Denver native touched lives around the globe

Tami Fisk, MD, who died March 4 at age 39, knew she wanted to work overseas as a doctor from the time she was 10, and never lost sight of that goal. She grew up in Denver, but fulfilled her childhood dream to help those less fortunate on the other side of the world. She worked in Zambia, China, and Thailand as well as the United States before she succumbed to melanoma "back home" in Denver.

Dr. Fisk was born in Lakewood, and developed a great love of the outdoors as she grew up. She skied and hiked the Rockies, plus the Grand Canyon, from an early age. A swim coach spotted her at a local pool when she was 5, and trained her for her team. Tami swam with a summer team, her Wheat Ridge high school and later for her college teams, focusing in the 500-meter freestyle and backstroke, while in the Pre-med program at Wheaton College, IL, from 1983-1986.

After Wheaton College, Dr. Fisk graduated summa cum laude at Emory Medical School in Atlanta, GA, completing a Med/Peds residency at the Rochester Medical Center in NY. During her college and medical school years, she twice served at a hospital in Zambia. During residency, Fisk worked in Beijing and Kunming, China, for three months. She came back to make wonderful friendships with the Chinese in Rochester, peaking her interest in learning Mandarin and returning to China long-term.

Dr. Fisk did go back to China in 1995 with Medical Services International (now MSI Professional Services), studying Mandarin in Chengdu before heading to Xichang in 1996. There, she worked at a local hospital and commuted to mountain towns in the region. Fisk conducted training for village health workers, and with coworkers held health fairs on village streets.

Creative and witty, Tami used skits to convey important health lessons. In one instance, she lined people up as "teeth" and had others be "bacteria" and run between the teeth. Her friend, Sharon, used a crowd-pleasing puppet show to deal with topics like smoking, AIDS, TB, nutrition, and drug abuse.

Friends and family back home enjoyed monthly installments of Tami’s newsletter, The Martian Chronicles (Dr. Fisk being the Martian), where her gift for describing her world shone. Letters included "culinary adventures" (anyone for French fried silk-worm cocoon or a 22-legged centipede?), "games and quizzes," as well as describing people and places. Mental images of four doctors squashed into a tiny examination room by an anxious crowd of patients, all eager to be examined first and incredibly creative at cutting in line, were indelibly impressed on the minds of Fisk’s friends at home. On one occasion, she and a team of doctors and nurses saw more than 800 patients in three days!

Few foreigners had visited Xichang at that time, and its inhabitants found Dr. Fisk enormously strange and entertaining. Children, calling Fisk "Auntie Fei," drifted in and out of her apartment on the weekends and took her hiking in the hills. She developed lasting friendships with colleagues at her hospital, and her love for the people of China continued to grow. A highlight was visiting one friend’s family in Mongolia, and another was a miraculous answer to a sheepish prayer in 1998. Tami, a huge Denver Bronco fan, desperately wanted to see Super Bowl XXXII, but no hotel in town had satellite TV. That day, she found a new channel on her TV at home and was able to watch the Broncos WIN! Her description of the Chinese play-by-play won her considerable fame at home. Elway’s good plays were described as "ke ai," meaning ”cute or adorable”, and the commentators had no words to describe the celebration dances after a touchdown.

Dr. Fisk returned to the US in 1998 for an Infectious Diseases fellowship at Emory. A few months later, she was diagnosed with melanoma. Tami underwent multiple chemo treatments while continuing her studies, then enrolled in a clinical trial at the University of Colorado Cancer Center. After only a few months, she went into remission and remained so for several years. Fisk spent half of each year in Thailand researching emerging infectious diseases, including AIDS and also SARS during the recent outbreak.   She spent the other half in year n Atlanta as an assistant professor at Emory Med School.  . Fisk kept up her Mandarin by having Chinese roommates and attending a Chinese fellowship and Bible study at her church. Her dream was to return to China in the future, but it was not to be.

Dr. Fisk spent her last days back in Centennial with her family, and many of her friends and family were able to visit her. She never lost faith, and everyone who met her came away encouraged. Her love for God and others were clearly evident to those around her, and people could see that she truly lived what she believed. Tami left behind a poem that sums up her thoughts at the end of her struggle with cancer:

Today I am healed.
Perhaps not the way you had hoped for, prayed for, waited for
But I'm in a glorious new body, free of pain, full of new strength
Free to run and dance in a place where God himself wipes my tears away
Immersed in a love, joy and peace that we have a mere taste of during our time on earth
In the presence of my God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who loves me more than His own life
Know that today I am healed.