Cajun M.D.: The Spicy Life of Victor Vautrot--a Board Certified Harvard doctor

Hunting Season at Serenity Farm: Awesome!

2011-12-14T22:08:00.004-05:00

Here I am out in my woods on the northern end of my property, holding my Collins double edge axe, chopping down trees to make another trail for us to travel on to get to the duck hunting ponds hidden in the Cypress & Oak tree forest!

Since September and hunting season begam, my friends, family and I have harvested quite a lot of Wood ducks, Green Wing Teal, Blue Wing Teal and squirrels. I have seen some rabbits, but their numbers are down on my property (220 acres) due to a pack of coyotes that apparantly has devestated their population over the years while I was away in Massachusetts completing my residency training through Harvard School of Medicine. Now that I am back, however, my brother and I will hunt the hunters--use a predator call at night (an electronic device that makes sounds like a wounded rabbit) which attracts the coyotes for an apparant "easy meal." Well, they'll be ambushed and have a lead sandwich instead!

Back to the duck hunting on my property in Eunice: it's unbelievable. I placed several hunting blinds around one of the many small pounds that are located near Bayou Mallett, which courses through the northern boundry of the Vautrot estate. I cut with an axe some Palmetto trees and other small trees and planted this foliage along the edge of the pond in several clusters, from which I hide behind. I then got into my canoe (pirogue) and placed several decoys in patterns on the pond water's surface. At 6:05am each morning, the ducks are swarming from all directions directly above us trying to find spots to land in the pond. They dive directly down from the sky above like missiles--it is such a beautiful site to watch them as they flare their wings back to slow down immediately prior to landing on the water surface. We have seen flocks of about 2 dozen Woodies circling and then landing in my pond, as well as larger flocks of the migratory Teal ducks (the rare Blue Wing and the very common Green Wing teal). I instructed my family and friends to not shoot the female Woodies (Wood Ducks), as they are local/indiginous ducks, and I want to keep their population very high on my estate. However, we are free to follow Dept of Wildlife and Fisheries mandates to harvest the maximum limit of teal--since they migrate to Louisiana from up North...escaping the brutal, bitter winter cold weather.

We have harvested as many as 15 teal in less than one hour at my pond that I have the duck blinds prepared on. It is really amazing--while standing behind the implanted folliage (small trees and Palmettos), you'll see other wild life come by: squirrels in the trees around you leaping from limb-to-limb; Great Horned Owls come to land in the tree limbs, too...monitoring the squirrels as their prey; and large, swamp rabbits run by the water's edge--oblivious to your hidden presence. There are risks out there, however: I have come across two venomous Copperhead snakes near my hunting lodge...they are not as poisonous as the notorious Water Moccasin (a.k.a. "Cotton Mouth"), but can cause quite a lot of pain and still requires ER attention if one is bitten. They are, oddly enough, a most beautifully colored snake--even their eyes are the color of bronze/copper!

adult Copperhead snake

adult Copperhead snake

My sister came out to Serenity Farm; her and her husband went to one of my other ponds (my property has several ponds stocked with fish on the southern side of my estate; several ponds for duck hunting located on the northern border of my estate; and several very large ponds for harvesting crawfish located in the middle). She caught several Brim (Perch) in just a couple of minutes. My brother caught a 2-3 pound Bass with just a few casts of his pole using an artificial worm. So, no matter what your interests are--hunting ducks, squirrels, rabbits, fishing, crawfishing, etc), there is something fun for everyone to do! That is why I named all of this property "Serenity Farm."

Duck Hunt November 2011. Dr Vautrot's Serenity Farm: 13 ducks and 1 Teal in my canoe with a 12 guage Browning "Gold Hunter" shotgun

Duck & Squirrel hunt November 2011. Serenity Farm: cleaned 7 Teal & 6 large Wood Ducks, 1 large Fox Squirrel

Duck Hunt November 2011. Dr. Vautrot's Serenity Farm: 13 ducks and 1 Fox Squirrel

Duck Hunt November 2011. Dr. Vautrot's Serenity Farm: 13 ducks & 1 Squirrel

1 male Green Wing teal

2 male Wood Ducks: November 2011

15 Green Wing Teal: December 2011.

December 2011. 4 Wood Ducks and 2 Green Wing Teal

Victor with several Wood Ducks and Teal: December 2011

over 2 dozen turtles I trapped in Bayou Mallet

Confederate States of America official Battle Flag (1861-1865)

Confederate General Richard Taylor's reverse battle flag (Louisiana Battalion, 1864, Red River Campaign)

Meet "Dixie": my new Golden Retriever puppy

2011-12-13T21:37:00.001-05:00

Here she is: Dixie. She is an AKC registered Golden Retriever. She was given to me by one of my best friends whom I have known since I was in AmeriCorps during my college days back in 1996. Bryan raises them,and they compete nationally. Her parents, Shilo and Jessie, are of championship bloodlines out of Montana and North Carolina, respectively. She was born on October 25th, 2011.

Dixie in November 2011

Dixie in December 2011

Christmas attire: Dixie, early December 2011

Dixie and her siblings: November 2011
(she is the dark one in the middle with the red collar)

Board Certification is complete...I am a "Board Certified" doctor!

2011-01-18T18:29:00.007-05:00

Well, I recently returned from Los Angeles, California--I flew up there from the Bayou state of Louisiana for my Part II Oral examination to complete the process of becoming a Board Certified physician...i.e. a "Diplomat of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology." I had taken and easily passed the Part I written exam with flying colors in May of 2010 on my first attempt; and, the second part ("the orals") was then offered to those of us that had passed that written examination component (about 67% of doctors pass it).

The Part II Oral exam has a 50-60% failure rate, as it is much more difficult than the written. There is a 1 hour live patient interview followed by a 1 hour section composed of 4 written and video vignettes (short stories of patient cases). I managed both sections quite well as I was examined by a crowd of older, Board Certified psychiatrists throughout the day. And I PASSED IT! I have a huge sense of relief and accomplishment, as there is nothing more challenging in the field of Medicine than for a doctor to be granted Board Certified in their specialty by a group of their peers.

Being a Board Certified doctor is not just the "icing on the cake," so to speak, it is the lit candles,too! This is truly the pinnacle of success...the peak of the mountain. There is nothing higher to strive for and achieve. This certification, and becoming a "Diplomat" in the medical field, represents superior clinical competency and demonstrates mastery in one's specialty of medicine.

So, by the age of 34 years-old, I have published research work in a major medical journal (Academic Psychiatry), graduated from a residency training program through Harvard Medical School, and have been awarded Board Certification. This endeavor (becoming a doctor) has certainly had its challenging times, and it has been a long journey of 9 years and 5 months--I started this in August 2001 one week after my 25th birthday. It required good ole' perseverance, tenacity, and a refusal to let those around me over those years try to throw me off track from achieving this dream. Life is full of people who will try to manipulate you towards their own selfish agenda.

It's great to be home in Louisiana and to now have everything maximized in the academic, clinical, and career fields of medicine. Now, it's time for a full, 100% pursuit of enjoyable, "extracurricular" activities!

Hunting and Fishing Paradise: Serenity Farm

2010-12-11T23:16:00.001-05:00

a very large, jumbo-sized live crawfish that I caught in my crawfish pots May 2011

Boiled crawfish from the ponds that I catch them in on my property

My new camp--my 3rd home thus far--that I am building in Church Point/Eunice. I now own a 220 acre estate--it has 2 fishing ponds stocked with Bass, Catfish and Sac-au-Lait ("White Perch"). There are centuries-old Cypress, Oak and Pecan tree-filled orchards, one large forest, several expansive fields with rice, and one bayou (Bayou Mallet) that runs through its northern border. My hunting/fishing camp has 3 bedrooms and 2 baths; 1200 square foot living area; has central air conditioner, running water. Outside of the camp, there is a large, screened-in Cypress wood porch that has 2 ceiling fans and lights, so everyone can stay cool and free from bugs in the summer time. My garage has large fans and lights, so that we can have cool days as we boil crawfish under the garage roof.

About 60 feet away, I had a large slaughter house constructed; it has attached to it a 30 foot roof that extends over my boat. At the end, there is an enclosed building that houses my fish/wild game cleaning table on a cement slab with central drain to a sewage disposal unit; there is running water to the building, as well as lights and a fan inside, too. So, it is competley equipped! Many a fish, amphibian, reptile, crustacean, and wild game will be addressed there!

I am very blessed because all of this (the 220 acres, hunting/fishing camp, slaughter house, my great-great grandfather's Cajun house) is all located in one place, outside of the city of Lafayette, so that I can hunt and fish right outside my front door without having to travel to a distant camp or a hunting lease like most Americans, yet I will still have access to the amenities of the city because there are several highways nearby. Because this property has so many forests and fields, there are squirrels, rabbits, doves, wild pigs, raccoons, and deer everywhere! Overhead, there are hawks and at least 2 local owls on my property that hoot throughout the night.

When I come home from work at the hospital each weekend, I am able to hunt doves (season starts in mid-September) in the twilight of the late evening hours as they fly across my large fields to find night-time roosting perches in the trees. Then, on the weekends, I'll be able to step outside my front door to start walking into the forests to hunt squirrels and rabbits (season starts October 1st)!

My 2009 Lexus 470GX parked on a piece of my estate with several acres of fields in the background.

13 ducks and 1 squirrel: November 2011

Serenity Farm: a hunting and fishing camp in paradise!

2010-10-28T21:42:00.015-04:00

Here I am standing in one of my 16 crawfish ponds on my farm in southern Louisiana--the 220 acre paradise we call "Serenity Farm." It is crawfish season (November - July), and I go there each Friday and bait my crawfish traps. The following Sunday morning, each trap is then full of those tasty, colossal "baby lobsters!" There are anywhere from 6-12 jumbo, dark red crawfish inside. I empty them into one of the buckets with me, then I bait it with the other bucket. I then keep walking in the pond, wearing those waterproof waders, and harvest the crawfish from as many traps as I need. I raise enough to bring back to my house, which is where I boil them for my family and friends. The crawfish are FREE...costs me and my friends nothing, as they are in my ponds. I never have to buy them at the store or restaurant anymore...which is where they cost at least $30 per person for only 5 lbs! I catch at least 15 lbs of live, very fresh, organic crawfish in about 45 minutes are less. My ponds are clean, no pollution, and the crawfish did not have to be trucked in from different parts of the state or other states!. All it costs me is time...less than one hour of walking in my ponds to catch enough for all of my guests to eat. Now, THAT is living Cajun style, baby!

Some of the crawfish I personally harvested on my farm one evening after work...just a few yards behind my house! I don't even have to go to a restaurant and order them anymore...living off the land--Cajun style!They were big and so easy to peel, because they're fresh and farm-raised!

Taken at the gym; body weight of 215 lbs.

I have started building a $127,000 hunting camp on my 220 acre farmstead near Church Point, LA. Each weekend, we go out there and make more progress. So far, it has 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms; it has a screened-in Cypress wood front porch that is perfect for having parties in the evenings; it has a huge covered cement patio in the back with a large barbecue pit that is perfect for grilling a variety of wild game, deer, beef steaks, fresh fish, etc. Located next to the camp is my "slaughter house"--a very long covered building, steel-framed, with cement floor and a centrally-located drain in the floor where I can spray wash the blood and viscera into, and it leads to a septic tank. This is where all of the fish cleaning and wildlife dressing will occur; it has both electricity (heater for the winters and ceiling fan for the summers) and running water! It is 18 feet wide and over 40 feet long and is completely covered to provide shelter for my 22 foot long commercial fishing boat--The Catfish Assassin. I have a large dog kennel (fenced-in) that will house my Golden Retriever hunting dog and my friends' dogs when they bring them over for the weekends. The front yard is a perfect place to relax late at night with a bonfire beneath the moonlit and star kissed sky above. This is paradise: this is Serenity. This is living--Cajun and Southern Country-style living! Back to nature. Laissez les bon temps rouler, mes amis! My brother and I have been renovating my great-great grandfather's home next door each weekend--Francois Joseph Vautrot's homestead. I will register it as a National Historical Landmark sometime next year, as it was constructed in 1871 and is still standing and in good condition...140 years later! Anyway, my family, friends, and I enjoy hunting and fishing on this large piece of family property that I now solely own--it is 220 acres of forests, rice fields, crawfish harvesting ponds, 2 fishing lakes, and one small river. I built this hunting camp on it for me, my family, and my friends to come and visit and play every weekend and on holidays! It's so awesome; everyone loves to leave the city and come out there. My property is full of Wood ducks, Teal ducks, Mallards, squirrels, rabbits, raccoons, big deer, wild bobcats, two black panthers, hawks, Mourning doves, White doves, owls, coyotes, some wild horses (about 6 so far that I've counted), and Box turtles. It's an enjoyable adventure every time all of us (family and friends) go out exploring in the woods!

Here I am out in my woods, chopping down a new trail!

Francois Joseph Vautrot homestead

2010-09-15T22:48:00.000-04:00

Photograph of the Francois Joseph Vautrot 1871 second homestead: Eunice, LA.
Photo taken July 2010.

Photo taken July 2011.

Photo taken July 2011.

My great-great grandfather was Francois Joseph Vautrot. His original homestead is still erect and located in Eunice, Louisiana.

The original Vautrot, Francois Vautrot, arrived in America aboard the ship Libertas in 1834 from France. They were French Huguenots (Protestants) that had been persecuted by the Catholics in France since the time of Louis the 14th (17th century French king). Well, Francois and his children left New York and settled in Pennsylvania. Francois Vautrot became a naturalized US citizen in 1846; he died in Pennsylvania in 1863. Some of his children moved to different states in the 1840's--Ohio, Alabama, and Louisiana. One of those sons is Francois Joseph Vautrot (1813-1881), who settled in St. Landry Parish and erected a home along Bayou Teche--he purchased 250 acres from Sarah Lee in 1853. More about him...

Francois J. Vautrot (FJV) emigrated to America in 1839, after military service probably in his native France. He was a French citizen, spoke European French and little English; he was not a U.S. citizen. His family, including five younger siblings, had made the trip from Lorraine, France, to New York and then to Crawford County, PA, five years previously in 1834...as already mentioned above. His brother, Jules, became a naturalized citizen in Lafayette, LA and Francois settled in St. Landry parish in 1840--around the city of Opelousas. There, he married a landed widow, Amelia Burleigh, in Opelousas in 1848 and became a planter. They had one son, Francois Louis Vautrot, born in 1849, who became the progenitor of the Vautrot family in Southwest Louisiana; he died in Church Point, LA in 1898.

FJV saw his produce and livestock, including cotton, confiscated by General Banks' troops during the Civil War (1861-1865). This large property was occupied by the invading Union Army under General Nathaniel Banks in October of 1863, and Francois Joseph Vautrot's herd of cattle (6), horses (5), and mules (5) was confiscated, 80 bales of cotton stolen, as well as several thousand pounds of corn and rice. My great-great grandfather's original home was burned down by the Yankees. He was a planter and slave owner (9 males, 10 females and several children per records in National Archives in Washington,D.C), but he was NOT a Confederate soldier nor did he support secession. Per government records and testimony, most of his slaves left with the Union Army, but some remained with FJV. The Yankess left them "maybe 40 or 50 barrels of corn, of which Francois divided with the slaves."

After the Civil War ended in 1865, Francois Joseph Vautrot emigrated again, to Brazil with some Confederados (the name bestowed on Confederate sympathizers who left the South after the Civil War seeking a more compatible political atmosphere), but returned to Acadia Parish circa 1871. He built a new home, which still stands today, not too far from his original one.

The date of his death is not documented (circa 1881), but his former slave testified that he was buried "under a tree" on his farm.

Address: 1172 Brigman Highway; Eunice, LA 70535

My 2010 Toyota Tundra parked in the beautiful Pecan Orchard--a favorite gathering spot for Fox and Gray Squirrels...it is located just a stone's throw away from the Vautrot homestead.

The Louisiana State Police and I have a conference!

2010-08-01T08:14:00.009-04:00

This week over one dozen Louisiana State Police Troopers from a variety of troop divisions came to our VA to attend a conference on Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention. Some of the troopers are SWAT team members, highway patrol, and others were specialists in hostage negotiations-- a really cool collection of law enforcement! I was part of the panel from the VA that was asked to offer recommendations to them for managing crises in the community, especially suicidality. In addition to me (the psychiatrist), we had a psychologist, licensed social worker, and suicide prevention coordinator.

I gave an educational seminar on "How to recognize, assess, and manage five common psychiatric disorders in the community." The troopers were very interested in learning how to recognize the many faces of mental illness when they are called to a crisis scene--i.e. Bipolar Disorder, Major Depression, Schizophrenia, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Schizophrenia. I discussed with them the signs & symptoms of each, as well as clues to which disorder it might be based upon the medication that the person may tell them that they are prescribed. I also discussed the various illicit street drugs that can mimic psychiatric disorders. Moreover, they were interested to hear about my recommendations on how to approach each person suffering from that particular disorder in unique ways depending on the type of mental illness the person may have.

The conference was very lively, enjoyable and educational! Our state police are a very committed, professional, and caring group of men and women that showed a genuine concern for the civilians that they encounter each day.

They asked me to create and write a handbook or field guide of the topics I discussed, which could be made available to all of their colleagues in their departments! Sounds like a new publication project will be on the way...!

Sweet Home, Louisiana!

2010-06-13T23:26:00.017-04:00

Well, there is no doubt that the April 20th disaster with the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion, whereby nearly a dozen men suddenly lost their lives and has caused oil to hemorrhage into the Gulf like a ripped and torn artery, is an unparalleled catastrophic event. Louisiana is again threatened and in perilous jeopardy, as she was from Hurricane Katrina nearly 5 years ago. Our culture, our way of life--a unique living that exists no whereselse on Earth, is challenged. However, we, the Cajuns, the Louisiana natives, will persevere and overcome this tragedy, too. We will marshall our resources and bold spirit and demonstrate our resiliency to the world!

As Louisianians, we are a die-hard breed. This is evidenced by our terrific Civil War
fighting records as the Confederate soldiers defended theselves against overwhelming Union forces both at sea and on land from 1861-1865--we were the "Louisiana Fighting Tigers." (L.S.U. gets its tiger mascot from our Confederate heroes). And, later we evidenced this in World War II with our famous 14th US Air Force squadron (the "Louisiana Flying Tigers") that shot down many a Japanese plane to strike terrific Allied victories in the Pacific theater of the war (1941-1945). Lastly, this was also evidenced by our recovery after Hurricane Katrina (2005) when New Orleans and the surrounding parishes were flooded within hours after the levees broke.

We Louisianians fight back and come out stronger than before. We will not lose our heritage, nor our culture. The Yankees couldn't do it in the 19th century; the Nazi and Japanese Axis powers of WWII couldn't defeat us in the 20th century; and not even one of the worst hurricanes in recorded history could demolish our way of life in the 21st century!

We will continue, like I do each weekend, to go hunting, fishing, and socializing with our friends and neighbors over boiled crawfish and fish fries. We, Cajuns, will continue to go to our camps each weekend and pass a good time. The oil will be removed; the seafood and wildlife will recover--they always have. It's nature. This is only a setback; this is not the end for us nor our ecosystem!

I will continue to have more stories and pictures showcasing this great state's Cajun culture and heritage. You will continue to read about fishing for 60 pound catfish caught in hoop nets and hunting ducks & rabbits at my camp in Gueydan, as well as the squirrel hunting and large mouth bass fishing on my very own private 220 acre farm that I own in Church Point, Louisiana, where we also harvest crawfish. There is no state anywhere in America like Louisiana--she is a pearl, a jewell, and a wonderful place to live and raise a family in. I love her dearly and will never leave her.

My new boat:
The Cajun Titan--23 feet of steel & stealth. My catfish catchin' assasin!

My commercial fishing boat attached to my Platinum Edition 2010 Toyota Tundra.

Here is a black & white photo of our Louisiana Confederate Battle Flag that our forefathers bravely and valiantly fought under from 1861-1865!

circa 1897: 81-year-old J F Griffin, last surviving member of the Louisiana Tigers, of which he was colour bearer, at the 32nd annual reunion of the United Confederate Veterans at Richmond, USA. He is wearing various war trophies on his belt.

Here are 2 photos of the famous Louisiana Flying Tigers from World War II.

My Best friend's Wedding

2010-05-09T22:16:00.005-04:00

Oak Alley Plantation Home: located on the Mississippi River between the historic Louisiana cities of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Oak Alley Plantation has been called the "Grande Dame of the Great River Road". Nowhere else in the south will you find such a spectacular setting! The quarter-mile canopy of giant live oak trees, believed to be nearly 300 years old, forms an impressive avenue leading to the classic Greek-revival style antebellum home. This was the romantic setting for my best friend's wedding.

Me and uncle Bob McBride

Jimmy Burford, Louis Turner, and Bob McBride--members of my duck hunting club

Mallard Bay hunting club members

Overall,this was one of the most spectacular weddings ever. The setting was unlike any! They served fried craw fish balls, bacon-wrapped shrimp, fried catfish, chicken & sausage gumbo, and crab cakes. There was fresh prime rib steak, as well as a complete full, open bar! For dessert, there was a liquid chocolate fountain with fresh strawberries and bananas to dip in. The wedding cake was out of this world,too. Overall, it was a wonderful experience--their guests were so friendly, the setting was beautiful and romantic, and the food/liquor spectacular. They didn't cut short on anything; no expense spared!

Passing the Board exam & my Publication will be in print this summer!

2010-05-04T20:56:00.009-04:00

I took the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology Part I written examination. It is a national, standardized examination that doctors elect to take in order to try to become board certified specialists in their field of medicine. My medical field career encompasses both Psychiatry and Neurology. The exam is offered for only 2 weeks in one calendar year. It is over 400 multiple choice questions displayed over 8hours on a computer. I had to read CT scans, interpret EEGs, make conclusions based upon laboratory findings, etc. Nonetheless, after having prepared for it since November of 2009 by studying 4 separate psychiatry and neurology board review books and doing over 1,500 practice questions in the public library on the weekends, I finished the test 3 hours ahead of everyone else (1:15 PM rather than 4PM) and PASSED IT! It is a huge relief, as this is one of the final hurdles that a doctor has in his career--taking the challenge to become Board Certified. The examination has an approximate failure rate of 50%. Now, next year, I can sit and take the Part II oral examination, which is the very last exam necessary.

In addition to passing the 1st part of my Board Certification examinations, I received news yesterday from the editors for the journal Academic Psychiatry that my research manuscript will be published in the July/August issue (issue 34.4). This is very exciting, since it is such an endeavor and high honor to become a published physician in a major medical journal during his career.

Front cover of Academic Psychiatry featuring my research article

Listing of the issue's Original Articles

Front page of my research project at Harvard

Career Advancement...Directing an Acute Psychiatric Ward!

2010-04-04T20:28:00.007-04:00

In September 2009, less than 7 months ago, I arrived at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center here in central Louisiana, and I have been the psychiatrist leading the Outpatient Mental Hygiene Clinic--treating as many as 12 new patients per day and doing inpatient consults on the medical wards. I must admit, treating outpatient veterans is very enjoyable and rewarding, as I am able to see improvements in their symtpoms and response to therapy at each of the follow-up visits. Now, starting in April 2010, I was asked to manage the Acute Psychiatry Ward--that is our VA's locked psych. unit upstairs, and it has over 30 beds. I accepted their offer, as it is not only a prestigous honor to be offered such a highly respectful role in a Federal Government medical facility, but it will also further enhance and broaden my clinical skills--both medically and psychiatrically. Interestingly, I am still just less than one year out of graduating from my residency training program at Harvard! Through this new position as the attending physician, I lead the interdisciplinary treatment team rounds three times per week, and I have Doctor's rounds on the other days. It is such a pleasure to work hand-in-hand, collaboratively, with the nurses, physician assistants, social workers, dietitian, pharmacist, chaplins, occupational rehab staff, and the suicide prevention coordinator to provide a multidisciplinary treatment approach to each of our veterans! Our nation's heroes deserve quality care...and that is what we at the VA provide--second to none.

Jug fishing ("jugging") for catfish in Louisiana

2010-03-05T21:46:00.020-05:00

Photos below demonstrate a classic Cajun custom of setting jug lines for big catfish. It's akin to our Cajun heritage of setting limb lines off the banks of a bayou. The theory is the same: the buoyancy of a floating jug and the bouncing nature of a tree limb will achieve the same result--a hooked fish. Either way, when a fish (catfish or garfish) bite down on the hook and try to pull the bait down toward the muddy bottom below, the hook will swing back up in an equal & opposite reaction (it's simple physics of an equal but opposite reaction to an action!).

So, all one has to do is to locate a few dozen empty gallon containers that have handles--i.e. empty clothes detergent or Clorox bottles. Buy some nylon string and some large hooks. Tie the strings, with attached hooks, to the handles of the bottles, then bait the hooks. Choice of bait will determine the species of fish you'll likely catch. Live bait, such as small perch, that are hooked through their back, will remain alive for several hours and attract large Opelousas catfish (a.k.a. Yellow cat, Flat head cat); moreover, you'll likely catch large Alligator garfish, too. An ideal bait for Blue catfish is chicken gizzards: they are too tough to be pulled off, bloody, and cheap.

Ideal length of the line is about 3 feet deep. Toss the dozen or more jugs into the middle of the bayou as you drive down its length. If you toss them too close to the banks, then the hooks and lines will get tangled in the shrubs, roots and other debris along the banks. Space them out initially so that you get a good enough spread to find where the large catfish and garfish are feeding. Then, when you go back to check your jugs and put them back out the 2nd time, you'll be able to concentrate all of your jugs in the high density waterway.

Here are some photos of me cleaning the Blue catfish. I set out 12 jugs baited with chicken gizzards, ran them each twice (at 4PM during the later afternoon feeding period and then again at 9PM when the fish also begin their hunt at night).

Blue catfish caught on juglines in the bayou at Mallard Bay

Large Blue catfish hanging to be skinned and dressed

Skinning a catfish

Skinning a catfish: the skin is almost pulled off using catfish pliers

Pulling the head off from the body

Here are some photos of me and my very good friend, Louis Turner.

Victor and Louis at the Camp

Louis and I holding some fried catfish and alligator that I fried on the porch; his brother pan fried some fresh Deer sausage that they hunted earlier this year!

Louis Turner, me, and Dillan Landry

Here is some pics of us inside the camp: Louis Turner and his brother Roger.

Louis and Roger Turner, and Scott Smith, Dillan Landry: eating some delicious Deer sausage, fried alligator, fried catfish and catfish courtbouillion. Good eatin' of some fresh, wild food! Nothin' better out there...

Louis Turner cooked the most wonderful, tasty, fresh catfish Courtbouillion. A Cajun Courtbouillion is made with a roux, tomato sauce, diced garlic, chopped white onions and green & red bellpeppers, with some butterfly shrimp. Serve it over rice and garnish it with fresh, cut shallots/green onion tops and parsley. It's tres bonne (French for "very good")!

It was such a wonderful weekend--spending time with great friends, hunting for rabbits, fishing for catfish, cooking spectacular meals, and sharing good conversations. There's nothing quite like our Cajun culture.

new Toyota Tundra Platinum Edition truck

2010-01-04T19:47:00.008-05:00

Here is a new 2010 Toyota Tundra, Platinum Edition truck. She is a V8, 5.8 liter, 4x4 All Wheel Drive beast. But, this black beauty has the amenities that my Lexus 470 GX has, too. She is equipped with a power Moonroof, heated & cooled seats, remote engine start, keyless entry, GPS navigation system, a back-up camera with a TV monitor in my front dashboard, as well as two DVD players in both the front and passenger seats' headrest. It is a Crew Max, so it has a whole lot of extra room in the back for the passengers. And, it can pull 10,000 pounds. This Heavy Duty Platinum Edition Tundra is Toyota's most powerful, yet luxurious truck on the market. The MSRP is $54,500...the exact same price as the Lexus I bought only 10 months ago. She will come in handy this year for travelling to my duck & rabbit hunting camp in Gueydan and fishing trips to my farm in Church Point where I also squirrel hunt; for pulling a boat; and for transporting my pet Golden Retriever that I will get later this year from a dear friend of mine that I met in college in 1995.

I still have my 2009 Lexus 470 GX, but that is for getting to work and driving around the city.

Just sealed the deal at the dealership.

With both the new 2010 Tundra truck (left) and my 2009 Lexus 470GX (right)

At home, later that week

Both the 2009 Lexus 470 GX SUV and the 2010 Toyota Tundra Platinum Edition truck
"The Black Beauty and the Beast"

Both the 2009 Lexus 470 GX SUV and the 2010 Toyota Tundra Platinum Edition truck
"The Black Beauty and the Beast"

Commercial Fishing for Catfish

2009-11-11T17:11:00.004-05:00

Seen here are some photos taken in 1996 by a great friend of mine Brian Schetele. We met while I was in AmeriCorps at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (formerly USL, now ULL), home of the "Ragin Cajuns." I re-united with my Cajun buddy a few weeks ago, and he still had these photos from over 13 years ago!

In the pics are my father, my friend (and best man in my wedding) Louis Turner, and me. We are raising Hoop Nets at our hunting and fishing club in Gueydan, Louisiana. We are catching catfish, which we clean and fry to eat. Most of them, however, we sold commercially.

At that time, I was 20 years old in these pics and was a freshman in college, pursuing my Pre-Med degree (double major in Biology and Biochemistry). My dad was still teaching 12th grade World History (he is now deceased). Louis Turner works for the U.S. Government; and Brian was also a volunteer like me in AmeriCorps, as we both went to college. He plays the Cajun accordion and breeds Golden Retrievers.

Me, Dad, and Louis raising hoop nets in Gueydan, LA

Raising a hoop net

Here I am holding a small Alligator Garfish (released it)

Here is dad holding a large (12 lb) Channel Catfish

Here is dad and Louis cleaning the fish we caught

Here I am about to skin a Garfish

Squirrel Hunting on my farm

2009-11-10T22:01:00.006-05:00

I had such a wonderful time hunting squirrels on the ole’ Francois Joseph Vautrot family farm, located in Eunice/Church Point on Highway 358 (Brigman Highway).

I woke up early Sunday morning at 5am and drove out there to our pecan orchard in my Lexus SUV (this 4 wheel drive black beast went through the muddy woods, wet bogs, and low-lying brush & shrubs like it was nuthin'!). With 12 gauge Benelli Super Black Eagle shotgun in hand, I began to stalk the crafty critters.

5 squirrels harvested; 12 guage Benelli shotgun and .22 rifle

5 squirrels (3 Fox and 2 Gray squirrels)

Key points I learned about squirrel hunting that I never experienced as a seasoned rabbit hunter: Squirrels are very, very sly—they hide when they notice you. Rabbits don't: they just run for their lives, darting at different angles in a jig-saw pattern. Squirrels, secondly, will try to wait-you-out by not moving on the opposite side of a tree limb for as long as 30 minutes; they will stay low among the heavy brush, avoiding open air tree branches. So, the best way to get a squirrel: simply stand motionless near a tree, dressed in camouflage, having a broad vantage point over a large area of trees, and be very patient. You may not see any movement for as long as 30 minutes as you watch large areas of trees for some minor degree of activity. But it pays off, especially when you hear a squirrel “barking” at another squirrel, or 2 squirrels chasing one another. Once you start firing at them, they will usually run from limb-to-limb, making for an easy mid-air shot (very exhilerating!). However, the seasoned, smarter squirrels will simply hide on top of a limb, away from you, hunkered down low & tight to the limb for as long as an hour! In that squirrel's case, I learned to leave the area, stalk a new patch of trees, and then come back to that tree some time later. It works. They sort of have ADD/ADHD and eventually start leaping from limb to limb. I always remember to keep my attention back on those trees after I initially left. It worked every time: I left, kept looking back every 15 minutes, then saw movement begin again, and then I slowly & quietly returned. I took aim...and “BOOM”—hit him with some lead shot. He is de-perched, falls and hits a few limbs during his death decent, lands on the soft grass below with a “thud”, makes a few last moment twitches with his back legs, I pick him up, feel his heart beating and pounding ever so fast in my palm (tachycardia), and then he drifts off to squirrel heaven--a peaceful pecan orchard rich in nuts and devoid of Cajuns. I place him in my back pack and proceed on. The area is quiet for awhile…squirrels are now aware of the peril in their territory. Then I go back to leaning beside a tree, watching and waiting for the next false move in the tree tops above….

It is very, very relaxing to be out in nature, walking, listening to the wild animals and birds (lots of owls, hawks, and other birds). I think having a dog would make it easier to get the squirrels moving, as well as to find them once they hit the ground in the thick brush. Squirrels despise dogs and will often taunt them and "bark" at them.

Squirrels dressed/cleaned

Squirrels ready to be cooked

There is nothing better than fried squirrel! Actually, it tastes a lot like rabbit—a sweet, soft, moist tasting meat that is light pink in color. It does NOT taste like friggin’ chicken (yard bird), which is dry and tasteless and needs various seasonings. Squirrel has a nice, subtle sweet taste like rabbit. I picked a young, small tender one—rolled it in light Organic white flour, and then fried it at 370 degrees in my black iron pot for about 7 minutes (until it floats and is golden, light brown in color). It was Slap Ya Mama, damn good! I admit to adding a light sprinkle of Cajun seasoning and a touch of parsley. I tried some of my own homemade Cajun dipping sauces, since I never ate fried squirrel before. For example, I used yellow mustard mixed with Cajun Tabasco Hot Sauce, as well as Heinz Ketchup infused with Cajun Tabasco Hot Sauce, and finally Jack Millers Barbeque sauce. Honestly, I really did not need any of them. The fried squirrel, with its own natural flavor and the touch of Slap Ya Mama Cajun seasoning (made in Ville Platte, LA), was enough!

I also fried a few other seafood items while the grease was hot: some pieces of fish and shrimp. To that, I added a touch of lemon pepper to the Cajun seasoning and had some tartar sauce for dipping. Very good!

The other cleaned squirrels I have in a zip lock bag in my refrigerator--marinating and tenderizing in a Cajun secret recipe to make the meat less tough and add taste for when you bake, brown or add them to a Cajun Gumbo. Part of the marinade involves Worchester sauce and yellow mustard. I hear that they taste great browned in a black iron pot, along with green onion tops, bell peppers, diced onions and even a little Cajun Smoked Pork sausage (which some of my hunting friends gave me). I plan on baking some in the oven & freezing the rest for future Gumbos.

As we Cajuns say, "Bon Appetite!"

Squirrel and seafood battered in Organic white flour to be fried

Squirrel being fried at 375 degrees in Cajun black iron pot for 7 minutes

Squirrel fried, fresh out of the pot and now seasoned in Cajun spices and herbs!

Fried squirrel and seafood, along with Cajun condiments to dip in!

Cajun squirrel and seafood dinner: Oh, so finger lickin' good!

My dad's commericial fishing boat

2009-11-09T22:29:00.006-05:00

This is my dad's commericial fishing vessel that he had custom built in the mid-1970's. It was used for over 30 years to catch catfish, carp, buffalo fish, gaspergoo, and any other unsuspecting fresh water fish!

It is 22 feet long and has two 90 horsepower Yamaha outboard motors. Our family friend is keeping it on his farm property as a favor until I get it repaired and renovated in the near future. I plan on using it to raise hoop nets to catch a few fish for family and friends--a lot of fun. Something to play with and to get a few fish for some future fish fries!

It's official: my manuscript will be published in Academic Psychiatry!

2009-10-19T18:46:00.008-04:00

I received the congratulatory email today from the journal Academic Psychiatry (see below) that they will publish my manuscript in their next issue! It was my 4th year senior project when I was the Senior Teaching Resident at Harvard, and it describes the curriculum that I created and taught for the residency program to improve their annual psychiatry written board exam scores.

I worked with my residency training director on the statistical analysis of the data that I collected: we had to use parametric statistics to calculate standard deviations, statistical significances, confidence intervals, one-tailed & two-tailed paired t-tests....It was a lot of work. I taught the curriculum in the late Summer of 2008; collected the data and started the analysis in the Spring of 2009. I presented it initially as an Abstract (which was accepted at Harvard), then as a Poster at Harvard Day, and now as a full text manuscript for publication.

So, from start to finish: exactly one year. I could not, however, done it without the academic support from my residency director, as well as the encouragement from my girlfriend to continue on with the long process while I was busy with graduation, moving out of state, and starting my career as a new staff psychiatrist.

HERE IS THE EMAIL FROM ACADEMIC PSYCHIATRY:
Dear Dr. Vautrot, Thank you for revising your manuscript "The Feasibility and Effectiveness of a Pilot Resident-Organized & -Led Knowledge-Based Review." (APPI-AP-09-05-0064.R2‏)

We are pleased to accept this paper for publication in Academic Psychiatry.

We appreciate your interest in Academic Psychiatry. We look forward to seeing this work in print!

Best wishes, H. Jonathan Polan, M.D.Michelle Riba, M.D.Guest Editors, Special Issue "Residents as Teachers"

The Direction of Psychiatry: Our ship is blown-off track

2009-10-17T21:44:00.016-04:00

Are psychiatrists being marginalized into becoming pill pushers?

This is the direction of psychiatry that I am both witnessing and experiencing now as a staff psychiatrist in the state of our current healthcare system.

Well, it seems that our profession (the specialty of Psychiatry) will be relegated to a 15 minute med check office visit with 10 minutes of documentation in each of the 30 minute patient encounters. This goes against what I was trained at Harvard to be and practice, which is a doctor with enough office time to understand the patient as a person, to explore the etiology of their suffering, and to provide enough time for empathic validation and brief, targeted supportive psychotherapy to address their concern. It's really not feasible to do this in 30 minute blocks of time. It’s a conveyor belt of patients—one poor soul rolling in after the other. I really feel that one can’t do anything substantive & enduring for them from a psychodynamic perspective to address their psychic issues and conflicts. As a medical doctor, a specialist in psychiatry, I prescribe pills for their problems. Pills are not the panacea. I know from my training that they provide little/minimal impact upon the pathology. Heck, I’ve seen the studies at Harvard where oftentimes placebo pills were superior to the drugs! How? We reasoned in our Grand Rounds and resident meetings that there is a strong impact from the therapeutic relationship with one’s doctor, being on a structured ward, having someone listen to you, etc.

Is this the direction of psychiatry? Have we lost our roots in exploring intrapsychic conflicts; are we moving further and further away from Freud and Engel?

Prozac now trumps Freud.

Now it is all about medications. Many psychiatrists are no longer doing psychotherapy; we are abandoning it to the psychologists and social workers. Yet, so many of us recent graduates received 3 years of full-time training in psychotherapy during our 4 years of residency. I have noticed now that at each office visit, there is ALWAYS a change, a tweak, in the patient’s medication. Why? Because I always see a patient that continues to have pathology with this form of mental health care delivery model. Evidently, pills are not the only answer. That is why there is still pathos, still suffering; a patient still symptomatic, still anxious, still depressed, still can’t sleep. This model—pill pushing by the psychiatrists and physician assistants, and psychotherapy by the social workers and psychologists, is not an effective approach. I see it 12 times per day in my office, 5 days per week = 60 patients who are short-changed by a health care system that is more interested in costs than in people’s mental health.

Dr. Glen Gabbard, who I met at Harvard in 2008 when I was in my last year of residency training, wrote an article this past month about “Deconstructing the 15 minute med check.” He states that we can’t parse treatment into a psychological dimension and a biological dimension. The “mind” and the “brain” are not separate and don’t require different treatments. We can’t lose the biopsychosocial spirit of psychiatry.

Dr. William Osler noted that “It is more important to know the person that has the disease, not the disease that the person has.” Mental life cannot be explained in terms of physiology, and our choices should not be fixed and determined by the laws of chemistry. Patients are not likely to buy into the same conceptual model that the treaters are trying to impose on them. Patients don’t show up at their doctor’s appointments to limit the content of their appointment to the side effects or therapeutic effects of their medication. Psychiatry has made far too much of a distinction between psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy. Psychotherapuetic skills are needed in every context in psychiatry. All clinical work in psychotherapy depends on attending to the therapeutic relationship. According to the NIMH (National Institutes of Mental Health) Treatment of Depression Collaborative Research Program: “The strength of the therapeutic alliance accounts for an equal, if not greater, impact upon outcome (response and/or remission) than the treatment method itself. “(J Consult Clin Psychol. 1996; 64: 532-539).

Psychotherapy is a biological treatment, and knowledge of neuroscience should be brought to bear in understanding the psychotherapeutic action of psychotherapy.

Psychiatry must retain a biopsychosocial perspective to treat the whole person.

The bottom line is this: There is a problem inherent in the division of mental health care delivery into psychiatrists providing pharmacotherapy and non-psychiatrists (social workers, psychologists) providing psychotherapy.

Turkey Creek Cemetary

2009-10-11T21:38:00.003-04:00

My mom and I located Turkey Creek Cemetary this weekend, which is where my grandmother "Mimi" (Hermence Vidrine) is buried. The location is off Interstate 49; exit 46 Ville Platte; follow it down to highway LA 13, turn right at the intersection where Tom's fried chicken is located. Continue down the highway into the town of Turkey Creek. At the end is an Exxon station, take a right, then an immediate slight left onto Cemetary Road. The cemetary is then on the left.

The weather was stark that day. She is buried with her last husband, my step-grandfather, Luther Fontenot.

Rest in Eternal Peace, Mimi....

The Return to Mallard Bay: Gueydan, Louisiana

2009-09-26T21:52:00.002-04:00

Fishing for Bass and Red fish in the brackish waters off Grand Lake in Cameron Parish with long-time friend Louis Turner. Here, at our Mallard Bay Hunting and Fishing Camp, we took his tunnel-drive boat out and threw a few casts out along the edges of our marsh and bayous.

There were several alligators in the water--patrolling their territories, eyeing us as we trolled by. The next morning, however, they were in for a Cajun wake-up call by our alligator hunters...but that story is on a different post!

Hunting Alligators in Mallard Bay

2009-09-25T22:13:00.003-04:00

Here are two adult alligators: hunted by some local Cajuns that are members of our lease. They were accompanied by some boys from Mississippi that travelled all the way to South Louisiana to see how we do it! As you know, there is a season for legally cultivating alligators, with limits, too, on how many one may harvest. Furthermore, their breeding nests are protected by the Louisiana Dept. of Wildlife and Fisheries. Consequently, their numbers have boomed in recent decades.

In regards to how we hunt them: it is quite simple. A large wooden pole is inserted at a 45 degree angle deep into the bank of the bayou or marsh. Attached at the end is a strong rope with a treble hook (3-pronged hook). One can place a dead bird or any other piece of smelly meat. The rope and hook is hung about one foot above the water. At night, the alligators swim along the waterways, smell the meat, and leap out of the water to grab the bait, and they swallow the hook. Well, they are then attached to the rope, too, whose other end is tied tightly around a tree on the bank (the large wooden pole only functioned as a leverage to dangle the meat above the water). Then, on the next morning, you travel in your boat looking to see if there are any ropes in the water (no longer dangling above the water). With stoic confidence, one then slowly drives up to the rope, reaches into the water, pulls on the rope. At that point, the alligator, which is hiding on the bayou bottom surface, then struggles and tries to get away...but it is hooked. So, one has to keep pulling with all of their might to bring it up to the surface. At that point, your Cajun compatriot fires several .22 caliber rounds into its head. The effect is immediate, but not always complete. Once you pull in the several hundred pound, 5-10 foot long gator into your boat, there is OFTENTIMES a flurry of rebound, automatic spinning and twisting by the gator in the boat. At that time, it is not uncommon to see the hunters then deliver a few final head blows with blunt objects.

The alligator skin is sold to craft belts, boots, etc. The meat is also sold for consumption. By the way, it is a very clean, white meat...not like chicken or fish. It is very unique and has a sweet taste to it.

Duck hunting at the Mallard Bay Hunting Club

2009-09-24T22:28:00.004-04:00

Here are a few daily bag limits (4 Teal ducks per hunter per day) of Teal. Teal are a species of small ducks; there are several variations-- Green wings, Blue wings, etc. They fly quite fast in their flocks, which come down low from the sky and dip and dive, twist and turn, and are very difficult to hit with your steel shot. A very fun duck to hunt, indeed! It is not uncommon to see flocks of 12 to 50 of them. I can remember as a young boy seeing flocks that could have easily has 75 to 100 of them swarming down from the clouds, being called down by our duck calls as we hid in our blinds, and landing in our ponds. Then, all at once, in unison, we stood up from our crouched position and unloaded a volley of steel shot into the flock. Then we set the Labradors and Golden Retrievers loose to fetch and deliver the dead and wounded to us. The ones still alive and swimming away with broken wings were pursued by us in the marsh as we wore our chest waders. One could hear a few lone shots as the wounded would then try to fly away from their pursuers, only to be handed one final, fatal, resolute shot to bring them down. The retrievers always relished in grabbing them afterwards. Team work that is as ancient and historical as the relationship between some caveman and a wolf-like dog that he tossed a bone to from his camp fire 10,000 years ago. Man's best friend.

In the above pics: Louis Turner in his "mud boat", which can traverse the shallow waters of our marsh. Mud boats are a novel Cajun vehicle: they have powerful car engines to propel them through the weeds, mud, and water Lilies, and can seat about 4hunters and two hunting dogs. Destination: the duck blinds and ponds. Seen above, is Cane...Brian Burford's 2 year-old Yellow Labroadore retriever. He is a gentle, playful, and excellent hunting dog!

Cooking the ducks Cajun style

2009-09-23T21:20:00.002-04:00

Here are some of the current members of our hunting club. We stuffed each of the Teal ducks with a link of deer sausage (venison); they were then pot-roasted for several hours in a dark roux, seasoned with Cajun spices, mushrooms, peppers. And, the gizzards and hearts were cooked into the gravy. Brian ("Hacksaw") Burford was the cook; Louis Turner made a pot of delicious black eye beans with Jalapeno peppers. The ducks and gravy were served over moist, white rice; we also had fresh French bread.

Also seen in the pics above is Robert Sistrunk.

Having a Good Ole' Time at our Camp

2009-09-22T10:28:00.004-04:00

Here are some pics of a couple of us Coon Asses from South Louisiana and some Red Necks from North Louisiana:

I am frying some Catfish & Red fish on the porch of our hunting camp, which is erected on the edge of a bayou. The porch is elevated above the water edge below.

Here are a few pics of me and Louis Turner--one of my best friends. He flew up from Houston to my graduation in Boston from Harvard in June 2009. He is a member of the Mallard Bay Hunting Club.

Here are a few pics of the outside of the camp. Brian Burford, a firefighter/EMT and friend of mine from Stonewall, Louisiana, is sitting on the porch of the camp with some of his buddies from the fire department.

Here are a few pics of the "Mud Boats" which we use to get us into the marsh for hunting ducks--these vehicles are capable of traversing in very low levels of water (less than a foot); they are equipped with powerful car engines. The steering is not done by a steering wheel, however, but by a long shaft pole: pushing it forward steers to the right, while pulling the pole back will steer it to the left. There is a lever that you have to push up to propel the Mud boat forward, and pull the lever down to drive the boat into reverse. Sometimes the water is very low, and they get stuck in the mud; then we (and the hunting dogs) have to leap out of the boat into the marsh and push & pry the heavy beast out of the mud until it sits in deeper water. This is a pain in the butt--because you are wearing heavy waders, sinking into the mooshy, sticky mud bottom below, and your feet get stuck in the mud. But, with a concerted team effort, we get the Mud boat unstuck, climb back into it, and charge forward. The driver drops the hunters off at each Duck Blind, where they then climb inside the camouflaged dwelling. The duck hunters then patiently wait for flocks of ducks to swarm by, and we also call them with our duck calls, and lure them down from the sky with displays of decoy ducks. Our hunting dogs stand motionless on the edge of the pond, eager for the ducks to get shot in the air and fall in some distant location, and then they rush off to go and retrieve them. They love it, and love the praise that we give them upon return with the duck lying limp & lifeless from their mouths, tails wagging. Our only fear is snakes: water moccasins sometimes bite our hunting dogs on the shoulders or neck. I have had a few of my dogs bitten in my lifetime, but they have all survived--ending up with swollen necks for a few days, lethargic, and sick; but, they recover. We shoot all the water moccasins we encounter in the marsh.

Post-Residency Career!

2009-06-13T18:05:00.021-04:00

Imagine working in a setting with expansive green lawns, beautiful and ancient Oak trees, and warm, sunny weather; and the staff have that good ole' Southern hospitality! It is reminiscent of Antebellum times....

Well, I realized early in my residency training that a job in the Veterans Affairs family would be a wise career choice after graduation. Firstly, as residents in the Harvard South Shore residency training program, we all do so very much of our clinical training in VA hospitals throughout VISN 1 (Veterans Integrated Systems Network), which covers a large region of the Northeast: 6 of the New England states. VA New England Healthcare System covers an area with a total veteran population of approximately 1.3 million. VISN 1 employs approximately 10,000 staff. In addition, numerous clinical and administrative trainees assist them in providing care and services. Annually VA NEHS treats more than 240,000 veterans. Each year approximately 2.5 million outpatient visits occur at Medical Centers and community based outpatient clinics throughout the VA New England Healthcare System. So, I already have familiarity with the VA system, its user-friendly computer charting record, as well as the patient population. And, it is so rewarding & fulfilling to serve our nation's noble, courageous veterans!

I am the only graduating resident among my classmates to choose working for the VA/Federal government post-graduation. Moreover, the winds of economic change suggest that private sector jobs and hospitals are at great risk for continued losses in growth and closure, respectively. On the other hand, under the current administration, government-based careers are more secure and actually increased in number of jobs and rate of growth this year. The VA may not offer the highest salaries, but that is more than compensated for by its long-term benefits: excellent healthcare coverage and retirement program for its employees and their families; 10 paid Federal holidays per year; 13 paid sick leave days per year (which add-up year after year if not used), and 26 paid vacation days per year. That is 49 paid days off. Moreover, in the VA, a doctor does not have to buy his own malpractice insurance every year (which saves ~$5,000 each year), and he can not be directly sued by patients (Tort protection). Moreover, my unused sick leave days that I have accumulated from 4 years of residency training in the VA system will actually carry-over into my career as a staff attending; and, I also have 4 years towards my Service Computation Date (SCD).

After interviewing at several VA facilities throughout Louisiana in VISN 16, I accepted a wonderful position in the Alexandria VA facility (#502). VISN 16 covers a vast area of 170,000 square miles, serving >90,000 registered veterans in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and parts of Texas, Missouri, Alabama and Florida. There are 26,000 active veterans that are on the patient roster for the Alexandria VA. I am very excited about joining this VA family because my position will be as a Section Chief of their Mental Hygiene Clinic, working with 4 staff attending psychiatrists and 5 physician assistants. We have affiliations with 2 medical schools: both Louisiana State University School of Medicine and Tulane University School of Medicine. So, there are wonderful teaching opportunities--something that I have always been very enthusiastic about. More important than its beautiful campus (vast green lawns with huge, ancient, expansive Oak trees) is the staff camaraderie! This was the selling point for me. I met a lot of staff that day during my interview, and everyone was so very friendly and welcoming--people greet you in the hallways, elevators, on the sidewalk--all with genuine, kind statements and broad smiles. It is like a family; and everyone certainly shares the same vision--to serve the veterans in the area communities with the best possible care and attitude.

In regards to my typical work day--it will be 8am-4pm, with one, full hour for lunch. I will have both clinical and administrative duties as the Section Chief. For example, in addition to seeing my own patients assigned to me, I will be responsible for supervising the cases of the Physician Assistants.

If I would like to work more than the 8-to-4PM job, I found a lot of moonlighting opportunities--for example, there happens to be a state psychiatric hospital in the same city & it is in need of psychiatrists to care for their patients! Furthermore, there is a state college in the city that has a huge gym (pool, exercise rooms, track, etc) that one can use for a nominal monthly fee.

Lastly, the VA can even help pay-off one's medical school debt! Their EDRP (Educational Debt Reduction Program) pays towards your medical school debt if your education was in the field of your current service for the VA...and mine certainly was!

So, I feel very blessed and fortunate to not only have my medical school debt paid off, but also to have a great salary in a field of work that I genuinely enjoy. "If you love what you do, then you never work a single day of your life."

Harvard Diploma

2009-05-24T21:28:00.003-04:00

Here are some pictures of me with my framed residency training diploma from Harvard...picture taken inside my mom's parlor in Lafayette, LA.

Sold my home!

2009-05-23T15:33:00.002-04:00

I placed my house on the market to sell on May 1st; I had a signed contract a few days later on May 8th. Now it is time to return to Dixie!

Graduation Ceremony

2009-05-22T13:48:00.003-04:00

The event was held at the Harvard Club in Boston, MA on June 21, 2009.

I was awarded a special certificate, in addition to my graduation diploma, for being The Senior Teaching Resident at Harvard.

It was a very nice, special occasion shared with me by my friends and family who came-up from Louisiana.

Here are some photographs of the 4th year graduating psychiatry residents from the Harvard South Shore Psychiatry Residency Training Program.

Pictured with the two, new Chief Residents--good friends of mine & great champions for our training program.

Harvard team scores big: APA Mind Games competetion!

2009-05-18T21:24:00.005-04:00

We, at Harvard South Shore psychiatry residency training program, created a team to compete in a national, on-line competition with other psychiatry residency programs across the United States. (There are approximately 93 psychiatry residency programs across America.) The rules for the competition: each residency program must select 3 of their top residents (our program has about 32 residents) to form a team to take a 150 question test, time-limited to 60 minutes, on-line, multiple choice. Psychiatry residency teams from around the nation take the same test. The team with the most correct answers in the shortest amount of time, wins. Well, our program selected me, Syeda, and Lance as its representatives for this athletic mental event! Lo and behold, we scored in the Top 10 in the United States! Our residency training director was thrilled and surprised, as our program has never formed a team before or competed nationally for this event (sponsored by the American Psychiatry Association). It is called the APA Mind Games. It was a lot of fun taking it together; each of us prepared quite strategically for it with at home study sessions and reviews. We are simply trying to make our residency program proud and to help it shine for the pearl that it truly is!

Harvard MySell Poster presentation

2009-05-18T21:05:00.003-04:00

In April 2009, several of us in our psychiatry residency program at Harvard made posters to present in Boston at the annual Harvard MySell Day. Our posters represent a project that we each had worked on during that year of our psychiatry training. Most of our posters represented some aspect of a research project or other area of interest. About 10 of the 32 Harvard residents in our program presented. Since I am the Senior Teaching Resident in our program, my poster's focus was on an educational intervention that I created to enhance general knowledge in psychiatry as well as improve our nationalized board scores. The intervention is a curriculum that I developed which covers many subtopics of psychiatry, and the vehicle for delivery of this curriculum is a marriage of both didactic and game show formats. Each week, I provided a 2 hour course: the 1st hour I taught via lecture from a Power Point presentation and dry erase white board; the second hour, however, was via a video-projected question & answer test whereby teams of residents competed to answer the questions. After each question, the answer was displayed on the large screen, and all of the residents could discuss that topic. Well, I passed-out surveys during the course as a research tool; the feedback was very, very positive. Secondly, our board scores improved in many of the areas that were covered from these lectures, but some did not, too, in all frankness. Nonetheless, it is a novel intervention and an interesting endeavor for presenting for Harvard University.

New toy...a 2009 LEXUS GX 470

2009-05-17T22:01:00.009-04:00

2009 Lexus 470 GX.
March 2009.
Paid-in-full same day at dealership. No lease. No financing.
Nice to own after 4 years of medical school followed by 4 years of residency training with concurrent "moonlighting" at the state hospital prison.
Broken-in. Roomy.
Great for road trips, too (recent trip to Quebec, Canada again).

The "Final Stretch:" graduation is coming!

2009-01-08T17:24:00.007-05:00

Now that it is January, I am half-way complete with my 4th and final year of training in psychiatry. I am still moonlighting at a local prison hospital during some weekdays and on some weekends, and I am still working daily at the VAMC in Brockton, MA. My duties as a senior 4th year resident include mentoring, supervising and teaching PGY-I and II residents. Moreover, one of my curriculum that I launched last year is still on-going: the Residents As Psychiatry Teachers course, which is designed to teach senior residents how to teach junior doctors.

Most of the senior residents are actively pursuing the next step: one has been awarded a fellowship in psychosomatic psychiatry; but most want to either go into private practice. I, however, will very likely continue to work for the Federal Government via the Veterans Affairs Medical Centers. I truly enjoy working with our nation's veterans: those that have served in prior conflicts (World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm) and current, on-going wars (OIF and OEF in Iraq and Afghanistan). The VA offers stellar benefits to its employees (medical care, no need to have liability insurance, no need to have more than one Full, Active license, plenty of paid sick and vacation days, the best on-line computer system in the world, and a competitive salary with fair-market pay, too). Moreover, like I said, one has a nice feeling of helping those that help us maintain our safety and freedom here in America.

I still long to return to my homestate of Louisiana, too. I would like to continue to work for the VA and treating our veterans, and I will also like to continue to practice Correctional Psychiatry and work at a state prison. State jobs also offer very nice packages, and there is also a sense of satisfaction for treating inmates who struggle with mental illness. Patient inmates are a very neglected population, but with terrific need for care! And very few psychiatrists practice in the Correctional System, unfortunately.

Pictured below are a few photographs taken inside the Brockton VA, not too far from our administrative offices.

Here is a nice photograph of the outside of the front entrance for the Brockton VA:

Hanging out with the psych. residents

2009-01-08T17:15:00.004-05:00

Here are some of my colleagues here at Harvard South Shore. We were at one of thier apartments, and each of us brought a dish to the event. It was a nice time to hang-out together outside of work and relax!

Fall 2008: pics of my home in Taunton, MA

2009-01-08T13:38:00.006-05:00

Here are some uploaded photos taken of my home in Taunton, MA this past October 2008. I intend on selling this home in the summer of 2009 after the completion of my residency training here at Harvard South Shore in Brockton, MA.

More details of my home and pictures are located on: http://www.zillow.com/profile/drvautrot

Bridgewater State Hospital Prison

2009-01-07T17:47:00.005-05:00

I continue to "moonlight" at Bridgewater State Hospital. I began employment at Bridgewater State Hospital Prison (a state medium security prison), with emphasis on acute homicide/suicide risk assessments, comprehensive psychiatric evaluations, and initiating pharmacotherapy for the patients, who are also inmates. I cover the new admissions section of the prison, where people are delivered from local jails and prisons; and, I cover the 14 room Intensive Treatment Unit. The ITU is the most restrictive and behaviorally intensive unit in the entire prison facility—it is reserved for the highest risk (to self and/or others) patient inmates.

Here is a photograph that was available on the web of the ITU:

Here, also available on the web, is a photograph of the outside of BSH:

Vautrot Family History

2008-12-03T15:47:00.007-05:00

Antique photograph of large collection of cotton.

The Vautrot family is of old Huguenot stock, and was founded in America on July 09, 1834 by Francois Vautrot when he arrived in New York City aboard the ship Libertas from Havre de Grace, France with his wife Marie Moyeaux and their five children: Francois Joseph, Joseph Jules, Sophie Catherine, Gustave Emile Stanislaus, and Pierre Alphonse.

Upon reaching America, he went to the French settlement at Mead's Corners in Crawford County, Pennsylvania, where he bought land and established his home and followed farming. Two of his sons had come to the US prior to his arrival, one (Francois Joseph Vautrot) going to Opelousas, LA, where he married a southern woman (Amelia Burleigh Johnson), became a large slave holder and ardenlty espoused the cause of the South when war was declared in April 1861. The other son settled at Mobile, Alabama, where he became editor of the Mobile Advertiser and Register, which is still being published. This American ancestor of the Vautrot family (Joseph Jules) lived the remainder of this active days in Crawford County, PA, and then moved to Warren, Ohio where he died and is buried (he married Rosalie Gaudilott). Their descendants still reside in Warren, Ohio. In fact, there is a Vautrot and Myers, Inc jewelers shop there. Joseph Jules Senior and his wife had a son: thier son, Jules Vautrot, Jr served in the 84th Ohio Volunteer Infantry during the US Civil War (for the Union!); he battled throughout the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. After receiving his honorable discharge he returned to Warren, OH and to school in 1863. Jules Jr. married Frances Richards (maiden name).

So, by the way, who were the Huguenots?
The Huguenots were members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France (or French Calvinists) from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Above all, Huguenots became known for their violent criticisms of worship as performed in the Catholic Church, in particular the focus on ritual and what they viewed as an obsession with death and the dead. They believed the ritual, images, saints, pilgrimages, prayers, and hierarchy of the Catholic Church did not help anyone toward redemption. They saw Christian faith as something to be expressed in a strict and godly life, in obedience to Biblical laws, out of gratitude for God's mercy. The members of the Protestant religion in France, the Huguenots, had been granted the right to worship in their faith by Henry IV, and had remained unmolested during the reign of his successor, Louis XIII. But the next king, Louis XIV, revoked Henry IV's Edict of Toleration in 1685, forbidding Protestants to worship publicly along with other harsh sanctions against them. The penalties for preaching or attending a Protestant assembly were severe: life terms in the galleys for men, imprisonment for women, and confiscation of all property were common. Protestantism continued to be suppressed in France until the end of the reign of Louis XIV. Paul Revere was descended from Huguenot refugees, as were Henry Laurens who signed the Declaration of Independence for South Carolina, Alexander Hamilton, and a number of other leaders of the American Revolution.

A CIVIL WAR LAW SUIT: Heirs of Francois Vautrot versus The United States

Francois J. Vautrot (FJV) emigrated to America in 1839, after military service probably in his native France. His family, including five younger siblings, had made the trip from Lorraine, France, to New York and then to Crawford County, PA, five years previously in 1834. His brother, Jules, became a naturalized citizen in Lafayette, LA and Francois settled in St. Landry parish in 1840. There, he married a landed widow, Amelia Burleigh Johnson, and became a planter. They had one son, Louis Francois Vautrot, born in 1849, who became the progenitor of the Vautrot family in Southwest Louisiana. FJV saw his produce and livestock, including cotton, confiscated by General Banks' troops during the Civil War (1861-1865). After the Civil War, he emigrated again, to Brazil with some Confederados (the name bestowed on Confederate sympathizers who left the South after the Civil War seeking a more compatible political atmosphere), but returned circa 1871. The date of his death is not documented, but his former slave testified that he was buried "under a tree" on his farm. Information given here is from a lawsuit filed by his grandchildren, seeking payment for Federal Army takings. Records were obtained from the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C.

Claims of property loss to the Federal troops traversing the St. Landry area in 1863 were common and extensive, but FJV's claim was unique in that it was initiated in 1910, long after his death, on behalf of his eleven grandchildren, by Francois Joseph Vautrot II and Louis Vautrot, two of the eleven. Mr. Vautrot was a French citizen who spoke little English, who, along with his family, took no part in the Civil War. For this reason, he could not be branded as a Confederate sympathizer, unless proven by the Government defending the case. Testimony as to his lack of U.S. citizenship was provided by three former slaves, and one neighbors' son, who also gave their estimate of the lossess suffered by Mr. Vautrot. The same four persons testified that in October 1863 Federal troops confiscated FJV's property consisting of livestock, produce, and cotton. The Treasury Department, in response to a query from the Court of Claims where the suit was prosecuted, documented receipts given FJV for 2000 pounds of cotton, as well as 150 bushels of corn; 1800 pounds of fodder, and 5 head of cattle. In another letter, the Treasury also stated that no records of cotton taken from Mr. Vautrot were found on investigation. Finally, inquires were made to the Treasursy Department, the War Department, and the affiants in this case as to the loyalty (or disloyalty) to the United States of FJV, and no adverse findings were reported. Following are the details of the claim against the federal government, initiated by the heirs of Francois Vautrot, seeking compensation for their grandfather's losses to General Banks' Army in October 1863.

Antique photograph of a horse and plow, with 4 old men posing aside it.

The earliest documents are from Feb 18, 1909, two of them attest to the power of attorney, and the right to represent heirs of FJV, of Raleigh Sherman. The other is an affidavit of Stanley Laws, former slave of FJV, then a farmer in Nutleyville, LA. In this, the first of two affidavits, he was deposed by attorney Sherman. He gave rather specific numbers and values to the takings of the Federal Army of General Nathaniel Banks, including 80 bales of cotton weighing about 450 lbs each, 2000 barrels of corn in the shucks valued at 50 cents each, five American mules and five horses at $150 each, six milk cows at $50 each, and three beeves at $25 each. He dated the takings to October 1863. This short, specific statement, hand written by Notary Arthur Simon, clearly appears to be in the idiom of the recorder. This impression is confirmed by the original affidavit of the former slave of FJV, Charles Thomas, and that of William Henry, former slave of FJV's neighbor, Francois Coulon de Villiers. This was a single page, almost identical to the Laws deposition, signed "X" by both men. The only real difference is that the Henry's and Thomas' depositions add that FJV disapproved of secession and took no part in the war. The second affidavit of all three men, taken Dec. 10, 1910, is typewritten in Q and A form. It attempts to reproduce the proceedings verbatim, and is much longer but less specific as to numbers than the first ones. Lawyers for the US and for Vautrot's estate both participated in the second affidavits.

The claim was initiated in the US Senate by Senator Murphy Foster as Senate Bill S.5511, on January 26, 1910, to compensate "the estate of Francois Joseph Vautrot, deceased, the sum of $19,000" for property appropriated during the Civil War. It was then referred to the Committee on Claims. The petition in the court of Claims was labeled No 14877 Congressional. It sought to recover $3,875 for produce and animals noted above, and an additional $16,000 for cotton taken.

The Treasury Dept. auditor produced five records of takings from FJV by five different Union Officers, one of which were for cotton. The letter suggested that vouchers for purchases and receipts for seizures should be in the possession of claimants, or that vouchers may have been paid "at some remote place."

Charles Thomas' affidavit disclosed that he was a slave born in Virginia who was sold to FJV when he was 14 years old. At the time of his testimony he was farming on "his own place" at Armide, LA. During the Civil War, when he was about 18 years old, General Banks' Army visited FJV's estate. They apparently did not take any of Vautrot's property at that time, and as a result of this visit, the slaves were promised a share of the coming crop if they stayed, but were free to leave if they wished. While Thomas suggested that most of the slaves remained with FJV, the affidavit of Villers de Villiers, the son of FJV's neighbor, stated that most of the slaves left with the Federal Army. Thomas testified that the slaves never received anything for their work on the crops confiscated by the Federals. He gave the location of FJV's farm as "5 or 6 miles west of Barre's Landing." And the amount of cultivated land as "150-160 acres," 25 acres of which were cleared and planted during the war. The cotton was ginned at a "horse gin" on FJV's property. Banks' Army left "maybe 40-50 barrels" of corn which FJV divided with the slaves.

U.S. Civil War Union General Nathaniel Banks. After Nathaniel Prentice Banks' Union Army had outmaneuvered Richard Taylor's Confederate Army of Western Louisiana out from the Bayou Teche region, he continued his movements towards his main objective of Alexandria, Louisiana. The Confederates were trying to slow him down as much as they could.

Stanley Laws likewise was a slave of Mr. Vautrot, as were his father and uncles, and at the time of his testimony, he was a farmer at Armide, LA, and was 62 years old. He gave a rather detailed description of the stock and crops taken by the "Yankee Army." In response to questions as to the number of slaves on the Vautrot property, he estimated "about 9 or 10 women, ten men, and some children." The remainder of his testimony was consistent with that of Mr. Thomas. It is of interest that in his original affidavit in 1909, he signed his name by X—his mark, but a year later, signed his name legibly to his second affidavit. William Henry, the 71 year old former slave of FJV's neighbor was also a farmer near Armide, LA. His testimony was supportive of the two previous affiants, stating that Banks' Army took 70-80 bales of cotton recently ginned by Vautrot's slaves. His estimate of the number of slaves working for Vautrot was about 15, plowing 4-5 double teams.

The final witness supporting FJV's claim was Villiers de Villiers, a 68 year-old commercial traveler, who grew up on the farm adjacent to the Vautrot's. He confirmed that the community where they lived was called Nutleyville, on Bayou Teche, "about 8 miles south of Opelousas, 3 miles from Leonville." Mr. de Villiers was questioned about Mr. Vautrot' citizenship, political leanings, age, and attitude toward slavery and secession. His responses indicated that Francois Joseph Vautrot was a French citizen, non-political, favoring slavery, and against secession. He also believed that the Federals had taken Vautrot's property, but didn't know the specific amounts.

The remainder of the documents include interdepartmental requests for information on:
1. FJV's loyalty, cotton purchase or seizure, citizenship, and any other "relevant" information;
2. Louis Vautrot, Administrator of the estate, signed appointment of I.M Moyers and C.F. Consaul, of Washington, D.C., to prosecute their case on November 1, 1911;
3. and, Deed of sale of land on Bayou Teche from Sarah Lee to Francois Vautrot on October 17, 1853, comprising 296 arpents (about 250 acres).

Although there is no explicit denial of the Vautrot claim in the records, it is likely that the document from the War Department auditor replying to the request of the Treasury Dept. for information was regarded as a rejection of the claim. That the Court of Claims inquiries produced no information on the seizure of FJV's cotton is most interesting. According to Ludwell Johnson, General Banks shared an avid interest in cotton with military personnel, but was probably not himself attempting to profit from the frenetic trade going on about him, unlike the Union and Confederate governments, speculators and hustlers of every stripe. Thus, it is not surprising that no paper trail was found to trace FJV's cotton.

It is remarkable not only that the suit was filed almost 50 years after the incident, but also that four persons with first hand knowledge of the facts came forwards to testify. Most notable is the fact that 3 former slaves, all still farming (but now as free men) volunteered testimony favorable to Vautrot, without apparent ill feelings toward their former master.
Bibliography:
Passenger list. Port of New York. Ship Albany, Havre to New York, 14 January 1839.
Passenger list. Port of New York. Ship Liberates, Havre to New York, 9 July 1834.
Immigration File of Southwest Louisiana (Naturalization Records) T Ct. Hse., 1840-1929, p. 158.
St. Landry Parish Marriages. P 209.
Carl A Brasseaux "the Brazil Exiles: A Forgotten Chapter in the History of St. Landry Parish."
"Heirs of Francois Joseph Vautrot vs. the United States." No 14877 Congressional Records.
David Edmonds. Yankee: Autumn in Acadiana. Acadiana Press, p 217.
_______________________________________________________
The text below is copied verbatim from a geneology website
regarding persons pursuing information on the Vautrot lineage.
It is back-in-forth communications between various people, not written by me:

Francois Louis Vautrot, Letter, 1867 October 20. 2 items. Location: Misc.:V. Confederate refugee, apparently from Opelousas, Louisiana. Letter written from Pernambuco Province, Brazil, describes conditions, attitudes, and difficulties in adjustment. Vautrot refers to the introduction of African American voting in Louisiana. Included is an issue of Le Courier des Opelousas. For more information, see online catalog. Mss. 3153.

My grandmother was Marie Verna Vautrot Richard (1883-1945), the daughter of Francois Louis Vautrot born 1848 in Grand Coteau. My mother said (and this does confuse me) they came to America from Portugal but did not understand the conflict of the Civil War, so they left and went to Brazil; there they found the same type of war. There is a letter in the LSU historical Archives from Francois Louis Vautrot to the Government of LA asking for an explanation of why there was so much conflict over the "right to vote." He called the war an "abomination." He was Portuguese because there was a trunk in a storage house at my uncle Ben Richard's that contained his books and letters printed in Portuguese. Some of the letters to my grandmother were written in French. He seemed to be well educated and evidently spoke both French and Portuguese because my grandmother Verna spoke no English, only French.

I am researching the original Francois who I believe came to America in 1839 on ship Albany, thence to Opelousas. He went with family to Brazil in 1867(after the Yankees had taken his property during the Civil War), from where he wrote a letter back to Opelousas (I have a copy) which is in the Special Collection at Hill Memorial Library at LSU. I have no clue on any Portuguese relation of any Vautrots- I would love to know of any documentation of his Portuguese connection. I would be glad to share the other info on Vautrots I have- my grandmother was the daughter of Louis Phillipe, younger brother of Francois-and to have any other info you have. Herb Dyer

Today I realized that the reason that your family thought that Francois and his son Louis might have been Portuguese is that they went to Brazil where the language is Portuguese (not Spanish, like the rest of South America). They were French(Francois) or American(Louis) born. I am writing a bio of Francois and would very much like to see any letters of theirs.

It was not Spain; it was Portugal, then the U.S., then they went to Brazil for a while or until after the civil war then back to U.S. There is a letter in the historical archives of Louisiana --LSU archives--that backs this story my mother told me. Her mother was Marie Verna Vautrot married to Alexander Richard. My great grandfather's name Francois Louise Vautrot --I do not know what his father's name was but his father is the one born in Portugal he was born in Church Point 1849.

Lloyd
I am researching Francois Vautrot who married Amelia Burleigh. I think he came from France in 1834 on ship Albany. He went to Brazil in 1867 with son Louis and wife. Louis and mother (and Francois?) returned in 1871. Francois was elder brother to my great grandfather Louis Phillipe (I have his birth certificate from Annette Lynch. I recently met Frank and his dad Jude in Church Point- they showed me Louis'(son of Francois) grave- the inscription is Louis Vautrot!
Herb Dyer

Jude Vautrot tells me that he and my father (Henry Gabriel Vautrot, Jr) are second cousins. Jude’s father was Francis Percy (“Uncle Pack”). Francis Percy’s father was Francis Joseph II, who is Jude Vautrot’s grandfather; he died at age 46 of a stroke in Church Point, LA.

My father’s (H.G. Vautrot Jr.) dad’s name was Henry Gabriel Vautrot (my grandfather). He was a resident of Church Point. He was known as “Uncle Gabe.” He was a very active town member: owned a lumber mill, owned the first Ford Motor Company car dealership in town, and was head of the school board. In fact, when he passed away in 1947 from a heart attack while brushing his teeth in the bathroom one morning, all the schools closed down in Church Point when he was buried.

Well, Henry Gabriel Vautrot (who married Dorothy Matthews, my paternal grandmother) and Francis Joseph Vautrot II were brothers: my dad’s dad and Jude’s grandfather. Francis Joseph Vautrot married Agnes Gardiner in 1897.

There were quite a few male sibling Vautrots: Aside from Francis Joseph II and Henry Gabriel, there were William Leslie Vautrot (USMC, 1917), Georges Preston Vautrot, Philippe Vautrot, and Louis′ Vautrot (6 males); moreover, there were several female Vautrots: Marie Verna, Marie Amelia, Mary Mabel, Philomene Matilda, and Marie Arthemise (5 females).

He tells me that Preston Vautrot (“Uncle Tot”) was a very nice man, yet he did rob a bank and served prison time in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas--a Federal prison. When he came out, he was in his late 50’s or early 60’s and got married for the 1st and only time in his life when he was in his 60’s. After serving time in Fort Leavenworth prison, he worked as an engineer on a dredge boat, and he made a lot of financial investments in Evangeline Downs race track in Lafayette, LA when it was being developed. He died of a heart attack in Lafayette.

Mathilda Vautrot (“Aunt Tildy”) did marry Henry Lee Simon; they lived in Branch, LA.

Marie Amelia Vautrot married Louis B. Arceneaux (a doctor) in Church Point.

Mabel Vautrot married Joseph Daigle in 1918.

Marie Verna Vautrot married Alexander Richard in Church Point.

Cousin Jude is 1st cousins with Carol Ann Dingley. Joseph Erroll Vautrot, Carol Dingley's father, was a brother of Jude’s father, Francis Percy (“Uncle Pack”). Joseph Errol Vautrot was in the Navy for 31 years (he joined at age 16!), and he retired as a Captain. His ship left Pearl Harbor three days before it was bombed. Talk about luck! He got a bronze star for commanding an LST in the Normandy Invasion in WWII as well as a Purple Heart. He also was present on the deck of the Missouri when the Peace Treaty with Japan was signed. He retired in Charleston, SC and then we moved to Newport, RI. Their final move was to Dover, NH. His brother Leonard was also in the Navy.

TOP: Verna Vautrot. BOTTOM LEFT: Alexon and Lorena. BOTTOM RIGHT: Verna and Alexon Richard.

Mathilda Vautrot.

Frank Vautrot

Errol Vautrot

Dalila Vautrot

The Vautrot family has strong Confederate Army and Union Army ties: the following text pasted below is from a book that is available online about the history of Warren, Ohio. It is about Jules Vautrot...one of the sons of Francois Vautrot who emigrated from France in 1834:

Mr. Vautrot (Jules Vautrot, Jr.) is a member of Old Erie Lodge No. 3, Free and Accepted Masons; Warren Chapter and…

The Confederados: Southerners sail for Brazil! My great-great grandfather Francois Vautrot went, too.

2008-12-02T16:24:00.009-05:00

Emblem of the Municipal Prefecture of Americana,
State of São Paulo, Federal Republic of Brazil
from 3 November 1975 to 17 April 1998.
[by Municipal Public Law 1.408 of 3 November 1975: Ralph Biasi, Municipal Prefect]

At the end of the Civil War, thousands of people in south Louisana were left destitute. Their farms were in ruins, cattle run-off and stolen, buildings destroyed, and there was no such thing as money to buy seed or fix things-up.

Chafing under Reconstruction politics and with nothing to hold them to the land, many Southerners decided that they would move even farther south--to Brazil, to take up an offer extended by that country's Emperor Dom Pedro II.

He sent recruiters into Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas, to look for people willing to move to Brazil to raise cotton--taking advantage of thier misfortune, thier farming expertise, and a market hungry for cotton after the destruction of the crop in the southern United States by the raiding Union forces.

A family could sail to Brazil for only $30 and buy good farmland there for 22 cents an acre--all of it on credit, not due until four years later.

Thousands of people took up the offer, including a good sized contingent from St. Landry Parish. My ancestor (great-great grandfather) Francois Joseph Vautrot was among them! They settled primarily near the souther Atlantic coast in places that they named Americana and New Texas, or in already settled places such as Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

When they go to Brazil, they were met by bands playing "Dixie" and crowds cheering a welcome to the arriving Confederados.

Some died searching for better fortune in Brazil and many went back to America. But a small group overcame the perils of life in what was to them a strange, poor, tropical land and have become a small but important piece of its history.

"They wanted a new country, a new place to live." "Everybody's dream is to live in the United States. They wanted to leave."

Indeed, the Confederados' exodus was one of the very few organized emigrations out of the United States, a country better known for receiving immigrants than producing them.

Cyrus Dawsey, a professor of geography at Auburn University in Alabama who coauthored the book "The Confederados," estimates that between 5,000 and 7,000 southerners made their way to Brazil. About half went back.

Most of them were ordinary farmers or craftsmen worried about their prospects in the economic turmoil of the post-war South. Too poor to afford slaves in the United States, only a few bought them when they arrived in Brazil.

"There was a little bit of slave ownership in Brazil but it wasn't very important," Dawsey said. "That's not to say they were abolitionists, but [slavery] just wasn't important to them."

Brazil did not abolish slavery until 1888, 23 years after the United States.

Eventually most of the immigrants headed to the interior of Sao Paulo state near a town later named after them: Americana. The cemetery is located outside a neighboring city, Santa Barbara do Oeste, about two hours' drive northwest of Sao Paulo and where many of their descendants live.

Dawsey believes the Confederados' geographical isolation in Brazil and their Protestantism in a mostly Roman Catholic country may have initially helped them preserve more of their culture than other immigrant groups.

The land was indeed as rich as had been promised. One Confederado wrote to The Mobile Register, "I have sugar cane, cotton, pumpkins, squash, five kinds of sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, corn field peas, snapbeans, butter beans, ochre, tomatoes and a fine chance at tobacco. I have a great variety of fruits on my place. I have made enough to live well on."

But not everone did as well. For example, Francois Vautrot, one of those who left St. Landry in 1867 with his wife and one of his sons to try his hand way down south, was back in Louisiana by 1871.

Many of those descendants that still reside there are fourth-or fifth-generation Confederados, and they say they are just like anybody else in Brazil. "We're perfectly integrated," said Allison Jones, the Fraternity's official spokesman.

Indeed, just about everyone savoring fried chicken was speaking Portuguese and some don't speak English. Like Padoveze, whose Confederate ancestor married a black Brazilian slave, many have also lost their American last names and pale Anglo-Saxon complexion.

But then again, few people in Brazil fly the U.S., Brazilian and Confederate flags side by side at mealtime. In the United States, the flying of the Confederate "Stars and Bars" flag has sparked numerous controversies as a symbol of the racial hatred institutionalized in the the Confederate South. But Cullen Pyles, the Fraternity's treasurer, said the Confederate flag has a different meaning for the group.

"She is a reminder of our ancestry," she says. "It doesn't represent racism or any of that to us."

My father, H.G. Vautrot, Jr., is Francois Vautrot's great grandson. He wrote down and told me that "Francois Vautrot was a returning Confederate veteran. He had been burned-out by Yankee invaders near Leonville, LA (Francois' first home). Francois' Bayou Teche River front home and farm were pillaged and burned by Union troops in 1863 under General Nathaniel Banks (Union Army). After he returned from the war in 1865, he decided to move westward to the prairie land away from the Teche and River system that had been used by the hated Yankee invaders. Also, rumor had it that the soil in what is now North Acadia Parish was very rich. Rice was not yet the top crop of Acadia Parish: cotton was still 'king.'"

My dad goes on to tell me that "Francois Vautrot was what was called an 'Un-Reconstructed Rebel,' which means that he never took the oath to the Union after the War of Secession. He never regretted not taking the oath because he and most ex-rebels had been disenfranchised until the Amnesty Act of 1872."

"Francois also demonstrated how much he despised the Union by visiting the famous Confederate colony in Brazil. He had considered settling in Brazil with hundreds of other ex-Confederate military families. But after his 'tour,' he decided to return to Louisiana in 1871. He did not want to clear farm land from the jungle. He had indured many hardships and privations during the Civil War already. But while living in Brazil, he was served a dish of monkey meat...that was the last Brazilian meal he had, and it convinced him to return home to Louisiana!"

Henry Gabriel Vautrot, Jr.
Great Grandson of Francois Joseph Vautrot

The second, original home of Francois Vautrot that he constructed after The Civil War (1865) is still standing! I have seen it and walked around inside of it; it is very large and on a very nice piece of property. It has lasted nearly 150 years because it is constructed from pure Cypress wood! There is terrific squirrel hunting on the property, as there is a beautful Pecan Tree orchard behind it.

Its address is off of Prudhomme Road, Acadia Parish:
Louisiana Highway 358 / "Brigman Highway" on the right side of the road
Eunice, LA 70535
North Acadia Parish, near Bayou Mallet

My cousin Jude Vautrot's store

2008-12-01T18:27:00.000-05:00

Pictured below are a couple of photographs of my cousin Jude Vautrot's store located in Church Point, Louisiana. That is the city that my father was born and raised in, until he moved to Lafayette to go to college and start our family. He is related to my father through their grandparents: Jude's grandfather and my father's father were brothers. Our forefathers migrated here (a Vautrot) from France in the mid-1800's. He settled in south Louisiana as a farmer, raising livestock, corn, and cotton.

Jude Vautrot tells me that he and my father (Henry Gabriel Vautrot, Jr) are second cousins. Jude’s father was Francis Percy (“Uncle Pack”). Francis Percy’s father was Francis Joseph, who is Jude Vautrot’s grandfather; he died at age 48 of a stroke in Church Point, LA.

My father’s (H.G. Vautrot Jr.) dad’s name was Henry Gabriel Vautrot (my grandfather). He was a resident of Church Point. He was known as “Uncle Gabe.” He was a very active town member: owned a lumber mill, owned the first Ford Motor Company car dealership in town, and was head of the school board. In fact, when he passed away in 1947 from a heart attack while brushing his teeth in the bathroom one morning, all the schools closed down in Church Point when he was buried.

Well, Henry Gabriel Vautrot (who married Dorothy Matthews, my grandmother) and Francis Joseph Vautrot were brothers: my dad’s dad and Jude’s grandfather. Francis Joseph Vautrot married Agnes Gardiner

There were quite a few male sibling Vautrots: Aside from Francis Joseph and Henry Gabriel, there were Preston Vautrot, Philippe Vautrot, and Louis′ Vautrot (5 males); moreover, there were several female Vautrots: Marie Verna, Marie Amelia, Mary Mabel, Philomene Matilda, and Marie Arthemise (5 females).

He tells me that Preston Vautrot (“Uncle Tot”) was a very nice man, yet did rob a bank and served prison time in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: a Federal prison. When he came out, he was in his late 50’s or early 60’s and got married for the 1st and only time in his life when he was in his 60’s. After serving time in Fort Leavenworth prison, he worked as an engineer on a dredge boat, and he made a lot of financial investments in Evangeline Downs race track in Lafayette, LA when it was being developed. He died of a heart attack in Lafayette.

Mathilda Vautrot (“Aunt Tildy”) did marry a Henry Lee Simon; they lived in Branch, LA. One of the other sisters married an Arceneaux (a doctor). Mabel Vautrot married Joseph Daigle in 1918.

Cousin Jude is 1st cousins with Carol Ann Dingley. Joseph Erroll Vautrot, Carol Dingley's father, was a brother of Jude’s father, Francis Percy (“Uncle Pack”). Joseph Errol Vautrot was in the Navy for 31 years (he joined at age 16!), and he retired as a Captain. His ship left Pearl Harbor three days before it was bombed. Talk about luck! He got a bronze star for commanding an LST in the Normandy Invasion in WWII as well as a Purple Heart. He also was present on the deck of the Missouri when the Peace Treaty with Japan was signed. He retired in Charleston, SC and then we moved to Newport, RI. Their final move was to Dover, NH. His brother Leonard was also in the Navy.

Mr. Jude was born in his house, and he later attended Sunset High School. He was raised with two brothers and a sister; he had one uncle that was in the US Navy for 31-years, another uncle and an aunt. His two brothers reside in Georgia and Louisiana. His sister is now passed-on. Jude Vautrot, by the way, served in the US Air force from 1960-1964. He is one of our many patriotic veterans! He has been happily married since 1965; and he has some beautiful children and grand-children. His wife and he have run their store for 36 years as of February 2009. They have 10 employees.

Jude's store is terrific: it is not your typical convenience store/gas station. Inside, you'll find 2 unique, entrepreneurial enterprises. On your left, there is a very active, authentic, ethnic meat and seafood department. You'll find various local wildlife meats, most of which are seasoned with our local Creole and Cajun spices and marinades! He has pork and turkey tenderloins, which are injected and stuffed with dressing, garlic, and herbs within it. He has Cajun seasoned steaks and ribs, as well as local delicacies: Cajun and Creole potato salads, seafood and chicken gumbos, Cajun boudin, and Cajun seasoned sausages.

On your right hand side as you walk in, you'll discover a fresh deli, a virtual cornucopia of warm, ready-to-eat American food: hamburgers, fried chicken tenders, french fries, onion rings, fried chicken pieces, pepperoni and cheese pizzas, Cajun stuffed fried boudin balls, fried shrimp, and fried pork chops. Hey, I think that just about everything in South Louisiana is FRIED!

And it sho' does taste real good, boy. Ya'll come back, now!

Teaching the Harvard Medical School students

2008-10-17T17:44:00.000-04:00

Pictured below are some photos that the 2nd year Harvard Medical School students and I took together. They came to the Brockton VA every other Tuesday throughout the fall of 2008. Some of the attending psychiatrists and senior psychiatry residents (such as me, the Senior Teaching Resident) provided them with the opportunity to practice their interview skills. Moreover, we offered them didactic lectures that highlighted certain psychiatric illnesses. At the end of their fall curriculum with us, I solely provided them with a 3 hour, comprehensive review course that covered most of the material that they had been exposed to during the preceding months. My teaching vehicle was case vignettes that covered 4 common psychiatric disorders, with questions that followed. I split the 12 Harvard Medical School students into two teams, much like Family Feud game show style. Each team was given an opportunity to read and provide an answer for the question after they discussed the options quietly among themselves. If they were correct, they won points; if they were not, then they were deducted points and the opposing team was allowed to offer an alternative answer if they wished to submit an answer. The feedback from the 12 medical students afterwards was 100% positive. They found that this method of teaching (case vignette + game show style active participation) "was fun, fantastic and educational! I wish we did more learning like this." You can see this by the smiles on each of their faces.

This style of teaching is very similar to what I did in the fall of 2008 with the entire Harvard South Shore Psychiatry Residency Training Program when I was asked to develop a Knowledge Base Review course (K.B.R.) that would be helpful to enhance not only general psychiatry knowledge, but also elevate/improve our annual standardized PRITE exam scores (Psychiatry Residency In Training Examination). I created and presented a one hour didactic focused on a sub speciality field in Psychiatry (i.e. Geriatrics, Consultation-Liaison, Psychotherapies, Forensic Psychiatry, etc), and this didactic lecture (via a PowerPoint presentation) was followed by active game show style learning (a mixture of Jeopardy/Family Feud). I wrote, but not published, an Abstract about this academic intervention.

Trip to Quebec, Canada

2008-08-15T15:33:00.005-04:00

After the start of my 4th/final year of Psychiatry Residency Training began in July, I decided to take a drive up to Canada from Massachusetts to visit the old, famed city of Quebec. At that time, this city was celebrating its 400 year anniversary since its founding by European explorers. The drive was about 9 hours, with the help of a GPS TomTom device that vocalized the route. Interestingly, there are some very, very rural/agrarian regions in Canada, reminiscent of what one may see in the Midwest (lots of farms and pastures). Moreover, the city of Quebec, is very similar to the small European villages & cities that I visited many years ago in France. So, that style/flavor of architecture was certainly carried-over and reflected. The city's inhabitants are young: there are a lot of schools/universities there; many of the young adults (in their 20's and 30's) walked, rode bikes, or roller-blades. The service personnel are very, very friendly in Quebec! Furthermore, more than 90% of them (wait staff in restaurants, hotels, businesses) are bi-lingual and willingly and kindly speak English to the American tourists.

The photos below are a sample of some of the landmarks of Quebec city. The river is very large, and there are some islands with the river, too. I took a river boat tour, as well as a country bus tour. The country bus tour delivered us to region that specializes in making real, homemade Canadian Maple Syrup...straight from the trees there. It was unbelievable. There are, in addition, some very large & old Catholic churches, with beautiful gold ornamental pieces and antique artwork and colored-glass windows.

Overall, Quebec is a romantic, European-reminiscent city to visit, and not too difficult to access from any state in the Northeast!

My final, PGY-IV year of Psychiatry Residency Training through Harvard

2008-08-05T07:56:00.009-04:00

My final year of psychiatry residency training program is definitely a unique experience, in the areas of professional and academic development, but also in personal growth.

Below is a spotlight of some of the academic endeavors that I am involved with; I still have clinical duties, too.

1.“Summer Series” psychopharm course from 7/2 – 8/27, on
Wednesdays,whereby I give lectures on the essentials of
psychopharmacology (mechanism of action,receptor profiles,
drug-drug interactions, etc).

2.Knowledge Base Review (PRITE) course from 7/2 – 8/27, on Wednesdays,whereby I give a lecture on various
sub-specialties/fields in Psychiatry,and this is followed
by a game-show style question & answer
session with resident team competition.

3.Inpatient Psychiatry Didactic curriculum from 7/2/2008 –
6/10/2009 on Monday and Tuesdays for PGY-Is and IIs. To include
hand-outs, PowerPoint presentations, interview role-playing.
Course covers DSM-IV-TR diagnoses,Interviewing Skills, unique
Case presentations, and Surviving tough On-Calls.

4.“Residents As Teachers” course from 9/10/2008 – 6/10/2009 on
Wednesdays for PGY-IVs, whereby I provide a lecture on how we, as
psychiatry residents, can become "Clinician Teachers" for our
medical students and junior residents. It's a "Train-the-Trainer"
curriculum, and we will have guest discussants, too.

5. Will also be involved in the Fall 2008 with the teaching of
the Harvard Medical students. They come to the VA to learn how
to interview patients with specific illnesses. A didactic is
correlated with the clinical condition.

6. I cover our Brockton VA Triage a few Fridays each month:
evaluating walk-in veterans for mental health concerns. It is
like an Urgent Care experience.

My first Academic Abstract

2008-07-31T17:45:00.008-04:00

Here is my first attempt at research: it is in the field of Academic Psychiatry. This is an exciting area for us in Medicine. In this particular situation, I have designed and implemented, along with my residency training director here at Harvard, a brand new course that is tailored to raise our psychiatry resident's scores on their annual standardized written psychiatry exam. If succesful, we hope to maintain it as a permanant addition to the Harvard South Shore curriculum.

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF IMPLEMENTING A KNOWLEDGE-BASED REVIEW COURSE FOR IMPROVING THE SCORES ON THE ANNUAL PSYCHIATRY RESIDENT-IN-TRAINING EXAMINATION (PRITE®)

Victor J. Vautrot, MD

Harvard South Shore Psychiatry Residency Program.
VA Boston Healthcare System
940 Belmont Street Brockton, MA 02301

Contact: Victor_Vautrot@hms.harvard.edu

Background: Nearly all psychiatry residents in the United States take the American College of Psychiatrists' PRITE® exam three to four times during their training. It provides feedback to the individual residents about the status of their knowledge as compared to others at the same level of training; and, it is a moderate predictor of performance on the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN) Part I examination in psychiatry. To our knowledge, most residents prepare individually for the PRITE by simply reviewing prior exams. Our residency training program is interested in developing a formal course that both enriches residents’ general knowledge in psychiatry and improves their scores on the PRITE simultaneously. This is the first time that we have implemented a course with these objectives in mind. The impact of this intervention, if successful, will be beneficial to each resident, the residency training program, and may serve as a model for other training programs with similar interests. Here, we report on pilot efforts to implement an ongoing program evaluation component as part of this initial course implementation.

Methods: We designed a once-a-week course of nine sessions that leads-up to the fall PRITE. Each session is two hours-long and is equally didactic- and active learning-based. The first hour spotlights one of the 12 subscales of the PRITE with a power point lecture and an interactive residency group discussion. The lecture is presented by a fourth year senior psychiatry resident. The second hour uses a video-projected question and answer test that uses the same format, balance, and subject content of the psychiatry written board exams. Four teams of residents, comprised of balanced, mixed levels of training, actively compete in a game show style manner. Each team convenes and selects their answer choice collectively, an explanation of the correct response appears, and then residency group discussion can follow.

Findings to Date: Eighteen out of twenty-eight residents (64%) completed a survey after the fourth session of the course. 61% (n=11) of the respondents felt that the course was meeting its objectives “all of the time” and 39% “most of the time.” 72% “strongly agree” that the course is presented in an easy-to-follow and understand manner and 28% “agree.” 100% of residents feel that the didactic component is useful. 94% (n=17) feel that the game show component is useful; one responded “neutral.”

Future Steps: We plan to provide one additional, final feedback survey at the end of the course prior to the October PRITE. Resident’s performance on the exam will be provided to the training program the following spring. If the responses from the feedback surveys continue to be positive and the test scores are improved, then the training program will retain the course as a permanent addition to its academic curriculum.

My dad's passing

2008-07-31T17:34:00.004-04:00

My Dad's Obituary:

Funeral services will be held at 11:00 am on Tuesday, May 6, 2008 in the Delhomme Chapel of the Flowers for Henry Gabriel Vautrot, Jr., 67, who passed away on Friday, May 2, 2008 after a courageous four-year battle with cancer, at his son’s residence in Youngsville.

Reverend Mike Walker, Pastor of East Bayou Baptist Church, will conduct the funeral services. Interment will take place in Lafayette Protestant Cemetery.

Mr. Vautrot, a native of Church Point, was the son of the late Henry Gabriel Vautrot, Sr. of Acadia Parish and the former Dorothy Matthews of Lafayette. Henry was an honor graduate of Church Point High School and earned a Master’s Degree from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He taught history in the Lafayette Parish Public School System for thirty-eight years and nineteen summer schools. He was the recipient of several teaching awards, including twice a finalist for Lafayette Education Foundation Award. He was a life member of the National Rifle Association, an avid antique gun collector, and organized Lafayette’s first Gun Show in 1968. He was also a member of Hope Lodge Free and Accepted Masons since 1961.

He had been a commercial fisherman since 1956; being one of the shrinking numbers of fishermen who had the skill to hand knit his nets. With the help of his three sons and one daughter, he landed many tons of commercial fish in the last fifty-two years.

Survivors include his wife, Barbara Johnson Vautrot; his two sons, Philippe Vautrot of Lafayette and Victor Vautrot, M.D. of Boston, Massachusetts Harvard School of Medicine; his daughter, Tara Vautrot Gondron; his granddaughter, River Gondron; and his devoted cousin, R. Matthews Bourque, all of Lafayette.

He was preceded in death by his parents; his son, H. G. Vautrot, III; and his beloved uncle, Robert Matthews. Pallbearers are David Guidry, Jude Vautrot, Scott Arceneaux, Louis Turner, Jamie McBride, Mike Leger, and Greg Harmon. Honorary pallbearers are Robert McBride, Sr. and James “Spoky” Montgomery. The family requests that visiting hours be observed on Monday from 11:00 am until 9:00 pm and continue on Tuesday from 8:00 am until the time of service. The family would like to extend a special thank you to Drs. Gene Brierre, Stanley Hoover, and Lawrence Russell. They would also like to thank James “Spoky” Montgomery for all of his care and concern, and special gratitude to the staff of Hospice of Acadiana. In lieu of flowers memorial contributions can be made in the name of Henry Vautrot, Jr. to the American Cancer Society, 1604 West Pinhook Road, Lafayette, Louisiana 70508 or Hospice of Acadiana, 2600 Johnston Street, Suite 200, Lafayette, Louisiana 70503. Personal condolences may be sent to the Vautrot family at www.delhommefuneralhome.com Delhomme Funeral Home, 1011 Bertrand Drive, is in charge of all funeral arrangements.

My Letter to Dad in the Guest Book section of his online obituary:

Dear dad, I simply wanted to write and express a few thoughts, memories, and feelings. Firstly, I am so thankful for the way that you raised your three sons (Gabe, Philippe and me) and daughter, Tara. You were always so supportive of anything that we wished to do with our lives; you were never one to judge or pass criticism. Moreover, you never demeaned us or used foul language; you were always very respectful and kind. You never, ever raised a hand against us, either. You introduced us to hunting ducks, rabbits, woodcock, snipe, geese, etc in Mallard Bay, in Cameron Parish, all at very young ages. We went to The Camp out there every Friday after you came back from teaching at Northside High School. I could not wait for 2:15pm to come around, as I knew you would be driving down the driveway very soon, so that I could help guide you as you backed-up your big truck towards the trailer on your large, 22 foot custom-built aluminum boat. Then, we would start loading the shotguns, hoop nets, coveralls, slicker suits, ice, food, and hunting dogs all inside the back of the truck and into the boat. Then, we'd wait for our friends to come by in case they wanted to ride with us out there to Mallard Bay. This was the way Fridays were for about 20 years, till I left for medical school in 2001 when I was 25 years-old.

Sunday mornings were characterized by fishing in the Vermillion River. You climbing up the stairs at 5:10am throughout both my high school (1991-1995) and college years (1995-2000) to wake me up to get ready for "running the nets." I'd walk out to your truck, still dark outside, you'd have it running and ready to go, sitting in there listening to either Rush Limbaugh, National Public Radio, or some old music from the 1950's and 1960's when you were a young man. Then, we'd pull out and drive to The Landing, the boat dock near the Lafayette Public Airport, arriving there around 6am. I'd back out the boat, off your trailer, and you'd go park. In the meantime, you would drive us to our first set of hoop nets, which was not too far from the landing, and I would be packing the bait bags with either pogeys or with soybean chips. I would then come to the front of the boat, toss your big 3-pronged metal hook over board, and feel around the bottom of the river for the nets that you had hidden down there beneath the murky waters.

Once I felt the spring in the rope, I'd inform you that I found one of your nets, and we'd both pull the rope to land the net on the side of the boat. We'd slowly pull it up, and could already fill the fish struggling inside the nets, bouncing off its walls, shaking it in our grips. We'd pull the net up slowly, the fish would fall back into the very back well, and splash our faces and slicker suits with mud, dead fish parts, rotten snake parts and old bait. The crabs would be hanging-on for dear life, their claws firmly implanted and entangled in the webbing. Sometimes, the large Opelousas catfish ("mud cat," "flat head" catfish) would be thrashing about like some shark, his huge tail batting smaller Channel cat around the net like baseballs. What a site. We'd raise your nets from 6 am till about noon; you'd sip on your iced tea throughout. It was hot, and the work was not easy. But it was good, and we had good friends to help us along the way. You'd stop and talk to several people that lived on the Vermillion River, and offer them a fresh fish, and they'd watch your nets for you, too, in order to be sure no one stole or damaged them. This was our Sunday, for years and years. After we caught between 500-2000 pounds of catfish, buffalo, goo, you'd go to Catfish Wholesale to sell them.

I know that you were a terrific teacher; people have told me that all my life, and I am reading about it here, too. I never had you as my high school teacher, but you certainly taught me a lot of history when I was with you at home, in the truck, at the Camp, sitting in a restaurant, etc. Your passion for teaching is something that I carry with me, too. I am using your skills for teaching with my own students: my medical students from both Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard School of Medicine up here in Boston, Massachusetts. I hope to be able to inspire and educate as well as you had done for nearly 40 years...to help young people love to learn and grow-up appreciating knowledge and loving life.

I have no doubt that you are up there in Heaven, have found some marsh or river, and you are already looking for a new place to set-up a hunting blind for the ducks and geese, and that you are already going down some river, looking for a place beneath an old Willow or Oak tree to set some hoop nets. You're going to live up there in Heaven just as you did down here on Earth. Hunting and Fishing till the very end. Be sure to observe whatever hunting limits and fishing quotas that God has set-up, dad. Who knows what type of game wardens he has up there. I promise to always come and visit you at the cemetery each time I am back home in Louisiana, and update you on the most recent politics and family events. You have no idea how much I am going to miss you....

Love, your son,
Victor Johnson Vautrot, M.D.
Harvard School of Medicine

Trip to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico!

2008-07-01T16:56:00.007-04:00

Here are the pictures of my trip to the country of Mexico...we went to the resort city of Puerto Vallarta in Jalisco (a state), Mexico. The people there are very friendly and helpful. We had a wonderful time there: shopping, swimming at the beach, taking tours with ferries to distant islands and remote beaches further down the coast line.

We went kayaking in the sea; rode horses in the mountains; went to a Mexican fiesta with dancing and a huge ethnic buffet. The hotel was also 5 star and had several gorgeous pools.

Reflections on Tulane: my brief internship in Psychiatry there prior to Hurricane Katrina in August 2005

2007-11-13T13:12:00.001-05:00

I was once a Tulane Psychiatry Intern. I transferred out of the program AFTER Hurricane Katrina devastated our city of New Orleans on Aug 29th, 2005, forcing me to leave my home state of Louisiana and their program, and to transfer into another psychiatry residency program in Massachusetts at Harvard. Nonetheless, I did perform 2 months of training with this spectacular program and would like to share my experience with you: A typical day for an intern such as myself consisted of arriving on the unit around 7:30am to pre-round on my patients, talk with the staff to see how things went during the evening and night prior. Afterwards, we (me and the Tulane medical students) would talk with the patients and write our notes. The Tulane medical students are very helpful with interviewing the patients, writing Progress notes, setting up appointments, etc. Around 9 am, we had group therapy, which the Intern conducted with a Psychologist. At 10:30am, my attending psychiatrist arrived, and he would inquire about the patients, we would update the charts, write notes, and interview the new patients admitted the night before from the Charity Hospital Emergency Room. We'd have lunch after of this. Between 1pm and 4pm, I would cover a few things that needed to be done (call the pt's family, set up appointments, talk some more with the patients, teach my medical students a certain topic via a lecture), then go home. It is really up to you when you left: it could be early or late, depending on your speed/efficiency. No one is breathing down your back, watching you or making you stay until a certain time. It is very, very laid back! The social service ladies and nurses are all fantastic and helpful, making your work very easy. The call schedule was terrific, probably the best in the country from what I've seen on other residency sites; it was q8-q10 the first year, beeper call the second year, no call for 3rd or 4th year. While on call, which is overnight, you were always with an Attending and a Moonlighter (passed Step 3, has a license and is usually in their 4th year). So, you were covered for very difficult cases. The call room was on the same floor as the Pscyh ER, which was convenient, and you were provided free meal tickets. We had a lot of lectures during the week, but thankfully not too many to keep you from getting your work done. It was protected lecture time; so one could actually step away briefly from patient care in order to attend to the lecture. Lastly, on Thursdays, twice monthly, we may have to go to the local courthouse and testify whether or not to keep a patient judicially committed to the hospital...it was a question of legal status for the inpatient. The experience was not too bad, but somewhat intimidating because it was in front of a judge and there were lawyers. Nonetheless, you had a lawyer, too, and a psychiatrist who testified with you/for your case. Teaching: The learning experience was actually superb. The Attendings were very knowledgeable in many areas of medicine and psychiatry. Moreover, all the teaching was upheld: rarely, if ever, was a lecture cancelled. Interns were asked to prepare small lectures to give to each other; so, we were given a topic out of a psychopharmacology text, and the next week, we gave a "lecture" about it. The Residency Director (Dr. P. O'Neill) presided over these lectures, and he gave additional information as well. The atmosphere was quite comfortable and benign. Again, the program is probably the most pleasant one around, and their is a very reassuring comraderie among the residents and the attending staff. The grand rounds on Friday were pretty good: lots of lectures on PTSD. There were always, always free lunches from pharmaceutical companies on those days, too. Atmosphere: Outside of work, every week there was a pharmaceutical-sponsored dinner at a 4 or 5 star New Orleans restaurant! We had valet parking, could choose any drink and any meal choice from the menu. The guest speaker was always some famous person in the field of Psychiatry from some big name university, and again, the atmosphere was pleasant. Conclusion: The positives are mentioned above: the staff, teaching and atmosphere are unsurpassable! The negatives would be the fact that FMGs in the state of Louisiana have to complete 3 full years of training before they can get a Louisiana license; therefore, an FMG would not be able to moonlight (make the big $$$) until he/she is a 4th year resident. Once you are in the middle of your second year of this program, you will already be prepared to manage ANY thing that comes your way in terms of psychiatry pathology! They prepare you very well, very early. All I can say is that the Tulane Psychiatry program was a gold star residency training site in New Orleans; but this is what is was like for us residents prior to Hurricane Katrina flooding our city and damaging so many of our buildings we worked in. I imagine that once the Tulane residency returns, it wont be much different than what I experienced and described above. In fact, it could get better or improved!

Third Year of Psychiatry Residency: Harvard South Shore

2007-11-12T20:03:00.003-05:00

In these photos (October 2007), I am in my office in Brockton, at the VA facility.

In our third year of residency, we psychiatrists now have our own offices, which are located in the VA (Veterans Affairs) building in Brockton, MA.

I have about 50 patients in my clinic that I treat on a regular basis; the conditions include Schizophrenia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Bipolar disorder, Major Depression, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and substance (drug & alcohol) dependence.

I really enjoy treating our American veterans at the VA, as they have given so much for our great country.

Despite our busy case-load in Psychiatry, we still find time to work even more (a.k.a. "moonlighting")! Yes, it is a titanic endeavor indeed; as we see our patients Monday-Friday from 8am to 4pm in our offices, then we drive to local hospitals/treatment facilities around Massachusetts to work there. We are able to do this since we now have earned our Full Licenses to practice medicine & psychiatry by the Massachusetts Board of Registration of Medicine; we have to carry malpractice insurance to do this, too. The upside of this, however, is the extra income; the pay/compensation can be quite lucrative for a 7pm-6am shift at an outside hospital...about $700. A few of these evening shifts each month, in addition to the salary we earn from the daytime, weekday job with the VA, can really contribute to paying down our medical school debts and the house mortgage! The average medical school loan/debt is $200,000, and most house mortgages are about $300,000. Hence, the initiative to work 2 jobs!

Nonetheless, despite the day time and night time jobs, we still hang-out and watch television at night (NetFlix) and go on weekend trips: Salem, MA to see the witch trials and haunted houses for Halloween; Cape Cod to visit Nantucket Island for a biking tour; and Providence, RI to visit Brown University .

Harvard South Shore Psychiatry Residency Training

2007-11-12T16:32:00.005-05:00

Group photograph of the Harvard Psychiatry residents and faculty, Fall 2006.

Drs. Fe Festin, Ernesto Zilberberg, Avi Friedlich, Victor Vautrot, and Eleana Nickolskia. Spring 2006.

Drs. Victor Vautrot and Eleana Nickolskia. Spring 2006.

Since Hurricane Katrina forced me to leave Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana back in August 2005, I have since continued my residency training in Psychiatry at Harvard University near Boston, Massachussetts.

In the top right photograph, taken one morning of many of the residents in the Fall 2006, I am standing in the very back row, fourth individual from the left-hand-side, wearing a black shirt. My eyes are looking to my right, at my girlfriend in the row ahead of me.

There are about 8-9 residents in each of the 4 classes: psychiatry residency is a four-year training program.

As of July 2007, I will be a 3rd year resident, with one year remaining.

The field of psychiatry continues to be exciting and intersting; I take great pleasure in trying to bring mental wellness and safety to my patients struggling with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, panic disorder, major depression, and suicidal ideation.

Some Bodybuilding Photos

2007-11-11T00:27:00.005-05:00

Here are a couple of photos I found of me in 2004 and 2005, the final 2 years of medical school, when I was working out in the evenings (Queens, NY) after my daytime rotations in Surgery, Ob/GYN, Pediatrics, etc.

Taken in my grandmother's backyard when I went to visit her after graduation from medical school, before residency started. I had been exercising previously in a gym in Queens, NY: nearly everynight with heavy, compound exercises (squats, deadlifts and bench presses).

Age 28.
2004.
4th year med. school.

Lifts included at that time:
Squat: 405 lbs x 8 reps
Deadlift: 405 lbs x 8 reps
Decline Bench Press: 355 lbs x 2 reps
Barbell curl: 135 lbs x 4 reps

Taken in my grandmother's front yard.

Age 28.
2004.
4th year med. school.

Miami, FL. I was a 3 rd year medical student at that time. Training in a gym near Coconut Grove, (South Beach), Florida.

Age 27.
2003.
3rd year med. school.

Cutting my birthday cake; celebrating it with my girlfriend and her yellow lab, Sita.

Age 27.
2003.
3rd yr. med. school.

Various photos of me from childhood to adulthood

2007-11-09T00:53:00.000-05:00

Here I am at my house in Lafayette, LA, playing with some of our hunting dog's puppies (Queenie). She usually had one litter of 12 puppies per year, and we would give them (for free) to members of our hunting club; this would preserve the blood line with friends and family, rather than with distant strangers.

Family picture when I was a baby, in my mom's lap.

Hugging our hunting dog, Queenie. She was a very sweet black lab, loveable demeanor. She loved to have a tennis ball with her all of the time.

In 3rd/4th year of medical school, was doing Sports Medicine rotation at the time; living in the basement of a Greek guy named Nick in Queens, NY, paying about $800/month. I had a freakin' blow-up mattress for a "bed", chest-high refrigerator, half-broken gas stove, no windows to the outside, a stand-up only shower, and the floor collected water from somewhere every time there was a heavy rain outside. Nonetheless, it all worked out and I made it through med. school despite all of that stuff. Positive mental attitude.

Here is my Uncle Matt (Matt Bourque); he is a Circus Fan member...travels globally to view circuses (Europe, Asia, Mexico). He lives in Lafayette, LA presently.

This photo was taken the day of my grandmother's funeral (Dorothy Mathews, my dad's mom). Photo: from left to right: Victor, my Dad, Uncle Matt, and my brother. Grandma Dot died of natural causes in the mid-1990's after having suffered a stroke. She was a Registered Nurse for 52 years (retired at age 77), as well as a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, Daughters of the Confederacy, and a very proud Presbyterian church member (like myself). Her brother was my Uncle Robert.

Old Vautrot Family Photos

2007-11-08T23:40:00.000-05:00

Here is a collection of some photos that I uncovered of some of my relatives:

Here, this is my grandmother Hermence Vidrine (maiden name) on horseback, next to my biological grandfather, Joe Johnson. He was a rancher (sheep and cattle) and farmer (cotton). He was what the women called "a man's man." He was rough, tough, and of few words. He actually killed a few men in his lifetime, in self-defense. One man, for example, had his guts spilled out by a knife after he jumped by grandfather outside a dance.

This is my step-grand father, Luther Fontenot, of Pine Prairie, LA. He loved hunting quail and playing with his pet dogs. He died in the mid 1990's of natural causes.

This is a photo of my great-grandmother, Ma-Ma (maternal side). She lived in Reddel, LA.
Her son, wearing the light blue shirt, standing to the far right of this photo, is Howard Vidrine: a Purple Heart recepient from World War II. He was also a renowned local Baptist minister in South Louisiana, and a church building is named for him. He died in the mid-1990s of natural causes.

This is with my older brothers Gabe and Philippe Vautrot when I was a baby. Gabe was killed in a drunk driving accident in November 1984. He was at LSU at the time of the tragedy.

Family photograph taken inside our home in Lafayette, LA. Gabe is wearing the grey suit and hat; Philippe is sitting in the middle; I am the baby on my mother's lap.

Photos from the Camp

2007-11-07T00:03:00.000-05:00

Here is a collection of photos of my family and friends from our Hunting Camp in Mallard Bay, Cameron Parish, Louisiana.

Photo of my dad in the background, waving. My Uncle Robert Matthews in the forefront, holding a beer. He was an avid deer and turkey hunter in Missississippi and Louisiana. He had a camp in Butte LaRose, LA; was a very popular, likeable guy. He was also a WWII veteran. He died of natural causes in his sleep in the mid-1990s.

Here I am with my dad (far left of photo), being held by Uncle Robert. I am holding a large mouth Bass, crying. Notice the catfish hanging on the wooden plank in the middle of the photo. This was a common way that we (later, when I learned how to do it) skinned our catfish: nail them to a tree or hang them from a hook, make 3 knife slices around their neck to expose the flesh beneath the tough skin, then use "skinning pliers" to peel the skin off of them. There is someone unknown to me skinning/cleaning some fish on the table to the far right. This was at our hunting and fishing camp in South Louisiana in very early 1980s.

A photo of our beloved hunting/fishing camp from the other side of the canal. Notice the dog. The large rusty container is the well (holding rain water). The camp itself is made of Cypress wood, about 60 years-old. This camp survived both Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita in Summer 2005.

Here I am, about 5 years old, inside my dad's fishing boat. We are raising crab traps from Mallard Bay (a very large lake in Southwest Louisiana). As you can see, there are a few Blue Pointe crabs in the trap immediatly behind me.
I was probably learning how to re-bait the traps (with fish guts and heads).

This is my Uncle Robert, later in his life; here he is in front of a lake and mountain range somewhere in America. He loved going for overland tours of praries and ranges across America, in search of deer, bison, Caribou, etc...to take pictures. He always had a cigar in his mouth, but he never smoked it. I am indebted to him for great memories of Turkey Hunts in Missississippi; delicous meals at his camp in Butte La Rose, LA; and the trust fund he left me to help pay for medical school.

My New Orleans home after Hurricane Katrina

2007-08-18T16:45:00.000-04:00

This is what happened to my home after the levees failed following Hurricane Katrina's arrival. My house sat in over 11 feet of sewage/oil/swamp water for two weeks. The hot Southern sun, however, later evaporated the waters, and this is what was left. Photo taken around October 2005 when the National Guard and US Army allowed residents to return.

Reflections on Tulane: pre-Hurricane Katrina (8/2005) Psychiatry Training

2007-07-17T08:03:00.000-04:00

AN OVERVIEW OF TULANE UNIVERSITY PSYCHIATRY RESIDENCY TRAINING IN 2005:

Schedule:
I was once a Tulane Psychiatry Intern after I graduated from medical school on April 1st, 2005, moved back to Louisiana, and bought a home in Arabi, LA (a city just outside New Orleans). I transferred out of the program AFTER Hurricane Katrina devastated our city of New Orleans on Aug 29th, 2005, forcing me to leave my home state and the Tulane training program, and to transfer into another psychiatry residency program in Massachusetts at Harvard. Nonetheless, I did perform 2 months of training with this spectacular program and would like to share my experience with you:

A typical day for an intern such as myself consisted of arriving on one of the 4 inpatient psychiatry units at Charity Hospital (which the Tulane psych. residents shared training with the LSU psych. residents) around 7:30am to pre-round on my patients (I covered a team of 10-12 patients), talk with the staff to see how things went during the evening and night prior. Afterwards, we (me and the Tulane medical students) would talk with the patients and write our Progress notes. The Tulane medical students are very helpful with interviewing the patients, writing Progress notes, setting up appointments, etc. Around 9 am, we had group therapy, which the Intern conducted with a staff Psychologist. At 10:30am, my attending psychiatrist (Dr. Patrick O'Neill or Dr. Keith Jackson) arrived, and he would inquire about the patients, we would update the charts, discuss psychopharmacotherapy options/strategies, write notes, and interview the new patients admitted the night before. We'd have lunch after this around noon.

Between 1pm and 4pm, I would cover a few things that needed to be done (call the pt's family, set up appointments, talk some more with the patients, teach my medical students a certain topic), then go home around 3 p.m. It is really up to you when you left: it could be early or late, depending on your speed/efficiency. No one is breathing down your back, watching you or making you stay until a certain time. It is very, very laid back! The social service ladies and nurses are all fantastic and helpful, making your work very easy.

The call schedule was terrific, probably the best in the country from what I've seen on other residency sites; it was q8-q10 the first year, beeper call the second year, no call for 3rd or 4th year. While on call, which is overnight, you were always with an Attending and a Moonlighter (passed Step 3, has a license and is usually in their 4th year). So, you were covered for very difficult cases. The call room was on the same floor as the Psych ER, which was convenient, and you were provided free meal tickets.

We had a lot of protected lectures (could step away from patient care without getting into trouble) during the week, but thankfully not too many to keep you from getting your work done.

Lastly, on Thursdays, twice monthly, we may have to go to the local courthouse and testify whether or not to keep a patient judicially committed to the hospital...it was a question of legal status for the inpatient. A patient with a severe mental illness could be kept in our facility for up to 6 months if committed, then a new trial would occur, and such a sentence could be maintained or the patient released. I testified probably 3 times in court before Hurricane Katrina, during my two months at Tulane, and "won" the commitments of my patients each time, as I heartfully believed that they needed/required inpatient level of care and did not wish to see them back homeless on the streets of New Orleans, eating food from garbage cans, sleeping in Louis Armstrong Park, being abused by gangs, etc. The experience of sitting in the testifying/witness stand, giving an oath of telling the truth, and being cross-examined ("How long have you known patient X?" "Where did you go to medical school?" "How long have you been a doctor?" "Did you even read this part of the patient's chart which states....?") was not too bad, but somewhat intimidating because it was in front of a judge and there were lawyers. Nonetheless, you had a lawyer, too, and a psychiatrist who testified with you/for your case. The night before the case/hearing, we psychiatry residents would try to read the entire patient chart, in order to be ready for any obscure question that the patient's attorney may ask. Moreover, the other psychiatry residents would sit in the court room to watch their colleague on trial, sort of like a show/entertainment for them! We would support each other and hope for the best: some of them lost thier cases for the commitment, but that was o.k....whatever was best for the patient ultimately matters in the end! Not your ego.

Teaching:
The learning experience was actually superb. The Attendings (Dr. Galant, Dr. O'Neill) and the Chief Residents (Leslie Lawrence and Kris McCoy) were very knowledgeable in many areas of medicine and psychiatry (Forensics, Child, and Psychopharmacology). Moreover, all the teaching was upheld regularly: rarely, if ever, was a lecture cancelled. Interns were asked to prepare small lectures to give to each other; so, we were given a topic out of a psychopharmacology text, and the next week, we gave a "lecture" about it. The Director (Dr. O'Neill) presided over these lectures, and he gave additional information as well. The atmosphere was quite comfortable and benign. Again, the program was probably the most pleasant one around, and their is a very reassuring camaraderie among the residents and the attending staff. The grand rounds on Friday were pretty good: lots of lectures on PTSD. There were always, always free lunches from pharmaceutical companies on those days, too.

Atmosphere:
Outside of work, every week there was a pharmaceutical-sponsored dinner at a 4 or 5 star New Orleans restaurant! We had valet parking, could choose any drink and any meal choice from the menu. The guest speaker was always some famous person in the field of Psychiatry from some big name university, and again, the atmosphere was pleasant.

Conclusion:
The positives are mentioned above: the staff, teaching and atmosphere are unsurpassable! The negatives would be the fact that FMGs in the state of Louisiana have to complete 3 full years of training before they can get a Louisiana license; therefore, an FMG would not be able to moonlight (make the big $$$) until he/she is a 4th year resident. Once you are in the middle of your second year of this program, you will already be prepared to manage ANY thing that comes your way in terms of psychiatry pathology! They prepare you very well, very early. All I can say is that the Tulane Psychiatry program was a gold star residency training site in New Orleans; but this is what is was like for us residents prior to Hurricane Katrina flooding our city and damaging so many of our buildings we worked in. I imagine that once the Tulane residency returns, it won't be much different than what I experienced and described above. In fact, it could get better or improved!

my McFaddin and Matthews family history

2007-03-19T20:19:00.000-04:00

Here are some family documents (geneology records) that outline my paternal ancestry lines: Vautrot, Matthews, Prather, McFaddin,and Duffie. My grandmother Dorothy Mavis Matthews used these heritage lines to establish our membership in the following organizations: Sons of the American Revolution (SAR); Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR); Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV); United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC).

Flags & Images throughout my family history: the Vautrots, McFaddins, Prather, and Witherspoon.

2007-03-18T17:52:00.001-04:00

French national flag

Louisiana state flag

Cajun/Acadian flag of Southwest Louisiana

Confederate flags flown throughout Civil War

Records of the Vautrots arise around the time of the First Crusade (1095 A.D.) They are from the ALSACE & LORRAINE region of France. Francois Vautrot migrated to America, and eventually settled down in South Louisiana as a French/Cajun farmer in the late 1830's. He did not fight in the Civil War, as he was not an American citizen at that time...he was a French citizen. This did not, however, prevent the victorious U.S. Union troops under General Nathaniel Banks from raiding his farm, stealing his crops, seizing all of his cotton, and several dozen head of livestock from him in October 1863. In 1865, due to disgust from the death, destruction, and devastation from the Civil War that was inflicted onto his home, property and much of the region, he left America and sought a new life among the Confederate veterans that were establishing a colony in Brazil. He later returned to America in 1871, raised a family, and I am a descendant of him. I have much more detailed information about him in the post below that is entitled "Vautrot Family History."

My paternal grandmother, Dorothy Vautrot (maiden name Matthews), was a member of the Daughter's of the American Revolution (D.A.R.) and The United Daughters of the Confederacy (U.D.C., Alfred Mouton Chapter #1515). She tied our genealogy to a relative ("Colonel" Thomas McFaddin) that was a patriot who battled British soldiers during the American Revolution (1775-1783 A.D.). Captain John McFaddin, his son, was in the War of 1812; his father was "Colonel" Thomas McFaddin, a Revolutionary War soldier, and listed in the volume of "Marion Men." He is called "Colonel," but in fact, the highest rank he ever held was that of Lieutenant; but at one time, he was the adjutant for Francis Marion, "The Swamp Fox." General Francis Marion fought more battles in South Carolina than were fought in any other of the colonies.

The son of Captain John McFaddin was John Gamble McFaddin (born in 1805 in Salem, South Carolina; died in 1861 in Arkansas). He married Martha Mills English (born in 1811; died in 1878), and they had a total of twelve children. Most of them died young; the family moved to Hempstead County, Arkansas, where there is a large cemetery plot erected in their name.

Interestingly, John Gamble McFaddin's son, Thomas James McFaddin (born in Sumter, South Carolina 6-4-1830; died 6-17-1870), fought for the Confederate Army initially with the 3rd Consolidated Regiment of Arkansas Volunteers and later in the 20th Arkansas infantry. Prior to his voluntary enlistment in the Confederate Army, he married Mary S. Bradley (born 11-14-1832; died 3-8-1852). Under South Carolina law at that time, he inherited all of the slaves and other property of his wife and child; and he had a considerable number of slaves of his own. All of the McFaddins were Presbyterians, and did not believe that they should sell their slaves; and Thomas J. McFaddin came to Arkansas to get land so he could have a place for all of his slaves. He arrived in Arkansas in 1857, settle near Washington, Arkansas in Hempstead County. His parents later came, too: John Gamble McFaddin and Martha Mills English McFaddin. He remarried--Alice Teresa Duffie, a Roman Catholic lady; they married on 1/31/1858 in the vestibule of St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, LA. Thomas J. McFaddin and Alice Teresa Duffie had 5 children (3 daughters and 2 sons). They had a son, Manton McFaddin 11/1858-10/1892), who moved to Lafayette, LA and married Alma Prather ((1869-1941) in 1889; this couple had one daughter named Ellen McFaddin. Her paternal grandfather was the Confederate soldier Thomas James McFaddin; on Ellen's maternal side are the Prathers; Thomas Z. Prather is another Confederate soldier that I am related to. I have more about him in a section below. Anyway, Ellen McFaddin's father (Manton McFaddin) died, and her mother, now a widow, married a Montgomery. Little Ellen was only 8 years-old when her mother remarried. After Ellen McFaddin (now raised by Montgomery) grew-up, she married Otis Matthews (so, she called herself Ellen McFaddin Matthews). Ellen McFaddin Matthews was my paternal grandmother's mother (my great-grandmother). Ellen and Otis had several children: most died at young ages (Anna Lee from the Influenza pandemic of 1918, Otis J.R. from crib death, M.O. from cirrhosis), but I spent a lot of my young adulthood with my grandmother, Dorothy Matthews, and great-uncle, Robert Matthews; one of their sisters (Alma) married Roland Bourque (who died from tuberculosis), whose son is my cousin, "Uncle Matt."

Back to my Confederate great-great-great grandfather's Civil War experience: Thomas J. McFaddin was captured after the siege of Vicksburg (1863); and lived for many months in a Yankee prison there in Vicksburg. The prisoners lived on rats. He had been injured in the defense of Vicksburg: a cannon caisson was about to fall from a parapet, and in keeping it from falling, he received some internal injury that ultimately resulted in his death a few years later. Eye witnesses remember that the day he was exchanged by the Yankees, he "looked like a walking skeleton; and that he was literally starved almost to death." He reached his home in Arkansas via a mule. His faithful slaves had set-up a road block at the gate before his farm, in order to protect the white woman and children from the scalawags and marauders; and when Thomas J. McFaddin reached the gate to his home, he looked so terribly forlorn and weak, that his slaves did not recognize him. When he told them who he was, they insisted that the "Yankees had done killed Marse Thomas." His wife came down and recognized him; and she and his mother (Martha Mills English McFaddin, then the widow of John Gamble McFaddin) nursed him back to health. He went to fight again beneath the Rebel "Stars and Bars" at the Battle of Chickamauga in Tennessee (a Confederate victory). Of note, that he was so loved by his slaves is shown by the fact that when they were freed, they took the McFaddin surname, and even to this day, there are many black McFaddEns in Hempstead County; but they all spell their name "McFaddEn" to differentiate it from the white people.

Regimental Flag of the 20th Arkansas Volunteer Infantry

State flag for all Arkansas Volunteer Infantry units

My paternal grandmother, Dorothy Matthews Vautrot, also discovered our relative (Thomas Z. Prather) who was a Confederate soldier under General Robert E. Lee, and who was wounded at Gettysburg in July 1863 at the young age of 15! Thomas Z. Prather was a Private, enlisted on July 13, 1861. He was part of the 15th Georgia Volunteer Infantry Regiment; Company A, New Delhi Rangers from Wilkes County, GA. He was initially under General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia; 1st Army Corps (16,000 men); beneath Lee was Lieutenant General James Longstreet's Division (8,000 men), beneath Longstreet was Major General John Bell Hood's Brigade (2,000 men), and beneath Hood was Colonel Benning and Toomb's brigade (of 2,000 men, among which was Prather). His brigade successfully breached the Union line at the Battle of Gettysburg; assisted by the First Texas Regiment, they stormed into the Devil's Den and captured men and artillery. This brigade also fought at the Second Battle of Manassas (a.k.a. "Bull Run") in Aug 1862, where the 15th Georgia cracked the Union left wing. They then fought at the Battle of Antietam (a.k.a. "Sharpsburg") in Sept. 1862. They were also present at the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862. After the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg on July 3rd, 1863, Longstreet detached from the Army of Northern Virginia and went to fight in the Trans-Mississippi region at the Battles of Chickamauga and Knoxville. Prather went with him.

Battle of Gettysburg Pennsylvania.
Triangular Field / Devils Den - July 2nd 1863.
The 1st Texas and 15th Georgia Infantry Regiments.
This scene depicts an interesting duel between the color bearers
of the First Texas and the fifteenth Georgia regiments during the assault on the Devils Den. Each man is determined to plant their respective State flags further up Hauck's Ridge until the bearer of the Texas colors, George Branard, is wounded by an exploding shell and rendered blind. The flag shown in this painting is the second issue Lone Star Flag that was issued to the 1st Texas after both their original colors were lost during the brutal fight at Antietam's Corn Field. The flag is accurately shown edged in black crepe in memory to those who were lost in that fight, less than one year earlier.

Thomas Z. Prather served with Benning's Brigade, Hood's Division, Longstreet's Corp, under General Braxton Bragg at the Battle of Chickamauga on Sept 19 and 20th, 1863: the Army of Tennessee. He was wounded at Chickamauga, GA on September 19th, 1863. His unit successfully held the defenses of Richmond against the massive Union assault on September 29th, 1864, where the 15th Georgia is credited with capturing 433 Union prisoners. He surrendered at Appomattox, VA on April 9th, 1865. Of note, in 1862, there were 441 men in his unit; at the time of their surrender in 1865, there were 226. 50% casualties.

I also have a great-great grandfather that was a steamboat captain in the US Navy during the Civil War; his surname was Matthews. So, I had forefathers who fought on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line...for both Union and Confederate Armies.

The most fascinating piece of information regarding my family history is that we are descendants of Dr. John Witherspoon (February 5, 1723 – November 15, 1794), who was a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence, as a representative of New Jersey. He was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration. He was born in Gifford, Haddingtonshire, Scotland, attended the Haddington Grammar School, and obtained a Master of Arts from the University of Edinburgh in 1739. He went on to divinity school, afterwards becoming a Church of Scotland (Presbyterian) minister at Beith, Ayrshire, where he married and wrote three well-known works on theology. He was awarded a Doctorate of Divinity from the University of St Andrews, Fife. After emigrating to America, he became President of the Presbyterian College of New Jersey in Princeton, and he and his wife emigrated to New Jersey in 1768, at the age of 45, where he took up the position of 6th President of the college which was later to become Princeton University.

John Witherspoon, Doctorate of Divinity

Witherspoon served in Congress from June 1776 until November 1782 and became one of its most influential members and a workhorse or prodigious energy. He served on over 100 committees, most notably the powerful standing committees, the board of war and the committee on secret correspondence or foreign affairs. He spoke often in debate; helped draft the Articles of Confederation; helped organize the executive departments; played a major role in shaping foreign policy; and drew up the instructions for the peace commissioners.

Signing of the Declaration of Independence

In November, 1778, as British forces neared, he closed and evacuated the College of New Jersey. The buildings were nearly destroyed, and Witherspoon was responsible for its rebuilding after the war, which caused him great personal and financial difficulty. He also served twice in the New Jersey Legislature, and strongly supported the adoption of the United States Constitution during the New Jersey ratification debates.

A bronze statue at Princeton University by Scottish sculptor Alexander Stoddart is the twin of one outside The University of Paisley, Paisley, Scotland. Paisley honored Witherspoon's memory by naming a newly constructed street in the town center after him, in deference to his having lived in Paisley for a large proportion of his adult life. There is likewise a street named Witherspoon Street in Princeton Borough, New Jersey which runs through the Princeton University campus.

In essence, my forefathers in my family have made large contributions to this country since the late 1700's.

Johnson Family History

2007-03-18T16:09:00.001-04:00

My maternal grandfather, Joe Johnson (4/23/1889-3/09/1968) and his cousin, Leander Johnson, married two sisters: Marcantel was thier surname. Leander's son, was Leroy Johnson. That is how we are related.

Camp Leroy Johnson in New Orleans, Louisiana, formerly known as the New Orleans Air Base, is located on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain in the area bounded west by Franklin Ave. south by Leon C. Simon Dr. and east by Inner Harbor Navigation Canal. The area is occupied today by the University of New Orleans. Two former buildings of the base still remain. The "smokestack" was incorporated into an Alumni Building and a barrack remains as a record storage building.
The base used jointly with the New Orleans Airport for training during World War II. It was transferred to the Air Service Command and became part of the New Orleans Port of Embarkation facilities. Signal and Quartermaster units were trained on the post and it housed a Transportation Corps Officer Candidate School and a Replacement Training Center.

The base was named after World War II Medal of Honor recipient Leroy Johnson. He was a native of Caney Creek, Louisiana and served as a Sergeant, U.S. Army. He died on December 15, 1944 near Limon, Leyte, Philippine Islands shortly after he threw himself on two enemy grenades saving two comrades. In 1947 the New Orleans Navy Air Base was renamed Camp Leroy Johnson in his honor.

Birth: unknown
Death: Dec. 15, 1944

WW II Congressional Medal of Honor recipient. Leroy Johnson was born in Caney Greek, Louisiana. He served as a Sergeant, U.S. Army, Company K, 126th Infantry, 32d Infantry Division. On December 15, 1944 near Limon, Leyte, Philippine Islands Sergeant Johnson as squad leader was sent to patrol a ridge held by a well-entrenched Japanese force. Seeing an enemy machinegun, which covered the approaches to several other enemy positions, he chose three other men, armed them with hand grenades, and led them to a point near the objective. The men had knocked out the gun and begun an assault when hostile troops on the flank hurled several grenades. As he started for cover, Sgt. Johnson saw two unexploded grenades that had fallen near he and his men. He deliberately threw himself on the grenades and received their full charge into his body. Fatally wounded by the blast, he died soon afterward. Sgt. Leroy Johnson received his Medal of Honor posthumously and it was accredited to the state of Louisiana. In 1947 the New Orleans Army Air Base was renamed Camp Leroy Johnson in his honor. (bio by: John "J-Cat" Griffith)

Burial:
Manila American (ABMC) Cemetery and Memorial
Manila, Philippines
Plot: C-10-79

Record added: Jun 24 2003
By: T.L. Watson

Vidrine Family History

2007-03-18T16:08:00.001-04:00

My maternal grandmother's maiden name was Vidrine. Her father was Moise; her grandfather, Leon. I am related to Dr. Vidrine through my maternal side.

The LSU School of Medicine had an unusual beginning—a two-hour meeting of the LSU Board of Supervisors on Saturday, January 3, 1931, in Gov. Huey Long’s suite at the Roosevelt (now the Fairmont) Hotel in downtown New Orleans. Long is said to have attended in his pajamas. The meeting was dominated by the Governor, who was the driving force in establishing a medical school within the LSU system. With little discussion, the Board passed a resolution establishing a school, and selected Dr. Arthur Vidrine to be its first dean.

Dr. Vidrine, superintendent of Charity Hospital, was Long’s nominee. A surgeon who had graduated from Tulane School of Medicine, Dr. Vidrine had also been a Rhodes Scholar. He was later given approval by the Charity Hospital Board of Supervisors to retain his position as superintendent while serving as dean. In 1935 Vidrine would make an unsuccessful attempt to save Long’s life after Long was shot in Baton Rouge. He served as Dean until 1937.

Gov. Long’s motivation in establishing a state school of medicine was not based on personal antagonism toward Tulane University, although this story still flourishes. According to his chief biographer, T. Harry Williams, Gov. Long had been concerned about the lack of medical care for poor and middle-income people from the time he became governor. After studying the state’s medical education facilities, he concluded that inadequate medical care resulted from a statewide shortage of doctors. Tulane could not provide enough doctors in Long’s view, and its high tuition prevented many students from considering it.

Once Gov. Long achieved the important preliminaries of legally establishing the School and selecting its dean, he allowed Dr. Vidrine and his aides to assume the responsibility for the practical organization of the school, including choosing faculty and ensuring that the new medical center science building would be ready for the students in the fall of 1931.
On Thursday, October 1, 1931, the LSU School of Medicine received it first students, a small transfer class of juniors and a larger class of freshmen. Only one floor of the LSU Medical Center building was opened when classes started. The eight-story structure, built in the midst of the old Charity Hospital complex, had many art deco features. The most dramatic was over the foyer—a large silver-colored plaster bas-relief, “the Conquest of Yellow Fever,” celebrating the U.S. Army Yellow Fever Commission led by Dr. Walter Reed in Cuba in 1900. One of the Commission’s four members, Dr. Aristides Agramonte, was appointed LSU’s first head of tropical medicine.

Unfortunately, Dr. Agramonte died the summer before the school opened. The school purchased his personal library, which formed the nucleus of the school’s library.

Dr. Arthur Vidrine was a medical doctor from Ville Platte, Louisiana. He is best known for operating on radical politician Huey Pierce Long after Long was shot. He was educated at Tulane University, the University of Oxford (where he was a Rhodes Scholar), and at hospitals in London and Paris. Vidrine was named superintendent of Charity Hospital in New Orleans. In May 1931 Governor Long appointed Vidrine dean of the newly established Louisiana State University Medical School in New Orleans.

Vidrine operated on Long in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on September 9, 1935, after Long had been shot. It became necessary to perform the two-hour operation, during which Vidrine repaired two small wounds in the colon and sutured the abdomen closed, when the two surgeons Long had called for from New Orleans were delayed. Vidrine was later criticized by other doctors for failing to recognize a kidney wound that caused internal bleeding and ultimately led to Long's death.

Founded in 1737 by a wealthy French sailor, Charity is one of the oldest general hospitals in the U. S. Its troubles began in 1928 when Huey Long kicked out the old director, appointed in his place Surgeon Arthur Vidrine, a promising young man scarcely out of medical school. Then Huey invited Cajuns, Creoles and hillbillies to come on in for quick cures. Result: patients were packed two and three in a bed, many sleeping in the halls, under crumbling plaster.

When Huey was shot, Dr. Vidrine operated on him, against the advice of some more conservative surgeons. After Huey's death, an unfair cloud of suspicion drove Dr. Vidrine from Charity, and in 1936 he was succeeded by Dr. George Sam Bel, a courtly Creole. Last year, shortly before the new hospital was finished, Dr. Bel died. New Orleanians whispered that he had killed himself, suspected that he was involved in some dark construction scandal. But the elderly heart specialist, his colleagues proved, was felled by a heart attack.

My Family History: the Vautrots and Johnsons

2005-05-20T12:57:00.002-04:00

My surname, "Vautrot," dates back as far as the First Crusade, which was launched in 1095 A.D. The Vautrot's were from Alsace-Lorraine, a region between France and Germany, and they joined Pope Urban II's crusade to recaptrue the Holy Land from the Muslims; and they were succesful. We also know that the Vautrot's came to America at the time of her birth: they fought in the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783 A.D) under General George Washington. Lastly, all four of my great, great-grandfathers fought in the American Civil War (1861-1865 A.D.); two for the Confederate Army and two for the Union Army.

My mother's maiden name is Johnson; my grandfather, Joe Johnson (4/23/1889 - 03/09.1968), for example, prospered in the Piney Woods as a planter, a cattleman, and the biggest sheep rancher in Allen and Evangeline parishes. From dawn to dusk, he and a crew of fifteen to forty men rode the woods herding, branding and cutting calves, dipping and shearing sheep and searching for rustlers. He was admired for his horsemanship, unflinching courage and respected for his ethic of hard work and honesty. Terse, he spoke to the point; tough, he endured hard times with honor; stoic, he suffered sorrows without complaint. At the time when and at the place where he lived, folks knew the difference between a man's value and his worth. Joe Johnson was a man of worth.
His cousin, Leroy Johnson, is notable for being one of the few men to have received the United States Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery in battle! This award, the Medal of Honor, is truly a monumental achievement: it has been awarded to very few soldiers--a little over 3,000 soldiers have received it since it was created 300 years ago during The American Revolutionary War. WW II Congressional Medal of Honor recipient. Leroy Johnson was born in Caney Creek, Louisiana. He served as a Sergeant, U.S. Army, Company K, 126th Infantry, 32d Infantry Division. On December 15, 1944 near Limon, Leyte, Philippine Islands Sergeant Johnson as squad leader was sent to patrol a ridge held by a well-entrenched Japanese force. Seeing an enemy machinegun, which covered the approaches to several other enemy positions, he chose three other men, armed them with hand grenades, and led them to a point near the objective. The men had knocked out the gun and begun an assault when hostile troops on the flank hurled several grenades. As he started for cover, Sgt. Johnson saw two unexploded grenades that had fallen near he and his men. He deliberately threw himself on the grenades and received their full charge in his body. Fatally wounded by the blast, he died soon afterward. Sgt. Leroy Johnson received his Medal of Honor posthumously, and it was accredited to the state of Louisiana. In 1947 the New Orleans Army Air Base was renamed Camp Leroy Johnson in his honor.

52 pound Catfish!

2005-05-19T01:35:00.000-04:00

Here I am holding an Opelousas Catfish, which I just caught out of the bayou at our camp: the Mallard Bay Hunting and Fishing Club. This fish weighed 54 pounds, and was very tough to handle by hand, as it was biting my fingers in this picture (because I was holding him up by his teeth!), and he was hitting my right leg with its very powerful tail! I later skinned and cleaned this fish: it fed about 10 men. These Cajun men made a Catfish Couvillion out of it: that is a red, tomatoe gravy that is rich in Cajun and Creole spices and served over a bed of rice. It also has diced peppers and onions in it, too, making it a spicy Cajun delight!

Alligator in my hands!

2005-05-19T01:31:00.000-04:00

Here I am, yes a doctor, holding an alligator! I caught this a few hours earlier in the bayou at my camp in Gueydan, Louisiana (Cameron Parish). The alligator was only about 4 feet long. I was raised hunting alligators in Southwest, Louisiana; as it is part of our/my Cajun Heritage. By the way, there is a hunting season on alligators, just like there is a hunting season on bullfrogs. A hunter is allowed to kill only a certain amount per year (less than 15, I think). I have killed probably only 5 in my life. I prefer to fish for catfish.

The "Three Vautrot's": Cajun Fishermen!

2005-05-19T01:28:00.000-04:00

Here you see the "Three Vautrot's" holding three Opelousas Catfish! Well, I am holding two of them, Jude Vautrot is holding one, and I am not quite sure what my dad is holding behind his back.

2005-05-19T01:26:00.000-04:00

The Three Vautrots: Here you see, from left to right: Victor J. Vautrot, M.D. holding the head of a 54 pound Opelousas Catfish; in the middle is Mr. Jude Vautrot from Church Point, Louisiana, and to the far right is my father, H.G. Vautrot, J.R., also from Church Point, Louisiana. In the background, is my dear friend Dennis Simon: he is cleaning an alligator!

Skinning Catfish on the Bayou

2005-05-19T01:24:00.000-04:00

Cleaning a large Opelousas Catfish in Gueydan, LA at my hunting camp. May 2005. The Opelousas Catfish has many other names, such as Flathead, Mashwatan, and several other Cajun French names! The meat is the best out of all of the species of freshwater catfish! This catfish weighed about 25 pounds. In my left hand, I am holding a Blue Catfish, which is a different species of freshwater catfish.

Buying my first home: May 2005; New Orleans, LA. Photos taken prior to Hurricane Katrina (Aug 27, 2005)

2005-05-19T01:20:00.000-04:00

Finally, the back view of my house and property. Here you can see the windows of the master bedroom. To the right, one can see that my garage has windows as well, which is where I will put an AC unit for my gym.

2005-05-19T01:19:00.000-04:00

My garage, which has a remote control access. I will not use it for my truck, but will convert it into a gym: it is very clean inside, very new, and has excellent cement floors. I intend on putting cable television and a window wall AC unit. This would make a terrific place to exercise or hang-out. To the right of this picture, one can see some roses: there is a rose garden next to my house!

Buying my first home: May 2005; New Orleans, LA

2005-05-19T01:16:00.000-04:00

A picture of one of the three bedrooms. Again, the curtains and carpets will be removed, and beautiful, stained laminated wood floors added. All three of my bedrooms are 11x14.

2005-05-19T01:14:00.000-04:00

This is the parlor, showing the front door. I will remove those terrible curtains, remove that white carpet, and place beautiful laminated wood floors.

2005-05-19T01:13:00.000-04:00

Here is the opposite view: this is with my back at the dishwasher in the kitchen, facing towards the dining room where my mom is entering, from the parlor in the very background of this picture. The parlor is behind her, the dining room is to her left, and the kitchen area is where I am standing.

2005-05-19T01:11:00.000-04:00

Here is a view of my kitchen from my parlor. The Parlor is the first room a visitor walks into from the outside. In this shot, one can see my dining room (before the kitchen counter top, and the kitchen itself). That door to the left in this view, that is the door that leads outside to the covered driveway.

2005-05-19T01:09:00.000-04:00

Here is the opposite end of the driveway: I have my back to the closed-in garage, and am facing my front gated-in driveway. To the right are several beautiful plants. To the left, there is a small door, that is not the sidedoor to my kitchen: it is a door that leads to my utility room, which is where my clothes washing machine and dryer are located (outside utility rooms are the norm in New Orleans I just found out, esp. in older homes built several decades ago). In the photo is my realtor, who just exited the steps that led-up to my side door. Notice the roof: again, there is a large portion of covered driveway, that is ideal for getting into and out of one's car if it is raining. Moreover, I think it makes an ideal spot for Barbeques at night!

Buying my first home: May 2005; New Orleans, LA

2005-05-19T01:05:00.000-04:00

My home in Arabi, Louisiana; St. Bernard Parish. Here I have walked up my drive way and tried to picture both the front gate (on the left), the fenced-in front porch (on the right), and the covered portion of the driveway beyond my front gate: there you can see a door, which gives access to my home, into my kitchen (a brilliant idea in design for carrying groceries inside my home directly into the kitchen if it is raining...I wont get wet!) Now, the front door at the right of this picture, behind the porch gate, leads into my parlor. The roof is only 4 years-young. I am very proud of my new home! It is great investment, and will certainly make me money when I sell it after residency!

2005-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

A view of my first home in St. Bernard Parish (on the outskirts of Orleans Parish where New Orleans is). As you can see, I have both a covered driveway and at the very end of the driveway, I have a closed garage (remote control open-close). My lot is decent: it is 100 feet long by 50 feet wide.

Buying my first home: May 2005; New Orleans, LA

2005-05-19T00:58:00.000-04:00

My first home in Arabi, Louisiana! I am moving to New Orleans for my residency at Tulane University School of Medicine, and I committed myself to buying a home rather than renting for 5 years. The mortgage on it is tax-deductible, much like my $190,000 medical school debt! Rent is not a tax write-off and a waste of money.

Hunting & Cleaning the American Bullfrog: Cajun Style!

2005-05-19T00:55:00.000-04:00

Hunting the American Bullfrog is quite variable: many locals (Cajuns) have their own techniques, which are co-dependant upon both the areas they hunt the frogs and the way their father taught them. And by the way: there is a hunting season on bullfrogs! It is NOT done year round, and we can NOT take as many as we please. Nonetheless, the most universal method of hunting these very large frogs involves: a flash light at night (their eyes reflect the beam in a very distinctive hue), a quick hand to grab them, the other hand holding a cold beer, and a large cotton/wool sack to place them once you caught the frog. The flashlight that is shined directly into their eyes will "blind" them to your slow approach. But one must be very fast with their hand to grab them, or else they leap far away into the safety of the muddy pond. Then you can celebrate your accomplishment with the swig of some cold beer, as you brag to your buddy about how fast you are despite having had so much to drink! Only in Louisiana! To clean Bullfrogs, you need a table as you see here with all of the following: a sharp knife to make an incision that is the circumference of the frogs head; a pair of "skinning pliers" to pull the skin down after it is cut to the depth of the meat; and a small hatchett to cut the head off. Be sure to wash the meat thoroughly in the buckets of clean water afterwards. Frog meat is best served fried: that is the most common way Cajun people, such as myself, eat it! However, I have recently used it on my George Foreman grill (a healthier alternative, especially for a physician to be mindful of)!

2005-05-19T00:51:00.000-04:00

Here I am holding one of the frogs in my fingertips, and taking the picture with the other hand at the same time. If you notice, the frog stretches as long as my finger tip to my elbow! That is exactly 18 inches long (yes, I measured). By the way, frog meat does not taste like chicken or fish. It is a distinctive meat, with its very own unique flavor and texture! Frog meat is a high-priced delicacy in Southwestern Louisiana: it is served only at our finer Cajun restaurants, and it is expensive! Moreover, there is a hunting season on frogs, too

Part of the Catch: 6 of the 18 Bullfrogs I caught at night.

2005-05-19T00:46:00.000-04:00

Here are the six American Bullfrogs (Rana catesbeiana) before I cleaned them. I used, in this photo, a very large kitchen table spoon as a size comparison!

2005-05-19T00:44:00.000-04:00

Here are six cleaned American bullfrogs (Rana catesbeiana); I caught them on my friend's property (Brandon Arabi) near Abbeville, Louisiana. Brandon owns a beautiful piece of paradise: he has several crawfish ponds, rice crops, etc on his property. One early evening in May, we rode on his four-wheeler and, with the use of headlights, caught 18 very large bullfrogs sitting on the water bank, by hand!

May 2005 Update

2005-05-08T03:12:00.000-04:00

I graduated from Ross University School of Medicine on April 1st, 2005. My cumulative grade point average for those four years is a 3.9. I will graduate with honors Sum Cum Laude.

I was accepted to Tulane University School Of Medicine for my residency training in Psychiatry. Only six were accepted into the four-year progam out of the 305 that applied from across America! I feel very fortunate and blessed to have achieved this after all of these years of intense studying & long night calls at the hospital.

Sisters' Sea Lodge: Fall 2001 on the island of Dominica: Ross med. school.

2005-05-08T02:47:00.000-04:00

An age-old photo taken in my 1st Semester of medical school at Ross University in September 2001, on the island of Dominica. I am with my good friends: Cathy, Rosy, Amber, Jim, Mujahed, Mia, me, and Margaret. We were all very young and knew nothing about medicine then (only one month of schooling!). Now, after more than 10 semesters and 4 years of schooling, each one of us is a physician. Amazing! In this photo, we were celebrating Amber's birthday; this particular restaurant was on the beach, and the view of the moon over the Carribean Sea that night was unforgettable! The food, which was fresh lobster, sea shrimp, and Red Snapper fish from the nearby bay, was absolutely stunning. They served these entrees on large banana leaves rather than traditional plates. The beer of choice was the local beer: Kubuli. It is made by the islanders.

Here are some photos taken in 2002, our 3rd or 4th semester of medical school at Ross University in the British West Indies (isle of Dominca). In these photos are my dear European and Middle Eastern friends: Ali Harb (radiology residency), Dmitry L. (internal medicine residency), Taras D. (psychiatry residency), Mishna (ob/gyn residency), "Stoytch"/Chris (internal medicine residency), "Paki" (anesthesia residency), Oleg (anesthesia residency). Most are from Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Siberia. They are good friends; they studied long and hard in the library; they also took time off to play sports, weight lift, visit neighboring islands, too. After our 4 semesters on the island, they went to America for their 2 years of clinical rotations, worked hard still, and many landed outstanding residency positions!

Another Blizzard hits Queens, NY

2005-05-08T02:43:00.000-04:00

Shovelling my truck out of snow the day after yet another New York blizzard hit us in Queens, NY in Feb. 2005! That is where I was living during my many last rotations of medical school (OB/GYN, Surgery, Neurology, etc). Also seen in this photo is Sita, which is our Yellow Labrador Retriever. She was quite "busy" watching me do all the work! She is a truly terrific dog: full of personality and mischief.

New Orleans: Feb 2005

2005-05-08T02:41:00.000-04:00

With my mom, Barbara Ann Johnson, in the French Quarter section of New Orleans, La on Feb. 15, 2005. She drove down to visit me from our hometown of Lafayette, LA. to visit me for my interview at Tulane University School of Medicine. I was living in New York, completing my last rotations of medical school and was invited to fly down for the interview at Tulane.
She will proudly tell ya' that she was born in the "piney woods" of Louisiana, and that her father was a rancher and a farmer! My mom is an English Literature high school teacher for 25 years; she also teaches Greek Mythology, Theology, and Shakespeare (which she can quote effortlessly). Nonetheless, she has been a true and sincere supporter of my medical career, both psychologically and financially: med school can, at times, be difficult to handle because of the long hours we work and the difficult patient cases we handle, and it is certainly very, very expensive. So, again, I am eternally thankful to have such a supportive mom by my side, as you can see here!

New Orleans, LA: Feb. 2005

2005-05-08T02:40:00.000-04:00

Standing in front of the Mississippi River in New Orleans, La on Feb 15, 2005. It was the day prior to my interview with Tulane University School of Medicine, which is where I was later accepted to do my residency training! What a blessing from God.

SURGERY! An exciting experience, but very challenging!

2005-05-08T02:38:00.000-04:00

Wearing my scrubs during my Surgery Rotation in medical school. January - April 2005, in hospitals throughout Brooklyn and Queens, NY. This is me wearing my scrubs that I had to use daily during my 3 month Surgery Rotation in Queens and Brooklyn, New York. Surgery was indeed the hardest, yet most educational rotation during my Clinical years of med school. I loved the educational experience of Surgery, the capability we had in helping our patients (removing cancer tissues, fixing atherosclerotic aortas and carotid arteries, etc), but I despised the long, grueling hours we put in: I clocked in 92 hours per week during those 3 months. In fact, many of the boyfriends/girlfriends of my medical student collegues broke up with them, as they blamed the med students for neglecting the relationship. Well, we were required to work, eat, and sleep at the hospital everyday and night. And their boyfriends/girlfriends could not relate nor understand what we were going through. So, alot of the med students lost there loved one. It was sad, but good in a way: it is good to get rid of those who dont understand the committment we have to the field of Medicine, and it would be a disaster to marry someone like that.

Hunting Camp in Gueydan, Louisiana

2005-05-08T02:35:00.000-04:00

This is another view of the inside of the camp, showing the cooking area where many terrific meals were made: catfish couvillion, fried fish, roasted wild ducks, barbequed wild deer and pork, fried alligator, chicken and sausage gumbos, seafood gumbos, squirrel gumbos, roasted rabbit, etc. I can go on and on; the food in Southwestern Louisiana is totally unique!

Hunting and Fishing Camp: Gueydan, Louisiana

2005-05-08T02:33:00.000-04:00

This is one view of the inside of the camp, showing the 6 bunk beds to house and sleep 12 hunters. Seen on the table is a large serving of fresh, fried catfish that we caught in the bayou a few hours earlier. There are also some bags of groceries (drinking water, bread, etc).

Hunting and Fishing Camp: Gueydan, Louisiana

2005-05-08T02:32:00.000-04:00

This is the side profile of our Hunting and Fishing camp: The Mallard Bay Hunting Club. It is in Gueydan, Louisiana, built in 1955 with the use of real Cypress Tree wood. Will last several hundred years. It is on an island, surrounded by two bayous, one large marsh, and one large lake. Lots of deer, ducks, and coyotes live in the area.

Catching Fish in a Hoop Net!

2005-05-08T02:29:00.000-04:00

Raising a hoop net at the Mallard Bay Hunting Club in Gueydan, Louisana. April 2005 with my friends Dennis Simon and Louis Turner. What is a hoop net? This device is laid with its mouth open IN the direction of the bayou's current, because fish must swim UPstream to maintain oxygenation in their gills. However, as they pass inside the hoop net, each funnel gets smaller and smaller, until they reach the last compartment of the net (the net is about 16 feet long with 3 large compartments to hold fish). The last compartment has a flimsy funnel that lets the fish inside but they cant pass back through it. And the end of the net has an area that we tie to open and close, so that we can let the fish out inside of our boat. The hoop net is a unique fish catching device invented thousands of years ago by Native Americans along the Mississippi River. The tradition was passed along to the French settlers who travelled and traded here in this part of the country beginning in the mid 1700's. Cajuns, such as my family, still bear the tradition of hoop net fishing in the freshwater bayous of Louisiana, where each net can hold up to 400 pounds of catfish, garfish, buffalo fish, and carp! Sometimes, we even catch large turtles and alligators. Here you can see all of the fish splashing water around, as they are caught inside the tail of the net! Seen behind me is my dad, H.G. Vautrot, and there is also our long-time friend Louis Turner (wearing the blue shirt). He lives in Houston, Texas, but is always happy to drive down over to Louisiana to catch fish with us, and enjoy a good, tastey Cajun meal of fresh, fried catfish!

Cleaning the Catch!

2005-05-08T02:26:00.000-04:00

Cleaning the Gaspergoo fish. This was taken at my hunting and fishing club: The Mallard Bay Hunting Club, which was established by my dad in 1955 when he was 15 years-young. It is in Gueydan, Louisiana (in Cameron Parish). There are lots of bayous, one huge lake (called Mallard Bay), and an extremely large marsh, which is where we hunt deer and ducks. The large lake is where we set hoop nets to catch fish for us to eat...primarily catfish. However, here I am seen cleaning a Gaspergoo fish, which is a freshwater scale fish that is related to the saltwater fish called a Drum fish. They have very tastey white meat, and their primary food prey is crawfish.

My Antique Civil War era gun collection!

2005-05-08T02:24:00.000-04:00

This is a picture of my Civil War antique gun collection; these are official, real weapons used between 1850 and 1870. Notice the Confederate battle flag! My paternal great, great grandfather fought with the Confederate Army. His name was Thomas Z. Prather: he was with the 15th Georgia Volunteer Infantry regiment. His unit fought in ALL of the major battles in the War for Southern Independence (aka Civil War): he was at Fredericksburg in 1862, Gettysburg in 1863, Chickamauga in 1863, Petersburg in 1864, and even surrendered with General Robert E. Lee at Appamattox Court House on April 9th, 1865. By the way, he was only 15 years-young when he enlisted, and despite being wounded at Chickamauga, this young man survived that terrible war! am proud of my ancestor! And I am proud to be an American.

2005-05-08T02:21:00.000-04:00

My mom took this pic in her kitchen in May 2005.

2005-05-08T02:18:00.000-04:00

Here I am posing in my mom's kitchen! May 2005.

April 2005 Update

2005-03-27T17:47:00.000-05:00

Well,
The NRMP (National Residency Match Program) is concluded; I matched at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana for a 4 year residency in Psychiatry! This is a true blessing, as my parents live in the area, and it is a University program, which has easy access to elite Fellowship programs (Child Pyschiatry, Forensic Psychiatry, and Emergency Psychiatry). So, I will drive away from Brooklyn and Queens, New York in April, now that I am done with Surgery, and head back South. By the way, Surgery was the toughest rotation I have endured: the call schedule was q 3, meaning I was overnight at the hospital every third night for the 3 months! I was clocking-in 90 hours per week of hospital time, spread out over Emergency Room admissions and Operating Room time. Nontheless, the learning experience and exposure was terrific.

Anyway, I cant wait to return back to the Bayou State; I have been away for 4 years: I lived in Dominica, British West Indies; Miami, Florida, and New York City, New York. I look forward to helping my neighbors and citizens in New Orleans, and getting a great education at a University program such as Tulane.

Celebrating the end of 5th Semester on a Cruise Ship

2005-01-07T16:34:00.000-05:00

April 2003: Here I am aboard a Carnival cruise line ship. It was a lot of fun for a 4 day trip. The ship served lots of food, fun, and drinks! We went to parties, gambled, sunbathed, had dinner and drinks, and then we took a smaller boat to a little island. On the island, we swam in a lagoon, slept on a hammock, and played on the beach.

Studying for a Medical Board Exam

2005-01-07T16:28:00.000-05:00

Summer 2003: Studying in the library in Miami Florida for USMLE STEP 1. The test is an 8 hour long mind-maze that leaves one feeling dazed, confused, and "drunk-like" afterwards. It was probably the hardest exam of my life. It covered genetics, biochemistry, pathology, histology, physiology, behavioral science, endocrinology, etc....

Residency Interview at Eastern Carolina University

2005-01-07T16:25:00.000-05:00

I am at Eastern Carolina University for an interview for the Physical Medicine/Rehab residency program in Greenville, North Carolina. Standing next to me is a very nice Phillipino doctor; he is short in stature but has a huge heart !