September 6, 1948 – February 20, 2024
It is with heavy hearts that we announce the passing of our beloved father and friend Dr. Nicholas Charles Di Domenico of Encino.
Dr. Di Domenico was born on September 6, 1948, in Chester, Pennsylvania, a small town outside Philadelphia. Although he would move across the country as a young man to establish a medical practice and raise a family in the San Fernando Valley, throughout his life he remained closely connected to Chester and the Italian American community of his childhood.
Dr. Di Domenico proudly hailed from a long line of Italian immigrants, including all four grandparents who emigrated from the Naples and Abruzzo regions of Italy. Some of his fondest childhood memories were of his mother’s homemade Italian cooking, which he maintained was the best in the world. In later years, he would travel extensively with his children throughout Italy and never found a dish that quite matched the ones his mother cooked in their little rowhouse kitchen in Chester.
His communion, confirmation, and baptism occurred at St. Anthony’s de Padua, an Italian church in Chester. This early exposure to Catholicism afforded him a strong connection to his own spirituality, which provided a sense of peace at the end of his life.
As a young student, Dr. Di Domenico excelled academically. In junior high, he was placed in the school’s most advanced academic class and served as student council secretary. As a student at Chester High School, his mother’s alma mater, he was placed on two academic decathlon teams and was later accepted to Temple University on a scholarship.
Unable to afford housing near campus, he lived at home and made the 3-hour roundtrip commute on public transportation each day. He supported himself through those early years selling subscriptions to the county newspaper, working at a local pharmacy, unloading tractor trailers on weekends, and joining his father’s union as a construction laborer.
“As a little kid around 12-years-old, I had a dream to become a doctor, and I never thought I could because I didn’t come from a lot of money or have educated parents,” he later explained. “But I never stopped wanting to go to medical school because I knew that's what I wanted to do.”
As he continued his education in a master’s degree program at Temple, his desire to become a physician was cemented when he took a weekend job in the hematology department at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “Serendipity isn’t luck,” he would later reflect. And thus began his 40-year career in medicine.
Dr. Di Domenico stayed close to home for medical school, earning his medical degree from the Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1976, where he was named to the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society. This was followed by an internship and residency in internal medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. The only problem? The weather.
“With all this overcast weather, I gotta go somewhere where the sun shines,” he reminisced of his fateful decision to accept a nephrology fellowship at UCLA in 1980. He would call Los Angeles home for the rest of his life.
As expected, his fellowship brought warm weather. But as serendipity would have it, the fellowship also led to a chance encounter with a dialysis nurse named Priscilla Quintero during a shift at the Department of Veterans Affairs. By the mid-1980s, the couple had married, purchased a modest ranch home in the San Fernando Valley, and started a family that would grow to five children.
Dr. Di Domenico joined the Valley Internal Medicine Group in 1982. His days were mostly spent at the practice's Van Nuys office. He loved working with the other team members in that office, and they became their own happy work family. The office was situated right next to Valley Presbyterian Hospital which provided him the opportunity to round on patients and see new consults for nephrology. Dr. D, as most hospital staff called him, built relationships with everyone at Valley Presbyterian Hospital. He found caring for the patients at this community hospital to be extremely rewarding.
“I'm sort of a people person. I like to be around people,” he recalled of his years practicing medicine. “I like to hear their stories. In the hospital, I knew everybody. I knew the housekeepers, the transporters, the nurses, the technicians, the ward secretaries, and it was another great experience. Taking care of the patients in the hospital was rewarding. It's exactly what I wanted to do.”
In 1990, he was appointed chair of the VPH Foundation’s Advisory Committee. Later in life, he served as a member of its Board of Directors. His enduring commitment to his patients was recognized in 2015 when Dr. Di Domenico became the first doctor honored at Valley Presbyterian’s annual gala. His family cheered him on as he beamed from the dais.
And although he enjoyed great success as a physician, Dr. Di Domenico’s single greatest joy and accomplishment in life was raising five beautiful children. From baseball practices and swimming competitions to birthday parties, graduations, and holiday dinners, Dr. Di Domenico could be found with a video camera in hand documenting everything for posterity. His children continued to bring him immense joy throughout his life, even when fatherhood grew bittersweet with the unexpected passing of his wife Priscilla in 2006 while his children were still young.
When Dr. Di Domenico’s bladder and kidney cancer became high-grade in 2019, he stepped back from the practice of medicine and devoted his remaining time to his family, including walking his daughter Katie down the aisle at a small wedding in his backyard just a few weeks before his passing. He was thrilled that Katie met her future husband while working as a nurse during the COVID pandemic at Valley Presbyterian.
Over the years, he drew from his tough upbringing to help give him the strength to complete countless procedures, blood draws, hospitalizations, chemotherapy, and radiation treatments. He would often tell the nurse or phlebotomist, "I can handle it, I am a tough boy from Philly."
As his illness worsened, he was asked if there was anything he felt he still needed to say to his loved ones.
“I think that ‘I love you’ is a very important thing to say. I didn’t quite hear it much as a kid. I would like to say that I love my kids.”
When Dr. Di Domenico finally lost his courageous 30-year battle with cancer, his children were by his side. And as he took his final breaths, his children found strength in those same words as they told their father they loved him too.
Dr. Di Domenico is preceded in death by his wife, Priscilla. He is survived by his younger brother Louis and sister Marilyn, children Jennifer, Judith, Gina, Katherine, and Giancarlo, sons-in-law Matthew and Miguel, grandchildren Santino Nicholas and Catalina, and a host of other family members and friends across the country.
The family has requested that remembrances be made in the form of contributions to the National Kidney Foundation at https://www.kidney.org/, Valley Presbyterian Hospital at https://www.valleypres.org/ways-to-give/donate-now/, and Our Lady of Grace Church at https://pushpay.com/g/ourladyofgrace.
A funeral mass will be held at Our Lady of Grace in Encino on April 25th at 11am. All are invited to attend.
COMPARTA UN OBITUARIO
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