Last week, Dr. Gloria Beim woke up on her horse ranch near Gunnison, drove to work and performed her normal duties as an orthopedic surgeon at Gunnison Valley Health.
This week, she’s in Italy to work as the head team physician for the United States Olympic team, caring for the world’s best athletes.
It’s quite a whirlwind for her, but by now she’s used to it. This will be Beim’s ninth major games, including five trips to the Olympics and four to the Paralympics.
“It’s beyond belief,” she said. “I don’t know how I got this lucky. They keep asking me back. It’s such an honor to represent our country and to take care of the best athletes in the world. Even though I’ve done this many times, it’s just as exciting and mindblowing as the first.”
Beim’s Olympic assignments began in 2004 in Athens, Greece, when she was the team physician for cycling and taekwondo. She covered other sports, too.
“I was there for five weeks and I didn’t rest for five minutes,” she said. “It was so busy, but it’s so exciting. There’s so much amazing energy that I’ve never felt with any other competitions. It just gives you the strength and stamina to work constantly and enjoy every second of it.”
Beim left Friday, Jan. 30, for Levigno, Italy, where she will be stationed for some of the highest-risk sports at the Olympics. She’ll be there for the snowboard and skiing events.
“I’m so excited,” she said. “I’m going to do my best to take care of them.”
Beim grew up in the San Fernando Valley of California with Jewish parents who were both survivors of the Holocaust. She was bullied from an early age because she was shy and because of her faith.
“It was so bad, I didn’t want to go to high school,” she said. “I was scared to death to go to high school.”
She and her family petitioned the local school board to let her skip high school and instead head straight to college at the age of 14. That request was granted and since then, nobody has been able to stop her.
“There was no turning back after that,” she said. “There was no way I was going to go back to that terrible high school.”
Beim knew she wanted to be a doctor and because she was so shy, she thought being a veterinarian would be a good fit. She’d work with animals instead of people and have a comfortable life.
When she was 16, though, a knee injury put her in front of an orthopedic surgeon.
“I thought, ‘This is the coolest thing ever,’” she said.
Beim excitedly told the surgeon she was now interested in becoming an orthopedic surgeon herself. In the 1970s and early 1980s, though, this was just about unheard of.
“You can’t (become an orthopedic surgeon),” the surgeon told her. “You’re a woman. Women aren’t strong enough to do orthopedics.”
The day he told her that, she joined a gym and became a bodybuilder.
A few years later, when she was interviewing for her orthopedic surgery residency, the man interviewing her told her women weren’t strong enough to do the work. She challenged him on the spot to an arm wrestling contest.
“If I lose, I’ll leave,” she told him. “If I win, you have to treat me like the other candidates.”
He took her up on the bet and lost.
“He offered the residency on the spot,” she said. “I declined. I had an inkling I was going to get into Columbia, and I did.”
Of course, that wasn’t the only time Beim hit her head on the glass ceiling.
When she did her general surgery residency, it was going to be vital for her to get a positive recommendation from her superiors, one of whom did not understand why women would want their own careers. He’d often say such hurtful things to women that they’d leave their rotations in tears. Beim knew all of this advance and steeled herself.
“I came in ready for anything,” she said.
In the man’s office on the first day, there were a handful of men and her, and everyone was nervous for their first clinical rotations. He was asking each of the men what they wanted to do and eventually got to Beim, asking her in a condescending tone, “What do you want to do, little girl?”
“I said, with complete confidence, ‘I’m going to be an orthopedic surgeon,’” she said.
The man started laughing and offered an alternative profession for her to consider, suggesting something that made it clear why many women fled his program.
“I know he wanted to make me angry and cry and get me running from the room like the other women in the past,” Beim said. “I wasn’t going to let him win.”
Later, when she was on rounds with him, he, too, made a joke about how she wasn’t strong enough to be an orthopedic surgeon. He told her to get down and do 20 pushups.
“One arm, or two?” she asked. Beim hit the floor and gave him 20 one-arm pushups.
“In the end, he ended up writing me the best letter for residency that you could get,” she said.
Beim came to the Gunnison Valley in 1996, living first in Crested Butte. Living on a mountain meant she had a relatively long trip into the emergency room on nights and weekends she was on call. She recalled one incident where she was called in to work, but her snow plow had broken down and she wasn’t able to get to the highway. She used her cross country skis to get down the driveway and hitchhiked to the emergency room.
She recently moved to Gunnison, living on a horse ranch, which she said had been her longtime dream.
“I wake up in the morning and have horses looking at me through the window,” she said. “It’s basically a dream.”
When she takes a minute to look back at the obstacles she’s overcome to get to this spot in her career, she is both proud and humble.
“I felt like if I worked hard and I was good to my classmates and my patients, I would do OK,” she said. “All the other stuff I just let fall off my shoulders. I had my goal in my mind to be an orthopedic surgeon. I wouldn’t let anyone stop me.”
“I taught my kids that there’s not a lot of competition in the extra mile. I’m a perfect example of that.”
Chad Richardson can be reached at crichardson@orourkemediagroup.com.
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