Awards, Press & Interests

The Specimen

On April 11, 2014, Dr. Marilyn Olga Clare King-Rankine, M.D. a humble, industrious, and pioneering cardiologist and electrophysiologist from the former British Guiana, global South America--a tiny, mineral-rich country nestled in between the arms of border neighbours Venezuela and Brazil--sighed her last breaths on one of her beloved hospital cardiac care wards in Fort Worth Texas; her hands were in the hands of her eldest daughter Fey, the author, as she did so. Her passing marked a final, merciful release after a courageous two-year battle with two types of rare uterine cancer. She was 69. Dr. King-Rankine, the second child of Wainwright Earle King, the Superintendent of Police of British-controlled Guiana, South America, and Stella Edna (née Wharton) King, his wife, a Roman Catholic boys' school teacher--emigrated to the Unites States as a foreign student in the midst of the civil rights turbulence of the 1960's. She received her B.A. in Zoology and an M.A. in Microbiology from Howard University in Washington, DC; her M.D. from Temple University Medical School in Philadelphia, PA; performed her internship and residency at the renowned Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, OH, where she was also accepted into their cardiology program--and additionally became the first Woman ever accepted into the electrophysiology program at the Cleveland Clinic. Subsequent to her training, Dr. King-Rankine went on to become the first--and died the only--Black cardiologist in Fort Worth, Texas. A private practitioner, Dr. King-Rankine specialized in cardiology, particularly the implantation and explantation of pacemakers and defibrillators, electrophysiology, and nuclear cardiology. Additionally, amongst other firsts, she brought the revolutionary procedure of explanting pacemaker leads--using lasers--to Fort Worth in 2011, one year before she was diagnosed with stage 4 uterine cancer. A convert later in life from her baptismal Roman Catholic church to the religion that was actually that of her first husband--Episcopalianism/Anglicanism--Dr. King-Rankine's packed funeral mass was held at All Saints Episcopal Church in Fort Worth, Texas, and presided over by the rector of the church--himself a retired emergency room physician, who had decades earlier, been called to the Episcopal priesthood. Dr. King-Rankine was preceded in death by her brother, Dr. Loris Oswald O'Brien King, M.D., also a pioneering cardiologist, in Naples, FL--who similarly died of prostate cancer, seven years before her, in 2007. Dr. King-Rankine was in fact, still deeply grieving her beloved brother's death to cancer, when she received her own late-stage cancer diagnosis. They are both interred nearby each other in Naples, FL. The Specimen is a poignant, poetic and actual photographic ode to the Stages of Death and Dying--as lived by Dr. King-Rankine in her battle with her late-stage diagnosed cancers and attendant chronic illnesses, with the majority of the poems presented in Western haiku form, and the remainder in traditional Japanese haiku.