User Profile

I've been an orthopedic surgeon longer than anything else in my life if I exclude being the child of my parents and the wife of Paul Nader from that list. I'm Barbara Bergin, an orthopedic surgeon from Austin, Texas. I finished four years of medical school and five years of residency in 1985. I came here with two other guys I met in my residency at Texas Tech University School of Medicine and we started Texas Orthopedics, Sports and Rehabilitation Associates. It's been one of the most successful and fulfilling endeavors in my life. I love my practice and being an orthopod. I wrote about that in my novel.

My husband and I wanted to come to Austin because my parents had moved here several years before we finished our training and because I am a momma's girl. It was fortuitous that my partner, Frosty Moore and his buddy, John Obermiller were moving to Austin, come hell or high water, since they were old Austinites and die-hard Longhorns. Having been a Red Raider for all of my graduate and post-graduate years, I would not have otherwise gravitated toward Longhorn territory. Now that I think of it, I've been a Red Raider longer than I've been married to Paul! That's strange, but football is a big part of our lives so it's probably natural to consider ourselves in terms of team mascots.

Austin has been a great place to raise our kids and I'm glad we came here. I have a daughter Wallis who is a student at the University of Texas. She's a Longhorn. My son Matt committed to play football for the University of Texas as an offensive lineman when he was a junior in high school. Because of a previously unknown lethal heart condition which almost took his life during a football game on September 15, 2006, he will be unable to play football. But Coach Mac Brown honored Matt's football scholarship so our son remains involved with the team as a student assistant coach.

I've been a mom for twenty years, also a successful and fulfilling part of my life. Raising my children defines me. More than being a surgeon or a wife or a horseback rider, I am and will always be, Wallis' and Matt's mom. And with children that definition is always changing.

My husband is a nephrologist (a kidney specialist). It would be unfair for me to leave out his affiliations. He would call me on it too. He's a sometime Southern Methodist University Mustang and a die-hard adopted Tiger. LSU tiger. But now he says "hook 'em horns!" Did I say we love football?

Wallis was born while we were in our training. Paul decided on nephrology and we decided to live in Austin at about the same time. Paul had to do his fellowship training in Dallas, Texas so we lived apart for those two years and we look back on them as two of the most difficult years of our marriage.

I think I lost my northeastern accent about five years ago. At least that's about when people stopped saying "you don't come from these parts, do you?" No I don't. I was born in the Bronx. You don't say Bronx, New York, except on government forms. Just "the Bronx." I didn't live there for long, or anywhere for long for that matter. We lived in Rome, New York, Houston, Texas, Kansas City and finally Houston again. From there I moved to Lubbock, Texas to start school in 1972. There is something special about Lubbock and I'm going to write about it in my next book.

Back to losing my accent. Western horseback riding did that. I've been a horseback rider for almost fourteen years of my life. Prior to that I may have rented a horse on a beach once, taken a childhood lesson once and ridden on a vacation trail ride... once. That's a story in itself. Maybe I'll put it in the book about Lubbock.

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