Debi Thomas graduated Stanford and became a surgeon before her downward spiral began
As Debi Thomas visited a park near her home, she frolicked in the snow and called out to her fiance, Jamie Looney, who was nearby: "Look, it's from the movie!" She was imitating a scene in “The Shawshank Redemption” in which a prisoner escapes and stretches his arms outward in the rain. "I'm free, don't you get it?," she said. Debi Thomas, the best African American figure skater in the history of the sport, couldn't find her figure skates.
athlete of the year in 1986. She wasn't just the nation's best figure skater. She was smart — able to win a competition, stay up all night cramming, then ace a test the next morning.She wanted it all. And for a time, she had it. After Stanford came medical school at Northwestern University, then marriage to a handsome lawyer who gave her a son — who in turn became one of the country’s best high school football players. Higher and higher she went.
“She’s got all these degrees,” fiance Jamie Looney said as he watched television with Thomas inside the trailer. “She’s a doctor. She’s a surgeon. And she’s here. I’ve got one year of community college. I know why I’m here. I look at her, wondering, ‘Why are you not working somewhere else?’ ”Such comments upset Thomas. “People are all like, ‘Get a job,’ ” she said. “And I’m like, ‘You people are fools.’ I’m trying to change the world.
transformed into something much more serious, when her coach realized he had a prodigy on his hands, when she got deeper into the byzantine and fiercely political world of figure skating, there came a choice. Skating — or school?“Eighth grade came along and she comes in second in the nation and her coach wanted her to quit school,” her mother, Janice Thomas, said. Instead, she enrolled in high school near an ice rink in Redwood City, Calif.
elite athletes that they can will themselves to excellence. Self-doubt and vulnerability are banished. Confidence is everything. Triumph is within reach. Difficulties with other medical professionals would come to define Thomas’s career as she left one institution after another after short periods of time. Her first stop was in Champaign, Ill. Then another in Terre Haute, Ind. “I’ve never lasted anywhere more than a year,” she said. What she viewed as commitment to perfection, others perceived as recalcitrance. “Olympian mentality is rough because you just get frustrated with how everybody does everything,” Thomas explained in a YouTube video.
Later that day, according to Virginia Department of Health Professionals records, she approached a police officer and told him she had a gun and wanted to hurt herself. He detained her and, on a temporary detention order, brought her to a hospital for treatment. Medical board records show she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Clinch Valley officials told Thomas to enter a distressed-physician program. But she couldn’t afford it.
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