DOCTORS IN LOVE

Drs. Bill and Marybeth Kapp with their daughters, Kelly and Reagan.

Benjamin Yuen and Celia L. Chan are doctors who married. They specialize in hematology and oncology and work at Cape Girardeau Physicians Associates in Doctors Park.

Cape Girardeau is home to at least five pairs of married physicians, maybe more. Some are in the same profession and even work in the same practice. Others specialize in different fields.

But for all of them, medical school and marriage went hand-in-hand. They discovered other doctors understood their work-related worries. They realized their time together would be limited due to ungodly hours and emergency calls.

Most importantly, they could read each other's handwriting.

Drs. Bill and Marybeth Kapp met during their residency at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. She was a budding ophthalmologist. He was a budding orthopedic surgeon doing a rotation in ophthalmology.

Their stories about their first encounter differ. Marybeth says she noticed Bill eying her, and when he asked to be assigned to her during his rotation, she told her supervisor no. Bill says he didn't want to be assigned to her, anyway.

Either way, he asked her out on the last day of his ophthalmology rotation for a casual drink with 10 or 15 friends. When the couple arrived at the meeting place, none of the friends was there. Their interest in each other blossomed.

Most of the Kapps classmates weren't interested in dating each other. The competitive atmosphere didn't lend itself to love, and Bill once claimed he never would marry a doctor.

"Now I tell my family I didn't marry a doctor," he said. "I married an ophthalmologist."

They wed in May 1991 and moved to Cape Girardeau from St. Louis in 1995. Bill is with Orthopedic Associates, where he works with Dr. Bill Wester. Wester's wife, radiologist Christine Wester, is Marybeth's sister.

Marybeth's practice is the Center for Pediatric Eye Care and Adult Eye Muscle Surgery.

The Kapps find Southeast Missouri offers them more time for each other and for their daughters, Kelly, 2, and Reagan, 6 months. Even minus commuting time, their schedules still can become hectic.

"I have friends whose husbands turned off their beepers because they were sick of hearing them," Marybeth said. "People who aren't doctors don't always understand why you don't get to see your family on Christmas or why you have to walk out in the middle of a movie."

Another Cape Girardeau couple, Dr. Benjamin Yuen and Dr. Celia Chan, are specialists in hematology and oncology. The Hong Kong natives met at Taiwan National University, where the medical students were very different than the ones at Baylor. In Taiwan, about 85 percent of the students married people in the medical field.

"The hospital and medicine was our whole life," Chan said. "You don't get a chance to contact the outside world that much."

They were engaged by the time they came to the United States, and they married in January 1985 in Chicago. Yuen said it was a bright, sunny day and only 20 degrees below zero.

Both did their residency at the infamous Cook County Hospital, which Yuen described as "a war zone." It was the best training he and Chan could have received, he said.

They went on to practice at different hospitals in Chicago for several years, but the pace was too much.

"That kind of lifestyle was very stressful," Yuen said. "We have two kids, and we had to leave them very far away from where we worked."

They moved to Cape Girardeau in August 1994 with their children, Christopher, 10, and Alison, 5. Both physicians are with Cape Girardeau Physician Associates in Doctors' Park. They share an office.

Their close working environment suits them. Yuen and Chan seem to smile constantly, consult each other about various patients and even take each other's caseloads when family emergencies arrive.

"Sometimes when we have interesting or difficult cases, we talk it over and get each other's opinion," Chan said.

Two other couples, Drs. Tom and Jean Diemer and Dr. Sarah Aydt and Dr. Michael Jedlinski, are in the same medical practice.