No One Is Coming

Who is Dan Poulsen…and where is he going with this?

I was born in a small upstate NY town outside of Buffalo. By the time I was 5 years old my parents had managed to ascend to a government housing project apartment. I vividly remember sitting on the steel and concrete porch watching for my dad’s headlights. You can’t tell what kind of car is coming at night by looking at its headlights. You’re blinded until the final moment it passes by you and is illuminated. None of the cars ever belonged to my dad. I stopped waiting when it was his day. The cherry on the Sunday was a day my brothers and I now jokingly reminisce about. Mom woke us up one Saturday and said “Get up and pack! Your dad is comin’ to get us ‘n move in with him.” We got up excitedly and packed our things into our garbage bags. Sat out in front of the apartment in the cool morning grass until it gave way to the hot afternoon sun. Guess what, we didn’t move out of that project apartment for another 6 years…No one is coming.

Because of this, I tried to follow through on my dad’s prior parting mandate. On his way out the back door he lifted me up into the utility room sink. Now eye to eye he said: “Danny, you’re the man ‘o the house now. Take care of your Mom and brothers.” Never have 4 syllables reverberated so thoroughly. Man-uh-tha-house. The phrase to my 5-year-old self was completely unfamiliar yet the meaning clear; stamped on my heart to this day. There’s something unusually comical yet, now as a father myself, simultaneously horrific about this scene. The words: man, house, care. Strung together in a directive to a kid capable of physically and psychologically absorbing them but without the intellectual, experiential or emotional connective tissue to do anything but collapse and misshape under their effects like a sandcastle encountering the rising tide.

The fact is, Mom was the only one capable of caring for anyone. She was my first model of a healer. If healthcare is a hierarchy, she never left the bottom rung. But, if defined as service and love, I’ve never met her equal. Sons are tempted to exaggerate their mother’s saintliness. But I have dozens of first-person experiences observing her at work with patients and, as a result, could only risk understating it. A nurse’s aide trained at the local community hospital; she kept the lights on caring for the elderly and disabled. She invented homecare before it had a name. Thankless, messy work, but always with a warm smile. 30-year-olds in diapers who suffered anoxic brain injury during childbirth, elderly grandmothers who long forgot their own names…she treated each as her own. It wasn’t just cleaning feces, wiping faces and sponge baths, but long conversations, singing old hymns and personalized renditions of “Jonah rode a boat ashore” as one of those special 30-something’s pounded away shirtless on his parents’ old stand up piano singing unintelligibly with glee. Mom did the thankless hidden things. But also saw the soul of each person, rehumanizing them in a way others couldn’t.

My first example of medicine was our pediatrician, Dr. Dahl. He was still making house calls into the 1980’s long before “Direct Primary Care” and “Concierge Medicine” became en vogue. An anachronism who had much in common with country doctors paid in kind from a time gone by. His office, located on the first floor of his home, was run by his wife. I now realize looking back through my adult experience, he must’ve been well into his 70’s. But Dr. Dahl was still carrying his black bag to visit left-behind kids in a rundown government housing complex, for mothers who didn’t have the means to make it to his office one town over. Once, after seeing my brothers and me for whatever was ailing us, he dozed off; right there on our frayed holey orange living room couch while sitting upright. Mom, upon walking back in with the tea glass of water she promised him, reverently whispered “shhhh, Dr. Dahl is tired. Let him sleep.” One saint, looking after another, recognizing the fatigue that comes after draining yourself for others.

Fast forward, now and I’m 14 years old. My mom managed to pull us up out of the projects with a little help. She married my stepfather who was a “rich” swing shift worker at the local power plant. We moved to that adjacent town where Dr. Dahl’s office was and lived in the first place that we owned outright. At this point I was a terrible student but a promising athlete. I started playing football and later joined the wrestling team in high school. I was a bit of a home-town hero. Really, just a big fish in a little pond. But good enough to make the local papers. I was even featured once as the athlete of the week on WKBW news channel 4 after I did some amazing feats as a wrestler.

Who made this possible? A coach named Dan Fire and his brother Dave. These guys were unique and a little bit crazy, but in a good way. I tried to quit wrestling halfway through my junior year of high school because I wanted to get a job and buy a crappy car. Dan Fire called my house every night. “You have the rest of your life for a shitty job, you only have NOW to be a wrestler.” He did this until I relented and finally agreed to come back to the team. Another Saturday I overslepped on a tournament day. Panicked, I looked at the black digital clock with red numbers next to my bed and realized it was too late to make the bus…next thing I hear…the bus horn blowing in front of my house. Peering through the frosty window I see coach Dan hanging out the bus window waving his arm while yelling “Poulsen, get your a8$ out here!” I waited out front for my dad to pick me up and these guys were chasing ME.

These men gave up every afternoon after their regular jobs (Dan a postal worker and Dave a high school maintenance man) to teach a bunch of nobody kids in a nobody town how to wrestle. Of those kids they taught, one went from being convicted in a courtroom of grand theft to being a prominently known lawyer, another became a hospital system CEO known for turning around institutions from deep in the red to the black, another was a kid who moved to Philadelphia to teach kids in the hardest schools in the country that they could learn with a little inspiration, they just had to do the hard work and have somebody show them the way; that was until he overdosed visiting his friends back in my hometown that he used to get high with. And that illustrates the duality of where I came from. We all grew up in a nowhere town in the midst of the opiate epidemic. These men, the Fire brothers, for basically no money and no glory for themselves, donated 1,000’s of hours to kids that nobody else believed in to teach them that somebody cared about them and hard work pays off…like really hard work. Wrestling is a beast. If you wrestled in high school or college, you’re a hardworking mother…but you only made it because you had coaches who cared more about you than you cared about yourself.

All that grit and guidance carried me into college, but it didn’t make me a good student. At least not at first.

Part 2: Becoming Dr. Poulsen (the long way around)

This will be a 3-part series published entirely this week.

Next installment Tuesday May 12, 2026

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