Dr. James Boudwin
By: Amy Dipierro
Tags: Covid 19, Coronavirus, New Jersey, Family, Doctors

Jason Boudwin watched the water in his basement rising an inch an hour. Outside, Hurricane Sandy bore down on his townhouse in Somerset County, N.J. The storm had knocked out the electricity. Knowing that no technician could come to his house for an emergency repair, he called the only other person he thought could help.

His father, Dr. James Boudwin, arrived at the house within an hour. He had duct tape, a water pump, a garden hose and speaker wire.

The elder Boudwin was accustomed to making house calls. As a physician in Dayton, N.J., he sometimes treated two or three generations of the same family. Once, when a child sliced open his knee on a birthday party slip-and-slide, Dr. Boudwin stitched him up in time for cake. He loved caring for patients so much, he told his children he would work until the day he died.

The emergency at hand called for a different set of skills. Dr. Boudwin cut two pieces of the garden hose and taped one to each side of the pump. He dropped the first end into the basement. The other end he fed into a toilet upstairs. He ran the speaker wire from the pump to Jason’s car and started the engine.

The contraption worked. Dr. Boudwin celebrated as if he had stuck the moon landing.

Dr. James Boudwin examines a patient in 1987. (Photo courtesy of Jason Boudwin)

For as long as Jason and his two younger siblings, Dan and Karen, could remember, their father had worked a minimum of 70-hour weeks. When Karen filled in as an assistant receptionist in her dad’s practice, she and Dr. Boudwin sometimes started their days as early as 4 a.m. and didn’t get home until midnight.

The medical office ran chronically behind schedule. Jason’s wife, Regina, who also worked in her father-in-law’s practice as a teenager, remembers peeking into the crowded waiting room with trepidation. Sure, some people complained about the delay. But many loyal patients were content to wait: They knew that when it was their turn, Dr. Boudwin would give them all the time they needed.

His work never ended at the clinic door. On an errand to the grocery store or Pierre’s, the local deli, Karen could bet her father would run into a patient and spend 45 minutes quizzing them about their lives. When a family friend fell terminally ill recently, he welcomed the woman and her family into his home so that he could provide her with hospice care.

Even outside of medicine, his focus rarely fell on himself. On winter vacations, Dr. Boudwin skied backwards so that he could film the rest of the family. He built computers for relatives when he realized they couldn’t afford to buy them. He encouraged young people to become doctors by teaching them to draw blood out of his arm.

Dr. Boudwin’s everyday heroics were tempered by a playful, often juvenile sense of humor. He regularly asked each of his children if they had experienced a bowel movement that day, needling them further if they showed any sign of embarrassment. While dining at a Chinese restaurant once, he orchestrated a diversion so that he could swap out the fortune cookies at their table with ones with dirty jokes written inside.

He was an enthusiastic but tone deaf gift giver, buying matching monogrammed robes for the children and their significant others, and a gift certificate to a palm reader for his wife. “If he wasn’t so excited,” Jason said, “it would have seemed thoughtless.”

Dr. James Boudwin with Karen’s son James in 2015.

By 2020, Dr. Boudwin had practiced medicine for more than three decades. His wife had died in 2018. He remarried in September 2019. He had nine grandchildren. Jason, Dan and Karen wondered if their dad would reconsider his retirement plans.

Dan wanted his father to put himself first for a change. He bought an airplane a few years ago, knowing Dr. Boudwin loved to fly and thinking some new hobbies would make retirement irresistible. Dan could see how much his father loved snapping photos at his grandson’s baseball games, loved baking cookies with his granddaughter, loved falling asleep with Dan’s youngest child in his arms. The devoted doctor warmed to the idea of retiring.

This spring, Dr. Boudwin told Dan that he was afraid Covid-19 would kill him. He continued to see patients. And then he got sick.

He developed a fever, body aches and a cough. By the end of the second week, he was short of breath. He suspected he contracted the disease from a patient.

At last, 16 days after he started showing symptoms, Dr. B. checked into the emergency room at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick. His blood oxygen was at 54%. It should have been 90% or higher.

He told loved ones that when he recovered, he planned to volunteer to treat Covid-19 patients. After that, he would retire.

He died two weeks later, on April 28, at 67.