno, Barstow, and in Sacramento, always as a primary care locum tenens doctor.  He married Mary Molina, a physician’s assistant, in 2002. The two of them ran a medical clinic in Sanger from 1997 to 2006.  He retired in 2008.

He suffers from post-traumatic arthritis of the spine due to a bicycle vs. car accident in 1972.  He also suffers from additional conditions, too numerous to even think about.  He is currently recovering from surgery, done by Dr. Ames at UC San Francisco on August 9-10, 2016, on the thoracic and lumbar spine to relieve spinal stenosis, scoliosis, and kyphosis, with a pair of titanium rods implanted to support T-10 to S-1.  The recovery is progressing well and he is now walking an hour every morning.

This blog consists of random political, medical, ecological, general scientific, and social news, analysis, and opinion, as well as other items of interest, with a few bits of personal history.  There are also a lot of photographs.