Reflections of a Country Doctor

During the summer before I started the 7th grade I took a course on athletic training and first aid. For me, the experience was earth changing. At the age of 12 I knew I wanted to be a good doctor someday. This idea became not my youthful fantasy but more my lifelong compulsion. Upon graduating from high school in Billings, Montana, I received a small scholarship that allowed me to enroll at Eastern Montana College, a small local liberal arts school. I worked my way through college and was accepted at the University of Oregon Medical School. Early in medical school, I decided that I wanted to be a "generalist" physician. With this in mind, I spent a majority of my free time over the next four years, and enhanced my experience and training, by observing activities in obstetrics, newborn intensive care, cardiac and pulmonary intensive care, surgery, orthopedics, and the emergency room. After completing more training in Spokane, Washington, I joined the National Health Service Corps and was assigned to a small town in Wyoming. I never considered medicine to be a regular job. I committed myself, like many physicians had before me, to being available to provide the care that a rural community required 24/7, that is, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Upon leaving Wyoming, my family and I located to Sidney, Montana where we intended to stay just one year. I closed my practice 25 years later.An African proverb says, "It takes an entire village to raise a child". The same can be said of physicians. No one traverses the journey through medical training and private practice by themselves because "the stars are aligned just right". The journey demands a considerable supportive effort from a village of many or perhaps many villages.This book contains my reflections upon my 26 years as an "old time" generalist family physician in rural America. It is merely a collection of stories that depict some of my experiences over the years. The stories mirror those of many of my generalist colleagues who have experienced "the trenches" of rural primary care. In fact, on occasion, I introduced myself as nothing more than a full time "trenchologist".My stories span the breadth and depth of the discipline of rural family medicine. Stories range from assisting mothers giving birth to caring for and comforting those at the end of life and from performing surgery to becoming involved in one's community. Some are silly, some are sad, some are funny, and some may make you mad.