Dear Family,
As I sit beside Nancy and watch her breathe from my almost comfortable hospital chair, I am actively trying to force positive thoughts into my being. I want to write something to balance yesterday’s note I sent you, so sad and so negative. I’ve always been an optimistic person, but this day has taxed me as no day before. My mind game worked. And I can now describe my “eureka” moment.
Though I often want to take each of my five-year-old patients home with me, absolutely enjoy the challenge of attempting to influence my all-knowing teen patients, and have had my heart warmed multiple times by those senior patients who share their vast wisdom and memories, in my thirty-one years of providing health care, only two patient encounters have made my heart skip beats, caused my hands to get sweaty, and left my mouth feeling as though I had been in the desert for a full day without water.
In 1978, my first job as a newly licensed physician was providing primary care at a single-doctor clinic in Mammoth, Wyoming, just inside the northern border of Yellowstone National Park. I was a “single doctor” in two ways. First, I was the sole doctor at the clinic. Second, at the time, I was not married.
The work was exhilarating. Most of my patients were park visitors who came from all over this country and from the far corners of the rest of the world. Practicing medicine in a remote setting meant my head was often in a book. And as if learning on the go wasn’t enough of a challenge, I had several unusual duties that came with providing medical care in a national park—like accompanying the rangers on selected backcountry rescues when they thought having a doctor along might be beneficial.
On this particular afternoon late in August 1978, I assisted the rangers on just such a rescue. I was away from the clinic for about two and a half hours. During my absence, a sick thirty-year-old came to the clinic looking for medical care. My front office clerk, Amy, explained the unusual situation: “I’m sorry, Dr. Winn is on a backcountry rescue and we don’t know when he’ll be back. There is another walk-in clinic at Yellowstone Lake. If you don’t want to wait, you should go there.”
“How far away is Yellowstone Lake?” the patient’s accompanying friend, Patricia, inquired.
Amy replied, “With the normal summer traffic, oh, an hour and a half to two hours.”
Patricia conferred with her sick friend who, I was later told, was already a little green around the edges and not too excited about getting back into a moving vehicle. “Let’s wait a bit and hope,” she told Amy.
Mobile phones were still a figment of some technologist’s fervent imagination back then, but I did have access to a ranger radio. Right after the clinic patient decided to wait for my return, I radioed the ranger dispatcher to report we were fifteen minutes out and would be met by an ambulance to transport the backcountry patient to the nearest hospital, located two hours away in Bozeman, Montana. The dispatcher called Amy, who alerted the patient she had made the right decision.
When I arrived back at the clinic, transferred the wilderness patient with the broken leg to the ambulance, and went into the room to see my waiting patient, I was instantly captivated. My heart fluttered and my hands were moist. I had never experienced such a reaction before with a patient, or for that matter, a nonpatient. The woman sitting on the exam table had an inviting, gentle smile that paradoxically made me both nervous yet comfortable. Her pale-blue eyes seemed as vast as the sky. Her easy laugh, frequent despite her stomach discomfort, was infectious. And her inviting aura made my skin tingle and my mind wander. I shuffled through the encounter, talking as much about Yellowstone, her, and myself as I did about her medical complaint. The visit lasted over an hour, far more than the twenty minutes it should normally have taken for an examination.
After she left, my nurse asked if I was all right. My reply was simple. “I think I’m in love.” I had rarely ever used those words. My nurse was speechless. So she brought me an aspirin.
(I thought I was the only one awake at this hour, but I just got tapped on the shoulder by Nancy’s nurse’s aide, who brought me volumes of paperwork to read and sign. I’d better go. I’ll explain later why I am sharing my wandering thoughts from the middle of the night when sleep is so foreign.)
Fondly,
Winnie