From Masonry to Medicine

It was in the summer of 1992, when a series of unfortunate events changed the lives of Jeff and Ava Munderloh of Fremont.

The couple married young. Ava was just 19, Jeff was 21. Eight years later they had their first child, a daughter, Alesha.

In 1992, they were expecting again.

“With Sara coming along, you begin to wonder if there is something else you’d like to do,” he said.

Jeff was blue collar laborer, working in “mud, dirt, sweat -- a man with a weak mind and a strong back.”

But various occurrences led Jeff to consider a different occupation.

The first involved finances. It was summer. Their air conditioning went out and there was little money to fix it.

Then a neighbor fell in their driveway and was bleeding.

“I had no clue what to do,” he said.

When the rescue squad responded, Jeff was amazed at their professionalism.

On July 2, Ava went into the hospital for a Caesarian section. There, pediatrician Dr. Scott Green noticed that baby Sara was breathing a little fast. As the doctor and Jeff were going down the hall they saw all the nurses run into the nursery.

They were working on Sara.

“They got her back, then Life-Flighted her to Children’s Hospital in Omaha where she was diagnosed with premature lungs.”

Jeff spent a week in the hospital with Sara before Ava could come. As time passed, he developed an interest in medicine �” and others noticed.

Ava’s mother saw that Jeff seemed to know how everything worked, which baby in the neonatal intensive care unit was getting what kind of therapy and medication.

When Ava mentioned her mother’s observation to Green, he suggested Jeff return to school.

He later told Jeff to go to medical school.

How long would it take?

“Twelve years,” Green said.

Jeff sought another route.

Dan Hakel, a physician’s assistant, advised Jeff to become a physician’s assistant. That was on a Wednesday night.

The next morning Jeff, his boss, Steve Lorensen, and two other men were digging a hole so steps into a basement could be constructed.

“We were digging the hole,” Jeff said. “My boss and another guy went to the basement to cut a hole through the inside concrete wall. I was thinking that maybe I needed to join the rescue squad. We just about had the hole dug. The backhoe was working when I heard, ‘Look out!’ then a rumble.

“I was buried under loose dirt and asphalt. A piece of asphalt slid on top of me and kept me from suffocating. The two outside men were trying to get the asphalt off of me. Lorensen came out and heaved the asphalt off and dug me out. They called the same rescue squad I had just been thinking about joining.”

Jeff spent the next five months recuperating.

“I was moping around feeling sorry for myself,” Jeff said.

Then Ava asked if he was going to check out becoming a physician’s assistant.

Jeff joined the rescue squad, took emergency medical training classes and returned to work in January. He worked until school started in August at Wayne State.

He remembers his high school years. He had taken no chemistry, no algebra, nothing like that.

“I was a slacker in high school,” Jeff said.

He grew up on a farm, one of nine kids, and although some of his siblings went on to college, he never really considered it.

At Wayne State, Jeff bloomed.

He won awards in anatomy and chemistry.

“When you spend 13 years on the brick pile, school is a vacation. You’re a sponge at that age,” he said.

Ava remembers that all Jeff would do is study.

She went back to work, he laid bricks in the summer and they scraped by, usually on their own, but with family and friends pitching in once in a while, eager to make it work.

Jeff learned what he missed in high school, was accepted to University of Nebraska Medical Center in his junior year, graduating mid-term in 1998.

For 28 months he lived with Ava’s aunt and uncle in Omaha during the week while he went to school, coming home to see his family on weekends.

“I’d always have a toy for the girls and sent them cards with a stick of gum in them during the week,” he said.

Jeff became a member of the staff of the Mercy Medical Clinic in Pender in 2001.

He credits Green, Lorensen and martial arts instructor James Willer with being key influences in the decision to return to school and become a physician’s assistant.

Each one gave him, he believes, what he needed. He remembers how Lorensen, who was working at Omaha while Munderloh was in school, loaned Munderloh his masonry tools so he could work in the summer.

He is grateful to Willer for the things he learned through martial arts and the encouragement he received from these men. Munderloh has his own martial arts academy in Pender where he teaches kids to focus and be self-disciplined.

“If I would have martial arts in high school, I would not have been a slacker,” he said.

The events of the summer of 1992 altered the Munderlohs’ lives. Out of medical emergencies came a desire to know more, to do more, that carried Munderloh to college, then medical school, and at last to a career he loves.