− when she’s doing something unconventional. She reminded her globe-trotting, military-trained father that he’d gone back to school to become an accountant at 55. Younger sister Margaret Argo Page ’82 said the age milestone didn’t faze her sister. “She would say, ‘In four years, I’m going to be 50. Why not get there and be a doctor?’ ” Page said. “Our family is like that. We keep reinventing ourselves.” Marks tracked down a professor from her college days, John George, UMW professor emeritus of chemistry, who wrote in wholehearted support of her application. “I would without hesitation put my life in her hands, were she my doctor,” he wrote in a letter of recommendation. With that, Marks applied. When none of the U.S. schools accepted her, she didn’t waver. She looked into a university in the Caribbean, a New Jersey-based medical school with training in Dominica – a place to do the academics required for medical students. She could return to the United States for hospital clinical training and residency. “Well, it’s now or never,” she remembered thinking. “When you want to do something, you just do it.” She and her youngest children − Ellen, then 13, and Daniel, 8 − would move to Dominica. They began to pack and included things they wouldn’t be able to get on the volcanic island northwest of Martinique. “I don’t think I processed it until − I remember packing trunks of granola bars,” Ellen, now 25, said. “That was my first hint that something was definitely going to change.”
We had to boil all our water It’s not that the hurdles haven’t been there. It’s just as if Marks doesn’t see them. Move to Dominica, a lightly developed island of fewer than 75,000 people, with two kids? Her description is hardly reassuring: “They still used carbon paper for everything. We had to boil all our water. It was really, really hot.” Along the road, she’d see groups of men with scars on their faces, carrying machetes. But she met the challenge. Bob came as often as he could but remained mostly in San Diego to work on the
Marks children Daniel and Ellen with a coconut vendor on Dominica, where they lived for two years.
government contract disputes he litigates. Ellen and Daniel found some boldness in traipsing around the island, every so often checking in with their mother. “We just became these little adults,” Ellen said. “There were only about five places she would be. We had a system, and we were kind of like a team.” The two years in the books were stressful. Marks would often study until midnight, wake up at 6 a.m., pull her textbooks up off the floor where she’d cast them, and start again. But the years were fruitful, too. She became close with her classmates, cooking big group dinners. She kept swimming, to a rusty buoy and back. And she drank it all in. “I just love the human body, and I wanted to learn everything about it,” she said. “I also love people. I just love people.” Her quest was far from complete when she left Dominica. Back in the United States, Marks spent her next clinical years in medical school in Bakersfield, Calif., about a five-hour drive from San Diego. She made the trip on weekends, cooking meals and doing laundry before returning for the week. It wasn’t easy to balance her family with her studies. She did one clinical experience in South Africa, another on a Native American reservation in San Diego, another in Hawaii. But even when she moved to Iowa for her residency, she flew back once a month to participate in mother-daughter charity events with Ellen, by then in high school. U N I V E R S I T Y O F M A R Y WA S H I N G TO N M AG A Z I N E • S U M M E R 2 0 1 3
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