Tolkkinen: A long-ago good deed by two radiologists has helped women across Minnesota

ASHBY, MINN. – Dr. June LaValleur took a Danish pastry out of her oven and set it on the counter, part of a six-hour process from start to finish. Flaky, sweet and golden, it would be frosted and dotted with sliced cherries and then delivered to someone special — a long-ago benefactor.

In the early 1980s, when LaValleur was 41, married and the mother of three teenage boys living in Osakis, Minn., she wanted to go to medical school. She'd been accepted at the University of Minnesota Medical School and had already started taking classes. She had no trepidation about starting med school in her 40s, something most people start in their 20s. When she graduated from Ashby High School in 1959, nobody encouraged girls to become doctors. Now that she'd thought of it, she had no money and had been turned down for most loans. And medical school was expensive.

Enter a pair of Alexandria, Minn., radiologists, Dale Undem and Richard Eiser. They heard about LaValleur's need from Undem's wife, Jo, who was friends with June, and they agreed without hesitation to finance her education, interest-free.

"We had the assets," Eiser recalled. "It was no big deal."

Little did he know that the outspoken, determined friend of his partner's wife would help change women's health care throughout the state.

Eiser's wife, Eileen, said they rarely thought about the loan. There was no paperwork, no promissory note, no breakdown of expenses. They never worried about being repaid. It was just something good they could do, so they did it.

LaValleur finished medical school and then her residency. It was tough being away from her family. She had asked them to come with her to the Twin Cities, but they wanted to stay at home in Osakis, two hours away. On weekends, she stayed with them, driving to the Twin Cities early Monday mornings and driving home on Fridays. She hired an Osakis woman to be at their home in the afternoon so that the boys would never come home from school to an empty house before her husband got home from work. That expense, too, was covered by the radiologists.

It was in her last year of residency that she had a blunt conversation with the head of the university's OB/GYN department. She told him his department did a terrible job of educating students about menopause. Only she didn't use the word "terrible." She used a much stronger adjective, one we can't reprint in a family newspaper.

Even though menopause can cause hot flashes, night sweats, palpitations, painful sexual intercourse, mood changes and memory problems, among other problems, medical students at the time barely learned anything about it. And LaValleur was not one to stay quiet.

The director didn't get offended. Instead, he offered her a job in his department as head of the newly created Mature Women's Center.

"I had planned on returning to the Alexandria area, but after a great deal of thought I decided I could make more of a difference by teaching hundreds of students and residents than seeing one patient at a time," LaValleur said.

Over the next 15 years, she conducted research, saw patients, and trained thousands of medical students and interns.

"What I emphasized was menopause affects every woman differently," she said. "Some have symptoms. Some do not. You need to listen to them. And if they have symptoms that they want treated you need to know how to do that."

The field was ripe for study. How did menopause affect women's hearts? What treatments would help? Was hormone replacement therapy helpful? Alongside dozens of other university investigators, LaValleur helped advance knowledge of women's health through national studies like the Women's Health Initiative and the Heart and Estrogen (HERS) Study.

Once she started earning a salary, LaValleur paid the Alexandria doctors back over 10 years. But she will never forget how they made her new life possible, and ever since, each December, she makes them their holiday Danish. It's a tedious and time-consuming process, hours of rolling and folding the dough, and then letting it sit, and then braiding it and shaping it. But the end product is a thing of beauty.

LaValleur is 83 now. Retired, she splits her time between Ashby and a small town near the Iowa border. She was raised on a farm and spent most of her life in rural Minnesota, and she worries about rural areas. There aren't enough pharmacies and not enough labor and delivery services. She wishes family physicians would learn to perform C-sections before they practice in a rural area. It would be so helpful.

Her work has been recognized several times by the medical community, and she has served on numerous medical boards and committees. More importantly, if you're going through menopause, and your doctor listens to your symptoms, and is able to prescribe a solution that works, maybe that's LaValleur's influence, made possible by long-ago help from a pair of Alexandria radiologists.

Undem died in 2008, but LaValleur still visits Eiser and his wife.

"They need to know how important what they did for me was," she said. "I never wanted them to forget it. I held them in high esteem."