Special Focus:  Riding Into Sunrise
Workdays long but inspirational for the woman behind Rush-Copley's new Heart Institute
By Marie-Anne Hogarth
BEACON NEWS STAFF WRITER

Growing up in her native India, Santosh Gill was her father's "favorite daughter."

As a small girl, she rode scrunched up on the crossbar of the bicycle that he used as his main means of transport around the city of Delhi.

Over the years Gill's father, a man with a fifth-grade education who worked hard to earn even a few rupees, grew rich enough to buy his own scooter. He allowed his precocious middle child to ride on it, although her legs didn't yet reach the pedals. By the time Gill went to high school, her father owned a factory with several hundred employees and had graduated to driving a truck. This time, Gill's father gave her a scooter, making her a maverick among her female classmates and the envy of even some teachers who rode to school on bicycles.

Perhaps it was that early attention that fostered in Gill a confidence that years later would make her a leader in a medical specialty long dominated by men and an entrepreneur who would build partnerships and make her dreams reality.

This week cardiologist Dr. Santosh Gill opens the doors of the $9 million facility on Ogden Avenue, housing Rush-Copley Medical Center's outpatient heart services and her longtime vision, the Women's Heart Center. The building is the fruition on an investment she made eight years ago when she bought a piece of land near the new Rush-Copley campus.

The story of the woman behind Rush-Copley's Heart Institute building begins with a young woman who followed her new husband to America.

It was a "semi-arranged" marriage — a happy one that has lasted some 26 years and is blessed with three children — and even involved her father going to the boy's hometown to do "a kind of criminal investigation" into her prospect's background.

"At the time, it was normal," Gill said. "People did not date for months and years like they do today."

Their parents made sure they had the right characteristics — tall doctor meets handsome electrical engineer — and it was up to them to make it work. Still, the woman they nicknamed "Scooter Girl" in high school had a vocation for medicine, going back to a time in childhood when she saw her mother suffer because a doctor kept her waiting.

Even today, with all her business successes, she considers herself a physician first. Gill picked cardiology because she liked the idea that people's hearts could be fixed and patients did not have to be endlessly ill. She barely considered that she was entering a male-dominated field, even when she was the only female student in her specialty to attempt a surgical rotation.

A Sikh, Gill believed most in the living guidance that her faith brings and did not stick to rules about outward appearance — such as never cutting her hair — adhered to by more orthodox followers.

"I believe in God. I feel that I am doing God's work," she said. "If God is who I think God is, I don't think that he would want me sitting in a corner."

And in many ways moving to the United States didn't represent a significant cultural change for Gill. She continued with her medical training through pregnancies and motherhood, completing her internship and residency at Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago and getting further advanced cardiology training at Chicago's Michael Reese Hospital.

When a male attending suggested once that most heart patients were men and wouldn't want a female physician, she shrugged it off, not only because it wasn't true that men suffered from the disease more often than women.

"People want a good doctor, not a man or a woman," Gill said.

Years later, when it came time to choose the best of three job offers, she decided on a gut instinct to strike out on her own.

"Once you know where you are going, you find ways to get there," she said.

Still filled years later with the same spirit of independence, Gill said she owes much of her success to partnerships. Her marriage to Teja Gill, who she credits with doing a good share in the rearing of their three children, allowed her to focus on her career.

Gill eventually merged the solo practice she started 20 years ago with that of cardiologist Dr. Abbas Khawaja, whose advice she had initially sought out when she established her practice in Aurora.

"I liked her very much," Khawaja said of his first meeting with Gill. "I gave her a survey of the area and told her that she would be most welcome."

Their joint practice, Fox Valley Cardiovascular Consultants, a partnership of six cardiologists, expanded to five locations close to hospitals and plans to hire two more physicians soon.

About a decade ago, Gill started paying attention to new research about women and heart disease and dreaming of having a special place dedicated to the underserved needs of female patients.

Over the years, partnerships among physicians turned into relationships with hospitals as Gill oversaw cardiology services first at Mercy and later at Rush-Copley.

Last year, Fox Valley Cardiovascular Consultants opened a building on the Mercy campus. Gill has a 25 percent stake in the new building, and is leasing half of it to the hospital.

But that was nothing like the joint venture that she forged with Rush-Copley, when she developed that land she had purchased at the edge of the hospital campus.

With an 80 percent stake in the new Heart Institute building, Gill is landlord to the hospital, along with her physician partners Dr. Kok Chua, Dr. Jaweed Sayeed and Dr. Vijay Shah, and she is the creator of a vision that complements her dream of the Women's Heart Center.

For Rush-Copley Medical Center, which was looking for a way to consolidate its outpatient services, the arrangement is mutually beneficial.

"She sets an example to the physicians ... of how you can develop your speciality into more than a practice," said Barry Finn, Rush-Copley president and chief executive officer.

Often during her quiet time early in the morning, Gill sits in a chair and meditates. It's a technique she learned from her father.

At bedtime, Gill's father would instruct his children to imagine a light in the spot between their eyes and focus on it, shutting out the outside world until their bodies seemed almost numb, to hear their inner voice.

"My dad used to make us do it for five or six minutes," Gill said. "I couldn't really wait that long."

Still, that capacity to imagine possibility helps Gill envision everything from health in the sickest of patients, to a brilliant future for her children, to a heart center on a plot of land near a hospital that at the time didn't yet have state approval for a heart program.

It was five years after Gill purchased the acreage at the northwest corner of Ogden Avenue and Waterford Drive that Rush-Copley got the green light to do surgeries.

Ultimately, the land she had purchased for $850,000 came to be valued at $2 million, an appreciation that allowed her to make a down payment on the $7 million construction project.

That project, the new Heart Institute building, is important to Gill because it allows her to serve her female patients through the Women's Heart Center and her male patients through all the services there under one roof.

"My mom, she is so excited about what she is doing," said daughter Sonia, 22. "She talks about her patients all of the time."

Gill said she doesn't have a life beyond her work and her family — she even went back to school to get her master's degree in business administration — but she said she doesn't feel the need for one.

Ultimately, she comes back to something that her father used to say, and which for years has been a source of inspiration.

"It is very hard to climb up on the mountain," he told his daughter. "But the breeze you experience when you are at the top, the people at the bottom cannot imagine."

02/25/04

Special Focus Section Archives
Women & Heart Disease
Sleep Disorders in Women
Hormone Replacement Therapy & Heart Disease