Dogmeat

Ambitious and cocky, a young neurosurgery resident left his hometown of Chicago for what became an unforgettable adventure in San Francisco, both exhilarating and disheartening, destined to irrevocably change his future. “Dogmeat” was the moniker he was given as apprentice to a famous-and famously intimidating-neurosurgeon.

Moris Senegor gives a disarmingly honest account of his “Dogmeat” days in the wards and operating rooms of UCSF. He also vividly recounts how he fell in love with San Francisco and a woman he found there. His story is for both surgeons and anyone ever beguiled by San Francisco.

BACK STORY

“While Dogmeat is, as the subtitle indicates, a recounting of my adventures in love and neurosurgery during a memorable residency, it’s also my love letter to the San Francisco I discovered when I moved there in 1986. It was well after the Haight-Ashbury ’60s and before the hoodie Silicon era.

This San Francisco, with its quirky neighborhoods and abundance of mom and pops, was disarmingly similar to my birth city of Istanbul. One of my goals in the book was to capture San Francisco at this moment in its history—what it looked like, felt like, and even smelled like. There are detailed descriptions of various locales, as seen through the eyes of a beguiled newcomer.

After I completed my residency, I moved to Stockton to start my neurosurgery practice. But that famous song about leaving your heart behind is true. I eventually bought a second home in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood.” —Moris

I purchased this book within minutes of hearing about it from the author and another colleague. Thank goodness for electronic books. Considering the large unread collection of books in my kindle library, I didn’t think that I would get to it anytime soon, but since I bought the book without knowing anything about it, I open it, and that was a mistake. I could not put it down. Dr. Senegor’s introduction immediately drew me in. His description of the city that I spent a year during my internship brought back my own nostalgic memories, and then I read his story with fascination and trepidation.