DENVER—When Elisa Melendez-Eisman first walked into Clinica Tepeyac in 1996, she was 24 and among a handful of volunteers at the new nonprofit health clinic in north Denver. She returned this week as its new medical director.
It’s been a long, hard journey that began when Melendez-Eisman graduated from Adams State College, where she majored in pre-medical school sciences. She was the first in her family to graduate from college, but her dream of becoming a physician suffered one blow after another.
She spectacularly failed the MCAT, the standardized test required by most medical schools. When she passed the MCAT, her first year as a medical student was a disaster.
Assuming the course load would be similar to her undergraduate work, she realized too late how important it was to devote long hours to study groups. Determined to spend as much time as possible with her parents, she had short-shrifted her time on campus. The result: Failing grades.
But instead of quitting, she petitioned to return and repeat that year.
“She just never, ever, gave up,” says Linda Yardley, one of Melendez-Eisman’s mentors at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center’s medical school.
From the beginning, the odds were stacked against her. Melendez-Eisman is the youngest of 11 children born to Benito and Celia Melendez.
She was 5 years old when her parents moved the family to the United States from Ciudad Juarez in Mexico. Her father got a job at Union Pacific railroad and secured a U.S. visa that covered his children.
Even at that age, Melendez-Eisman wanted to be a doctor. Her mother, now 73, has epilepsy and suffered seizures.
“I’d ask myself why that was happening to my mother, and worry about her coming back to consciousness,” Melendez-Eisman said. “As I got older, I was intrigued, especially with babies: How do we become this complex human being that starts with only two cells?”
She graduated from high school in Commerce City and went to Adams State, where she graduated in 1995 with a degree in biology, but then failed the MCAT.
“I had no idea how to take a test like that,” she said. She didn’t know until afterward that most students wouldn’t dream of sitting for the MCAT without taking a multi-week prep course.
For one awful year, Melendez-Eisman held down three jobs—one with Americorps, one at Salud Family Health Clinic and one at Clinica’s laboratory—while taking an MCAT review course and caring for her aging parents, who had both gone through surgery.
“And then Clinica Tepeyac put a note in my church bulletin, asking for volunteers and a clinic manager,” she said, “and I thought in the back of my mind, ‘That’s what I’m going for when I have time.’ ”
Melendez-Eisman started volunteering at Clinica Tepeyac in July 1996. By the end of August, she’d been hired as the clinic manager.
“She was a perfectionist, and we needed someone like that to take what limited resources we had and make the best of them,” said Jim Garcia, who founded Clinica Tepeyac and hired Melendez-Eisman.
“She was really starting from scratch, putting together policies for the clinic, scheduling patients, coordinating all the volunteer medical providers, and allowing us to offer consistent care. It was very rare that we ever had to cancel an appointment because we didn’t have a provider.”
Working at Clinica Tepeyac allowed Melendez-Eisman to see the grittier side of medicine and life. Among the first patients she saw was a viciously battered man who showed up, bruised and bleeding, after being turned away from a larger hospital’s emergency room.
His eye appeared to be only a slit inside a balloon of skin bulging over shattered bone. Worried about a brain injury, Melendez-Eisman arranged for a CAT scan at St. Anthony Hospital. It showed a fractured eye socket.
Her instincts impressed Garcia. The next spring, when Melendez-Eisman passed the MCAT and was accepted at the University of Colorado, Garcia hated to see her go.
“The conversation Elisa and I had then was, ‘When you finish medical school, you’re going to come back here,'” he said.
“At the time, all our docs were volunteers. I told her that I didn’t know how we’d get the money, but we were going to get her back here.”
As she learned to balance school and family during her repeated first year of medical school, Melendez-Eisman continued her association with Clinica Tepeyac. She helped organize and contribute handmade tortillas to Tortillas for Tepeyac, a celebrity tortilla-making benefit that became an annual spring event.
Seeing the fundraiser’s success, her parents suggested selling burritos to help offset their daughter’s medical-school expenses.
So she sold burritos to her classmates on Friday afternoons. Her tuition debt ($225,000 between undergraduate and medical school costs) dwarfed the profits, but she made enough to put a down payment on the car that took her to her internship and family-practice residency in Texas and Wyoming.
When she returned to Colorado, she won a Colorado Health Services grant. It helped pay off her medical-school debt in exchange for three years of service at Salud Family Health Center, a public medical clinic in the Commerce City neighborhood where Melendez-Eisman grew up. She had spent five years there when the position of medical director opened a few months ago and Garcia asked her if she wanted the job.
On her last day at Salud, some patients were teary.
“I will miss her; I will truly miss her,” said Helen Sandoval, who has chronic pulmonary obstruction disease.
“I am 61, so I have seen multiple doctors in my lifetime. You know how some doctors come in and they act like they’re smarter than you? She comes in with a friendly face, and really listens to what you are saying.”
Melendez-Eisman returns to Clinica Tepeyac, where she started as a volunteer, to lead the clinic and its affiliated mental health facility nearby. Besides seeing patients, she’s in charge of a staff of physicians still taxed by a crowded schedule and tight resources. Her own life is busy, too.
She’s married now, with two children under age 4. She still faithfully attends Mass, but at a church near her home in Brighton rather than at Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose bulletin carried the notice that first brought her to Clinica Tepeyac.
Today, Clinica Tepeyac charges patients $20 to see a doctor. It serves a mostly Latino clientele, but now physicians are paid, thanks to the grants and private donations that finance the clinic.
“Elisa coming back is a great story, but people who know the Clinica Tepeyac story would say it’s meant to be,” Garcia said.
