{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/4b2x34ph1c/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Dr. Lanny Copeland"]},"logo":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/246/original/CenterForHistoryFamilyMedicine_2c_RGB.png?1773344256","metadata":[{"label":{"en":["Rights Statement"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eThis item is protected by U.S. copyright and related rights. It is being made available by the Center for the History of Family Medicine as its rights-holder for noncommercial use, including sharing and adapting the work. No permission is required for noncommercial use so long as attribution is provided. All other uses require permission from the Center for the History of Family Medicine.  Disclaimer:  The views presented in this broadcast are the speaker’s own and do not represent those of CHFM or the AAFP Foundation. The information presented is for general, educational, or entertainment purposes and should not be considered legal, health, financial, or other advice. \u003c/p\u003e"]}},{"label":{"en":["Date"]},"value":{"en":["2012-04-20 (created)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Type"]},"value":{"en":["Oral History","Interview"]}},{"label":{"en":["Agent"]},"value":{"en":["Sandy Panther (Interviewer)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Format"]},"value":{"en":["audio file"]}},{"label":{"en":["Keyword"]},"value":{"en":["American Academy of Family Physicians","family medicine","family physician","Dr. Lanny Copeland"]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject"]},"value":{"en":["Lanny Copeland, MD (personal name)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Language"]},"value":{"en":["English (primary)"]}}],"requiredStatement":{"label":{"en":["Attribution"]},"value":{"en":["\u003cp\u003eThis item is protected by U.S. copyright and related rights. It is being made available by the Center for the History of Family Medicine as its rights-holder for noncommercial use, including sharing and adapting the work. No permission is required for noncommercial use so long as attribution is provided. All other uses require permission from the Center for the History of Family Medicine. \u0026nbsp;Disclaimer: \u0026nbsp;The views presented in this broadcast are the speaker\u0026rsquo;s own and do not represent those of CHFM or the AAFP Foundation. The information presented is for general, educational, or entertainment purposes and should not be considered legal, health, financial, or other advice.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e"]}},"provider":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus","type":"Agent","label":{"en":["Center for the History of Family Medicine"]},"homepage":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/","type":"Text","label":{"en":["Center for the History of Family Medicine"]},"format":"text/html"}],"logo":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/organizations/logo_images/000/000/246/original/CenterForHistoryFamilyMedicine_2c_RGB.png?1773344256","type":"Image"}]}],"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/150990/file/278446","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 2 - Copeland_Lanny_12_a.wav"]},"duration":2705.10198,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/public/images/audio-default.png","type":"Image","format":"image/png"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/150990/file/278446/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/150990/file/278446/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/278/446/original/Copeland_Lanny_12_a.wav?1750880311","type":"Audio","format":"audio/wav","duration":2705.10198,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/150990/file/278446","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/150990/file/278446/transcript/81415","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Dr. Lanny Copeland interview transcript  [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2195/collection_resources/150990/file/278446/transcript/81415/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"If you would, please take some time and give us your background starting with your full name, when you were born, number of siblings, your parents’ names, what they did for a living.\n\nMy full name is Lanny Ross Copeland. I was born November 21, 1944 in Batesville, Indiana. Both parents are from southeastern Indiana. Came from a farming family. There were seven children in each of their families. My father’s name is Ross Copeland, my mother’s name is Laura Copeland. I was born when my father was in Europe, in the middle of World War II. Dad left the states at about the 23rd of April, 1944, and actually was a foot soldier. Went into Anzio and then right up through Europe during the war. So I was about three months old when he finally got back to the states. I am the second of five children. I didn’t realize this until a few years ago, but the parents actually had four children under the age of six at one time, by a few days. And then the fifth one came along about eight years later. Dad came back from the war and actually built the house where we grew up and farmed a small farm. And my mother, back from raising the children, was a teller in a small bank in this rural farming community where we lived. I grew up near a town by the name of Cross Plains, Indiana which I think had a population of around 150. The house my father built we thought was very big. But we got to talking about the house, and since he built it he knew how bit is was. It did have a basement, but it was 28x30. It was 840 square feet with two small bedrooms upstairs. So there were seven people in that house, which we laughed at, at the time. Both parents finished high school. Neither went to college, although they wanted to do that. I’m the second of five children. I have three brothers and one sister. All five of us have our college degrees. I grew up in the same little town, the same place my first seventeen years. And it was really kind of an idyllic place. Everybody trusted everybody. We didn’t lock our door. Neighbors looked out after you. My grandfather always said he didn’t know how a Scotch Irish family like the Copelands ended up in a settlement of German Lutherans. And our neighbors were people with names like Austerheid, Stegeneler and Neihausmeyer. That was very common. In fact, there were kids in my high school class that when I went to their homes, on their farms, the grandparents still spoke German only. So it was a very interesting community. I went to the same school building all twelve years, in Cross Plains, Indiana. It was a high school that my grandfather, Earl Copeland, was influential in getting it established. In fact, my father graduated from the same high school in 1938. The second class of that high school. It had then what was called Brown Township and there were two other small grade schools in Brown Township. And the seventh grade kids would come in and go through high school. In my first six grades there were eight of us in my class. And I had the same teacher that taught me first, second and third grades. And fourth, fifth, sixth grade I went across the hall and had a different teacher, but she taught me three grades. The kids came in from these other grade schools and there were twenty-one in my high school class. I graduated number one in my class, which really wasn’t very difficult with twenty-one, I guess. Interestingly, only four of those twenty-four [twenty-one?] went to college. And there are about three or four that have passed away since that time. What I find interesting, the ones that did not go to college, literally every one of them live within a twenty-mile radius of that little town. We always jokingly said we got out of the agricultural ghetto. But they’re still there doing well.\n\nI’m the only physician in my family, ever. My older brother is a retired industrial engineer. Mom and Dad moved off the farm in the mid-60s, after my first year in college. Dad started a hardware and lumber supply store in a small town by the name of Rising Sun, Indiana, about thirty miles from where I grew up. And my younger brother actually owns and operates that store now. Both parents passed away about five years ago. My mother was almost eighty-four and Dad was just a few weeks under eighty-three. So my younger brother owns and operates that store. My sister works for Florida Education Association. And my youngest brother is retired from IBM in Austin, Texas. So we’re all spread out around the country. My oldest brother lives in Breckenridge, Colorado. So that’s kind of the story about my family. And I think it’s interesting still that when I go back to southeastern Indiana, a number of cousins and a few aunts and uncles are still living within a ten-, twelve-mile radius of where I grew up and many of them are still in farming. So it’s the agricultural background, the good influence it had on my life. And again, my dad always said when he came back to the house in the evening, he didn’t know whether there would be five of us kids playing in the front yard or ten because of all the cousins that other family members might drop off or kids would come in and be there at the house.\n\nA wonderful life. Not many people have that advantage anymore. Then after high school you went off to college?\n\nI did. Again, that was a dream of the parents. And it wasn’t “if” we were going to go to college, it was, we “were” going to go to college. And the other joke was that graduation from high school, the standing gift from the parents was a piece of luggage—because we were out of there. (Laughter.) But my older brother went to Purdue University. I wanted to go into medicine but didn’t have a clue. I remember going and talking to my family physician, who I’ll talk about a little bit later, about how you become a doctor. So I had a high school English teacher who was also a minister in a little church there in the county. And he had gone to a small school in central Kentucky by the name of Georgetown College in Georgetown, Kentucky and told me about the school. I don’t think I ever even went to visit. I sent my application in for admission, got accepted and actually showed up and that’s where I went to college. And I started college in the fall of 1962. Graduated spring 1962 from high school and started college. What I didn’t know was that this little college had a very good track record of students that went on to medical school. Enrollment was right at 1,000 total at this small school but yet had a PhD, a biology teacher that was really dedicated in teaching and getting kids into med school. I thought it was interesting, the University of Louisville, where I went to medical school, in my class there were ninety-one total students. The majority of them had gone undergrad at the University of Louisville. The second largest majority had gone to the University of Kentucky. But there were six out of my class of ninety-one from this small college. So I guess as fate would have it, that’s where I went to college. Stayed there four years. Scared to death I was going to flunk out because I went to this little rural high school and all. So I studied terribly hard. Had things that I found interesting to me and I really enjoyed. One was chemistry. That was my major. I took a number of chem courses. While I was there, I was active in student government. And I think it was quite interesting, I guess I fooled everybody. I was voted most likely to succeed my senior year at this little college. So that was my college. I graduated from there in the summer of 1966.\n\nI also met my first wife there and got married in ’66, when I was twenty-one and she was twenty. Vietnam was raging hot and heavy at the time. I applied to medical school. And being a resident of Indiana, applied to Indiana University. And they didn’t know much about the small school I had gone to, so I did not get in there. And I did not get accepted at the Kentucky school. So I liked chemistry and thought, I’m just going to go ahead and either work a year or go to grad school. So I took a job in 1966 in Paducah, Kentucky, working for the Atomic Energy Commission, which the plant was operated by Union Carbide. And I was there three months when I got my notification to report for my pre-draft physical. So I thought I was on the way to Southeast Asia. And I had a little plantar wart on the bottom of my foot and they said, you’ve got to get that fixed and come back in six months and then you’re going to get your papers. Well, between that time and the six months, I was a resident of Kentucky, applied to med school at the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville, and was immediately accepted at the University of Louisville. So with my acceptance, I got a deferment to go to medical school and was not drafted. So I entered medical school at the University of Louisville in the fall of 1967. That was a horrific time in our country’s history. I can recall in Louisville, Kentucky, at the old medical school, that up on the fourth floor, looking down Broadway and Chestnut Streets in Louisville at 6:00 in the evening, seeing tanks and soldiers and all that. We had a curfew at the time, you had to be off the streets or in the hospital. It was very much in turmoil, all related to the Vietnam crisis.\n\nIn 1968 I had my first child, Amy. She came between my first and second year in medical school. My first year in medical school, again I realized that I was going to more likely than not get drafted as soon as I finished my training. So I went ahead and opted for the Navy. In the summer of ’68 we actually went to Pensacola, Florida to the naval air station there and I did research. Amy was actually born in the naval hospital in Pensacola, Florida. So I went to medical school, there four years. Always wanted to be a family physician and really there was no emphasis on that. I just remember starting to hear something about things are going to change in general practice or family medicine, but I really was not very aware of that. So it was kind of a new push and there certainly was no focus on that at U of L. U of L is an interesting medical school. It’s the seventh oldest medical school in the United States. Two medical schools in Kentucky, that one and the University of Kentucky. U.K.’s medical school started in the 1960s. And Louisville was always known as the medical school in the state that turned out physicians that would go out and actually take care of people with an emphasis on primary care. Although there wasn’t much emphasis or much said about family medicine during that time. So I was four years there. I was vice president of my medical school class. And I knew that I was going to be drafted, had to go into active duty one year after I graduated from medical school. I looked at sites that I wanted to get someplace that would give me a broad training. Because the concept of a family medicine residency, I’d never heard of that. And certainly did not hear it at all at the University of Louisville. And subsequently I’ve looked back and I think in 1971 there may have been ten or twelve of these that had come up. So I did a rotating internship, four months of medicine, four months surgery, one month each of cardiology, ENT, emergency department. I forget the fourth one. And finished my rotating internship in June of 1972 and subsequently got my orders. Even though I signed up for the Navy, which by the way, my father told us four boys never to sign up for the Army or don’t go to the Army. Because he was a foot soldier in World War II and it was tough. So little did I know that the Marine Corps gets their medical care from the Navy. So I got my orders and was assigned to the 3rd Marine Division, which was the foot soldiers, but the Marines. In the spring of ’72, the government announced that all of the Marines had been pulled out of Vietnam back in garrison, in Okinawa. And I got my orders, 3rd Marine Division was actually in Okinawa. So two weeks after I finished my internship, I was on a plane, there were seventeen medical officers that reported for duty at Oceanside, California, July 17, 1972. We were there for a week filling out papers, learning how to salute, getting our shots. And one week to the day, from the time we went on active duty, I was on a plane headed to Okinawa. And had no basic training or anything. So I got into Okinawa, was with the 3rd Battalion ---- Regiment, 3rd Marine Division, which was basically your 03s or your grunts or your foot soldiers. And once I got there, learned that part of my battalion was actually in Vietnam, even though on the state side they said there were no Marines there. So here I was in Okinawa. The war was winding down. I was there for a year tour, but there was not much to do. So I got physically fit. I was running and lost some weight. I always wanted to learn how to jump out of an airplane. So I went and talked to my Marine Corps colonel that I reported to and told him that things were slow and was there any way that I could go to jump school? So he told me if I first go to jungle survival school with an elite group then he would send me to jump school. So six weeks into my one year tour, I was up in the northern training area of Okinawa which is an absolute jungle. And there was a monsoon coming through there. And we were out on patrol at about 1 a.m. one morning where you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. You’ve got to understand, I’m about twenty-six at the time and I’m with seventeen and eighteen year olds. So I’m out there trying to help them get through the jungle. I went over a cliff, fifteen, twenty feet high, and subsequently broke my leg. So I ended up being evacuated into the Army hospital there in Okinawa, having surgery. I’d been over there six weeks and had just been around and everything was fine. Well, about five days post-op, a chief petty officer came in and said that I was headed back to the States because it was a combat-ready outfit and it wasn’t me. So after seven weeks or so of being there, I was medevacked back to the States and subsequently had another procedure done on my lower extremity.\n\nFinally got orders to go to Albany, Georgia where there was a naval air station and a Marine Corps Logistics Base. This was in January of 1973 when I finally got to Albany. And that was a good duty station. We had a dispensary there and there were about fifteen physicians that were stationed there. We had a general surgeon, two obstetricians and a psychiatrist and a pediatrician. And we took care of the base and the retirees there, both the naval air station people and the people from the Marine Corps Logistics Base. And had gotten there and I had done no obstetrics in my internship. So they needed a third person to take call with the two obstetricians. And by just a stroke of luck, nobody wanted to do it and I was kind of interested in learning that. So for the next year, year and a half when I was there, I took one and three call with the two obstetricians, two young guys just out of training, and they taught me a tremendous amount of skills about OB. And I got in about 125 deliveries when I was there. And, of course, they just let me fly on my own after a time. And if I had any problem, I’d consult them. So I had a full year of OB, which was really a blessing because subsequently that was something that I did in my practice. So Knew I was getting out of the Navy in the summer of ’74. And my second child John came along in July of ’73, born there in Albany at the naval air station dispensary. So I had two children. And again really wasn’t aware too much about these residencies they were talking about in family medicine. And I made a few phone calls and I remember talking to someone, I think it was in Muncie, Indiana. And they were saying yeah, we have a residency, but said most of these people, they’re not sure that this specialty is going to evolve. They said a lot of these guys are coming in, doing one year of internship and getting their license. They starting their second year, they’re picking up on what they want, whether it be pediatrics, internal medicine or obstetrics. And after about another six months to a year, they’re dropping out and going into practice. So that’s really what I knew about the residency at the time. And again, looking back historically I think in ’74 there were maybe thirty residencies around the country. And they really lacked in continuity, other than some of the really good ones. I mean there were some that were really stellar. A lot of these that were just startups, their continuity really wasn’t there. So two children, had my year of internship. Had a year basically of OB/GYN. So I had always wanted to go into practice, into family medicine and always wanted to go back to southeastern Indiana. So I got out of the Navy after two years and went to a small town by the name of Osgood, Indiana. They had no physician there. I didn’t think things through very well there because it was about eighteen miles to the hospital. There were two hospitals, one in Batesville, where I was born, and another one in the northwest, in Greensburg, Indiana. I was there about three to four months. And what would happen is, it just had the office, no lab or x-rays. Again, a farming community. I’d see a patient who had a suspected fracture. These small hospitals didn’t have radiologists, so you’d send them to the hospital to get their x-rays done. And then I’d have to hop in the car to drive to look at their x-rays. And the other part of it would be doing OB, it was tough to manage somebody when I was eighteen miles away. I was on the staff originally with Batesville, Indiana and switched to Greensburg in late fall of ’74. After a few months in a small town, I located into Greensburg, Indiana. Again, about twenty-five, thirty miles from where I grew up. And there were nine physicians on the medical staff. And I did family medicine but high volume OB. I was the youngest physician on the medical staff there by about twenty-two years. And when I say I did OB, looking back at my two years there I believe I had something like 283 deliveries total. So I was out there pretty much on my own. And had no obstetrician, no obstetrical back-up. But did have one general surgeon there, and he told me he really wanted to do the [cesarean] sections. I said I don’t have any problem with that as long as you’re around. So I did not do C-sections while I was in private practice in Indiana or Georgia. I was there two years and a combination of things. Really tough to get coverage. Had some marital problems from working all the time. Then my wife, being very adamant that she’s going to run the office…I would tell any young physician that that’s not a good idea. I can say that from experience. So decided to relocate from Greensburg.\n\nAnd really when I was in Albany, Georgia, I used to moonlight at an emergency room in this little town by the name of Moultrie. Moultrie is about halfway between Albany, Georgia and Valdosta, Georgia and about sixty miles north of Tallahassee, Florida. So it’s way down in the southwest part of the state of Georgia. And I called back to Moultrie. Believe it or not, there was actually a physician there that had just located to Moultrie who was three years ahead of me in medical school. And I didn’t know him in medical school. But everybody was getting drafted because of Vietnam. And Dave was stationed at Fort Gordon, Georgia up in Augusta. Once he’d finished his training, he actually was the first orthopedist into Moultrie. So I called him and he said you ought to talk to the other physicians. He said we’re going to build the medical staff in this little town and we have high hopes. So as a consequence, moved back to southwest Georgia. Moved back to Moultrie, Georgia in the summer of 1976. Did solo practice there including OB. There was an obstetrician. There was another older family physician that did OB. And we had just begun to build our medical staff. We had one orthopedist, we had two young general surgeons, had one or two young internists and a young pediatrician. So we really kind of schemed about how we were going to really build this community hospital and make us all proud. So started there in 1976 and again did high volume OB in my practice, delivering anywhere from eighty to one hundred, one hundred twenty a year. Never delivered one through the years with an epidural. Just kind of a sign of the time. The other thing too that was interesting, southwest Georgia has one of the highest risks of infant mortality and high risk OB of any place in the country. And when I was on call for drop-ins in the emergency room, which was pretty common when I first went down there in the 70s, it wasn’t the obstetrician taking the call, it was all three of us had equal call. So I learned a lot about high risk OB and was taking care of the ones I felt comfortable taking care of and transferred the others on to Atlanta or Columbus, Georgia. So from that standpoint, it was good. The only problem was coverage. Again, I was in solo practice doing OB and it was difficult to get coverage. In essence I was on call all the time. Third child came along in January of ’81. So I had one in the 60s, one in the 70s, one in the 80s. Which was great when college came because I had one out…and my oldest daughter started college when she was sixteen. My son was nineteen when he started. And then my younger daughter was eighteen when she started. So I’d get them out and have about a three-year hiatus before the next one began.\n\nI loved what I was doing, loved the family medicine part and we really wanted to grow the medical community. But it was really difficult to recruit physicians to southwest Georgia. A lot of it was charity work. I was doing OB before Medicaid paid for many of the deliveries. So a lot of that was strictly free work. But in 1983 finally started building my group. Brought in a guy by the name of Gene Jackson, had just finished residency. He was from southwest Georgia. And built an office. I designed a 7,000 square foot office and built it big enough for four physicians. Put a little lab in it. I also put x-ray in it because we would run across the street to the hospital, but the flipside of it is we did a lot of workmen’s comp and it made it a lot easier for the patient and for us. It wasn’t about the revenue, although my hospital CEO thought it was. But that worked well. The office was nice. Gene Jackson came in 1983 and then Gary Lodge came in, in 1984. Both these guys had been trained at the residency program at Columbus, Georgia. My first marriage ended in early 1984, a long time coming. Probably a terribly difficult time in my life. Struggled with that. You know, there’s a real sense of failure when that comes along. But it was probably inevitable. I think having been a physician and had counseled many couples through the years, my decision was not unlike what I heard from patients. And that was that you just hang in there and you think it’s going to work and you want it to work bad and it just gets worse. And finally the end comes and you kind of scratch your head and wonder why it took that long. But you can only experience it I think if you’ve been in that. You understand that if you’ve lived that. So a terribly tough time in my life. My first wife and the kids originally stayed there in town and I would see my children a lot. And I lived in an apartment. And my group, my work really was helpful there. And I did what I told my patients to do, I actually got some counseling and worked through that. And often thought I’m not sure I’ll ever remarry. And especially living in a small town, who in the world would I ever meet there? First of all, I didn’t think I’d ever meet anybody. Secondly, if I did, it would probably take me out of the small town, which I really enjoyed. So in the spring of 1986, I’d been on my own a couple of years. I was at the hospital one Monday morning and went around the corner and saw this individual and didn’t know who it was. I went back and told my office manager, call over there – I think she’s a Medicare person, doing something for a Medicare inspection or something. So long story short, that was on a Monday morning when I met Mica Bain [?]. And I think that was like March 31st of ’86. And the 26th of July, about fourteen weeks later, we got married. And as sad as my first marriage – I’ve been married almost twenty-six years now and it’s better than ever. I had no doubt that she was heaven sent and has been a real helpmate, soulmate. We stayed in Moultrie. She was from a little town by the name of Dawson, Georgia. She was an only child. Dawson was about fifty, sixty miles from Moultrie. Her mother was Susan Bain, her father was Rembert [?] Bain. Really good people. And I guess one of the things in my career that I’ll always remember was about January of ’93, I had my group built and there were four of us. Billy Ray Price joined us in the early 90s. In January of ’93, Mica’s parents came down to see us. And her father, who was a real fit person, watched his diet, exercised and all, but he’d kind of been hoarse and he wanted to come by the office for me to listen to him. I said I can’t do that, you’re family. He said just listen to me. So he came by the office and I listened to him. He sounded okay but he was hoarse. So I went ahead and got a chest x-ray on him. And I can remember coming around the corner and having a third-year medical student stand there looking at a film. And the third-year medical student said, “I’m just a third-year medical student, but something’s not right on that x-ray.” At any rate, he had a big mass that turned out to be a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. So I dropped out of the office that afternoon, took him to Albany, which was kind of our tertiary referral center, forty-five miles up the road. And started that journey which would go along thirty-three months. And learned a lot about medicine during that time, being on the other side of it. Staying at bedsides, hearing physicians speaking to laypeople. And even though these two people were educated, they didn’t have a clue what the physician was saying. And it really taught me a lot about how patients navigate through the system and how we aren’t very good about helping them to navigate that. The flipside of that is it also made me extremely proud to be a family physician because I saw that really as my role. I mean he was family but I’d do the same thing for any patient, that navigating through the system. His voice went out completely. I called around and found a surgeon at Vanderbilt here in Nashville. So he came to Nashville and had a surgical procedure at Vanderbilt about a year into his illness that got his voice back. And of all the things we did before his death, that probably was the most rewarding for him.\n\n(Break.)\n\nI was talking about Mica’s father. He had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and passed away at the age of sixty in 1995. I continued to practice family medicine. The thing that got me really fired up and I really enjoyed, first of all, I enjoyed my career in family medicine. Bu the Medical College of Georgia, which is a flagship school in the state, was more of an exposure for their medical students in rural areas. And they approached three rural sites in about 1983 to set up rotations. Not electives but actually part of their curriculum. And so our group was one of those three. And beginning then in 1983 we began having third-year medical students rotate with us. And I really found that aside from family medicine, my first love was teaching, especially the medical students. So we would have medical students all the time. They would come in on a Monday. They’d be there four weeks. Subsequently they bumped it to six weeks. They would go in on Thursday back to August, which is 200 miles away, and get another medical student the following Monday. I felt like, among other things, they learned the sense of community. I would have patients who would invite these students to their homes for dinner. I’d take them out on house calls and they would really interact a lot with the patients. The other thing I think they learned was really the value of family medicine. I asked them the first day they came, what specialty they thought they were going to go into. And primary care, they learned a lot there. But if they said they were going into general surgery or orthopedics, I would tell them that one of the things I wanted them to do while they were there with us was to see how many patients, how many cases we generated for general surgery or orthopedics. And told them that if they were going to go into a specialty like that or cardiology, wherever they went into practice, regardless of where it was, the first thing they needed to do was go knock on the door of family physicians and introduce themselves and tell them that they’ve had the experience, they realize where their referrals come from. And tell them if they treat family physicians like they should be treated, they would make life good for them. So that was really the thing that I loved to do, teach.     \n\nSouth Georgia was an interesting place as well. There was a dire need for health care there. I had worked a lot with the state legislature about funding for family medicine training. And I got a call in about 1991 saying that the legislature was considering allocating monies for a new family medicine residency program in southwest Georgia. They said six hospitals, but obviously they ended up in Albany, as it should have been. And they approached me about starting the program and I told them I was smarter than that and I knew the fate of most inaugural program directors. I did help them a lot. I remember we had a site visit by a guy from Minnesota whose name is Don Asp. Sandy, you may remember Don.\n\nI know him well.\n\nAnd spent two or three days in southwest Georgia driving Don around. He was the one that really did our site visit, did an excellent job there. And got the program up and going where we took the first residents in 1993. And the program director that they selected was a guy by the name of Gary Levine. Gary came in from the University of Kentucky. He’s now at East Carolina. Had four residents. Mica’s father passed away in ’95. Had been in Moultrie eighteen years. Built the group. Enjoyed teaching. I came back. They said we want you to come back to Albany. So we made the decision in the spring of ’94 that we really would like to see the increases of family physicians in southwest Georgia and if we could help out there, that would be good. So the summer of 1994 left the practice and actually commuted to Albany for two years. About a forty-five mile trip each way.\n\nI’ll go ahead and intervene here about the leadership things. When I moved to Moultrie in 1976, I remember hearing about the Georgia Academy of Family Physicians and got a call from the exec whose name was Camille Day. She wanted me to really come to this meeting. So I got coverage and I went to the meeting in November of 1976. There was only one other person that I saw there that I thought was anywhere near my age. The rest of them were these old geezers. And Sandy, you probably remember who it was – it was Andy Morley. And I thought to myself, gee whiz, I’m not sure about this. So in ’77 I went back, Andy was back and there were a few more people kind of my age. So subsequently got involved with the Academy and was fortunate to serve as President of the Georgia Academy, ’85 to ’86. I also got involved with something called the Joint Board of Family Practice in Georgia and that had to do with funding. Family medicine actually had a line item place for funding for the specialty in the state. I mean it was like Mom and apple pie. It was sacred to the legislature. They weren’t going to touch that. You could go into the session and you talk about family medicine and the need for family physicians in rural Georgia…it was a good functioning board. That board has a different name now, but it’s still in place. And it’s actually been a model for other states.  I was chair of that board for three years. So I’d kind of done the things in Georgia. And the way the nominees for the American Board [of Family Practice] came about at the time was the state chapters would nominate individuals. Then there would be five or six selected at the AAFP meeting in the fall. Those names would be submitted to the Board [of Directors] and they would pick one. My name was submitted in the fall of ’87. And in ’88 I did not get elected. They turned back around and submitted my name again in the fall of ’88. And at the meeting in the spring of ’89, the American Board of Family Medicine named me to the Board of Directors to what was then the ABFP. A four- or five-year stint. And that was an interesting time. Nick Pisacano was still living at my first meeting and Paul Young was there. It was totally different than the Academy. The Board [ABFP] was really more of an institution. It wasn’t political at all or wasn’t supposed to be. But there were fifteen members. My class of ’89 included another family physician, Jim Puffer, who is now the Executive Vice President of the American Board of Family Medicine, and Norman Gant who is an obstetrician in Dallas, Texas. And so the five-year stint, very educational. There was some turmoil at the time, when Nick passed away, about leadership and all. And it was not very democratic, I don’t think, about how it was operated. But Paul Young was there. Came in as the next EVP and things smoothed out. So I had the good fortune in 1993 – each class would produce a president. And it was Puffer and I, and I had the good fortune that the Board in ’93 elected me to serve as President of the American Board from ’93 to ’94. A lot of things going on at that time, I recall politically. Mainly came out in Florida to the Academy that physicians who…I was grandfathered in – because I didn’t do a residency program. I took my boards first in 1976. But there was a tremendous push in the early 80s mainly in Florida. The physicians wanted the American Board of Family Medicine to reopen their boards where they could take them to grandfather in because of the pressure of managed care companies wanting their physicians to be board certified. And it was ironic, I was President of the American Board from ’93, ’94 and in the fall of ’93, really was the big topic at the AAFP meeting. And I chaired that reference committee to hear this. But I was adamant and held my ground. The residency programs had come up. People had so much vested in these things. And I still feel that way. And I think it would have been a real disgrace if we would have said gee, it doesn’t really make any difference whether you did a residency or not – we’re going to open the boards back up for anybody that wants to take them. So that was a real political football. But I think again the Academy and the Board did the right thing there in the early 90s. So my time on the American Board of Family Medicine actually rotated in ’94. My state chapter had asked me to run for the Board of Directors at AAFP. So I did that in the fall of 1994. And that meeting was held in Boston and I was fortunate enough to be elected by class. The other two family physicians were David Massanari from Maine and Phil Briggs from New Mexico. And served on the Board as a Board member from ’94 to ’97. Here’s a little trivia – I was the last Treasurer of the American Academy. And my first commission that I chaired (at the time the Board members chaired the commissions), was one called the Commission on Special Issues of Clinical Interest which is officially called COSICI. And nobody wanted it because it dealt with the gay and lesbian things, members coming in at that time. They wiped that commission out after my first year and set up a new Commission on Finance and Insurance and that fell to me. So as the chair of that, it was a Board election, inside the Board. But [Dale] Moquist wanted to be a member of the Executive Committee because he was a year ahead of me. And I was actually elected to the Executive Committee of the AAFP in my second year. So I actually served as a Board member on the Executive Committee for two years rather than the traditional one year. And the reason that fell to me was because they were doing away with the Treasurer’s position and they thought it made good sense that the chair of the Commission on Finance would be there. So I served actually on the Executive Committee from ’95 until the fall of 2000. So five years on the Executive Committee.                 \n\n   \n\nIt was a pretty good time there on the Board. It was during Clinton’s time. There was a lot of thought in the early 90s that family medicine was really going to blossom. And in the early 90s there were about 350 family medicine residencies. And by ’97 or ’98 we had gone up to about 485. The other thing I thought was interesting was that we talked about retraining of physicians, that there is going to be a surplus of specialties. And they actually talked about setting up programs where neurosurgeons and cardiologists could go back and do a six-month short course to learn more about family medicine. But that didn’t come out well. The other push too was trying to get a department of family medicine in every medical school in the U.S. There was quite a push there. And I think there still are medical schools that don’t have a department of family medicine. In 1997 I ran for President-Elect of the Academy. That was held in Chicago. And again had the good fortune of being elected. I was President-Elect from ’97 to ’98. I was President in ’98 and ’99 and Board Chair ’99 to 2000. That was a tremendous honor. A significant amount of traveling. The thing that I wanted to focus on in my year was health care for all. Universal coverage, not universal access. And worked with Nancy Dickey, who was President of the AMA at the time, and some of the other specialties to really bring this to a focus. And it’s now 2012 and I would hope that some of the focus that we put on that back in the late 90s has gotten us where we are today, for good or bad – I’m not sure which. But that was our focus. Probably the biggest thing when I was Board Chair, certainly in my opinion, with the six-year tenure with the Academy, was Bob Graham announcing his retirement. Which meant that we had to have a search committee and name a new EVP for the Academy, which was very interesting. And suffice it to say was the Board met in Washington, DC to talk about this. We had a Board member at the time who was very much interested in becoming EVP, Rich Roberts. He was refused from the meeting. And Sandy, I don’t know how much of this I really need to talk about.\n\nI was going to stop you. You can talk and say anything because I sort of know what happened.  So you can say I want that to be embargoed.  Because I would rather have it on tape because it’s key to what happened.\n\nI agree. And I really like that because it does need to be told. There were really very few people that really knew what went on there.\n\nRight.  So from this point forward, and I will tell Don, we will embargo what you have to say about the selection process of the EVP after Bob Graham.\n\nOkay. We met in DC and again, Rich Roberts but he was a candidate. I remember the discussion very clearly about what we were looking for in an EVP. Rich Roberts at the time was President-Elect to the Academy. It was very difficult for the Board to try and go through all this knowing that he was a fellow Board member, even though he was out of the room. So what happened was that the Board came to the conclusion and elected to offer the job to Rich Roberts. And we spoke, I remember spent a lot of time with Rich. But we made it very clear that he would have to step aside from his year as President and Board Chair. And Rich was rather adamant that he could do all of it. That he would be EVP but he would also be President and Board Chair. And to the credit of our Board of Directors, just saw that would not fly. The other rub that we had, we made it imperative that our new EVP, regardless who it was, would move to the Kansas City area because we felt that was extremely important. But Rich wanted to negotiate with us about covering airfare between Madison, Wisconsin, where he lived, to Kansas City. And again, that did not fly well. So he was the choice. I can remember calling Doug Henley, because Doug was very much interested in the job, and telling Doug this. It was terribly difficult for me to do that because I thought that Doug would have also made a great EVP. And I remember, I think my final word to Doug was, at the time that I called and told him that he was not our candidate, was not our choice – I think my words were “Doug, it’s not over until it’s over,” which really plays out as we go along here. But we tried to negotiate with Rich. And I can remember trying to get a contract agreement with him and there was always something else that he wanted to offer. He never was content with the fact that he would not be allowed to be the elected official of the Academy and the EVP. So the final nail in the coffin…I remember we got back with the Board and upped the ante in what we were offering him from a monetary standpoint. And there were still some more things that he wanted. And again, at the time I was living in Albany, Georgia. The Uniformed Services Academy was meeting in Atlanta about that time. And I can remember on a Saturday getting in my car and driving the 170 miles from Albany up to Atlanta and meeting in a hotel room with Rich and going through all this stuff and explaining to him if you take this, you can’t be the President and Board Chair, you’re going to have to move to Kansas City and all that. And we’ve upped the ante on this. I’ll admit I probably was not the most patient person in the world, because it was a lot of stress and we had worked on this for quite a while. And then there were some other things he wanted and still didn’t want to back off about living in Wisconsin and the elected thing. So I told him, here is the final contract. And I said, “Rich, I think this is it. You have it, you’ve been able to review it. You’ve had it for a period of time. And I would like you to tell me this afternoon, you want this or do you not?” And he said, “Well, I’m going to have to think about it more.” I said “If you don’t accept this, this afternoon, as Chairman of the Board I’m going to tell you that the offer is off the table.” And he did not accept it. So I think I wrote him and just effectively said “this offer is off the table and we’re going to go back to the Board.” So we went back to the Board and talked about this. And like me, I think the Board probably felt the stress and it had gone on for a while. So the Board actually agreed that it was time to pull this offer from Rich and rethink about our offer. And we all know how it worked out, the Board elected to extend the Board [EVP] to Doug Henley. And I can remember the phone call I made to Doug at that time. Obviously Doug was very pleased with that. This is to be announced at what was called the SOC meeting, the State Officers Conference, always held in Kansas City in April. And I remember flying Doug in a week or two before that. Mike Miller and I met Doug at the airport. Had the same contract, although we’d ratcheted down the payment end of what the Board originally thought was fair, where we start, and laid the contract down. And probably five minutes later Doug had signed the contract and it was over with. And the first introduction of Doug as the incoming EVP was at the State Officers Conference in April 2000. So that’s the history of it. And Graham and I actually drafted up a letter, and I think it’s in a safe someplace, it’s not to be opened until maybe fifty years down the road. But we also memorialized this so that we’d have it for history. But certainly Sandy, I’m glad we’re doing this. Because this is the first time I’ve ever talked about that.\n\n      \n\nI appreciate that.  And as I said, you’re not the first person we have embargoed on this topic.  So if it’s okay with you, we will end now the embargoed portion of the interview.\n\nYes, that’s good.\n\nThen my tenure went out in October of 2000. Just on a personal note, I remember a lot of people really enjoyed the President year much more than the Board Chair year. But my year that I really enjoyed was the Board Chair year. Kind of behind the scenes and seeing other people step up and all that. I think that was very rewarding. And then from a personal note, Mica and I knew that when we went to Albany, Georgia in ’94 that that was not going to be our last stop. So came back in the fall of 2000 to Albany. The residency program was on good footing. We had a new building that we built. I was teaching, working with the Medical College of Georgia. I wrote a template for a satellite campus in Albany, which subsequently has come about. There is a small satellite campus now in Albany of the Medical College of Georgia. And glad to see that. But we felt like that really wasn’t our plan. What happened when I was in Albany, I was the interim program director a couple of times. But it was based on a 450-bed hospital. And what happened when I go there was I just wanted to teach and see patients. I was interim program director and had stuff going on at the Academy. We had about fifty or sixty employed physicians and I was pulled in a lot to work with these physicians on communications and trying to foresee the future. So by the time my tenure ended with the Academy in the fall of 2000, we felt like it was probably time to move on. And I really considered, it was either time for me to do something administratively that I had learned my seven years there, plus building a group and all, or I wanted to go back and just be a family doctor. And I looked at two or three things. I went to Eli Lilly and talked to them. I interviewed with a hospital in Des Moines, Iowa. Didn’t feel like it was right. And I got a phone call in Albany in June of ’01. It was from a recruiter or head hunter from Witt/Kieffer. This guy said you and I met when we were in Moultrie, Georgia – you’ll remember when you see me. The guy was seven feet tall. So when I saw him, I said “oh yeah, I do remember you.” But he called me about a job in Dallas with a hospital corporation. Faxed me the job description, about the company. I remember getting that and went back home that afternoon and said “Mica, I think we’re going to be moving to Dallas, Texas.” So I went out there and interview with a company called Triad, which was a publicly-traded company, spun from HCA in May of ’99. They owned about fifty hospitals in fifteen, twenty states. So I was offered the job of Vice President of Medical Affairs for Triad hospitals. And my aim or my whole job there was physician engagement. Really getting the physicians on the same page as the hospitals. So as a consequence, I was with them for six years and traveled all the time. Would always cross somebody that I know. Come across different physicians at different stops. And just kind of thought I would finish out my career there with this company. And in ’07 it was actually bought by a company here in Nashville. And the company in Nashville called me and I came up here and told me they wanted me to stay with them. I could either live in Dallas or move to Nashville. That was on a Tuesday. And on the following Monday, a company called Lifepoint Hospitals, another publicly-traded company, called me and said we’re looking for our first medical officer. We’re the small and rural hospital company in the industry and we rely a lot on family physicians. So four days later I came back to Nashville and interviewed. And the offered me the position that afternoon. It was a good fit and it still is. We have fifty-five hospitals in nineteen states. All but four are the sole community provider in their community. So you can understand why our company relies on family physicians. I’ve always been impressed with family physicians, but this job really makes me proud of the specialty. Because we see these men and women out here in these little communities, tough as nails, doing what they do best – and that’s taking care of people. So I’ve been with Lifepoint Hospitals here in Nashville since 2007. I’ll finish five years August 1st. And in the next few weeks they will be announcing my retirement, effective March 2014, we can go ahead and find a successor. I have to be honest, I totally would hope we can identify another family physician to take this job (it’s a great job) and have him come in after me. The other thing that’s occurred during those years is that I’ve been fortunate, presently I represent to the American Hospital Association governing council on small and rural hospitals. And that’s been a great experience. Get to meet with CEOs three times a year on this council, talk about special things that affect these small hospitals. And then in January I was named to the Hospital Outpatient Payment Council for CMS. So that’s been good. And finally I guess I should say in the last three or four years, I’ve been named as one of the fifty most influential physician executives in health care by Modern Healthcare magazine, which is a pretty good sector magazine. So that’s where I am.            \n\n \n\nI would like to say a few things about family medicine, how I got interested in family medicine and what it means to me. We grew up, my parents said we didn’t have everything we wanted, we had everything we needed. Very rural, very isolated. And the one person that was really somebody I just held in absolute awe was our family doctor. His name was Henry Conrad and he was a family doctor in Milan, Indiana. You’ve probably never heard of Milan, but Milan, Indiana is actually the little town that the movie Hoosiers was based on.  \n\nHad a great basketball team.  \n\nThat’s right. They won the state championship in Indiana I think in 1955. They beat Muncie Central. Milan had an enrollment in their four grades of I think 163 total and Muncie Central had an enrollment of 3,000 in their top three grades. But Dr. Conrad was really my role model. And he probably thought yeah, here’s this kid off this dirt farm, it’s going to be heartbreaking when he doesn’t get into medical school. But he was a real role model. He was so kind to our family. Not just my immediate family – but again, both parents coming from families of seven in this area, he took care of many of my family members. So he was just held…I have a cousin whose first name is Conrad. So he was really my mentor and I wanted to be just like him. And I wanted to practice in a small town. That was my roots. And was in med school and never heard about family medicine much at all. There were no interest groups or anything like that. But that’s really what I wanted to do. The years have been good. The best years of my life were the eighteen years in that little town in southwest Georgia. I loved my patients. It’s unique, I always thought. One week you’re caring for these patients toward the end of their life and the next week you’re there pallbearer or the speaker at their funeral. You learn so much from patients. Not just family structure at all, but gee whiz, they’re so unique. And when I was in practice, if I didn’t have time to sit down and talk to patients and learn about them, it wouldn’t have been that rewarding. But what I learned about patients and family structure and the meaning of life and all that, I wouldn’t trade that for anything in the world. I never made any money down there. But other than a failed marriage, I was just as content and blessed as I could be. I made a decent living and it was really good and wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. Family medicine is really a special place. It’s what I wanted to do, it’s what I did. And now in the twilight of my career, I get to work with a lot of family physicians that are out there making a different. And I truly enjoy what I do. They made so much different in their communities, it’s unbelievable. And if they ever went away, these communities would just collapse. I was meeting with our chief administrative officer this morning about my retirement announcement and I said “John, I’ve always said that one of the things that I like so much about our company is our mission.” Our mission is that we care for a lot of these old communities, that we may be losing our shirt from a hospital standpoint. But I said “Just think, if we weren’t in that community, if these hospitals closed and these physicians weren’t there, these communities would just collapse, they’d shrivel up.” So to me it’s where I’m supposed to be in the twilight of my career and I enjoy it immensely. But I just consider it a tremendous blessing. I’ve had a great life. Been blessed in finding this profession. I think of all things, now that I look back, that troubles me the most is the lack of professionalism where there’s not that respect for who we are among ourselves, among physicians. My best friend is this orthopedist that I talked about who is retired now. He still lives in Moultrie. And we’re going to go hunting together a week from Monday out in South Dakota. I look forward to catching up with him. But Dave made the comment a few months ago when I went back for his birthday celebration, he said the difference today compared to what we did twenty, thirty years ago in this little town, we took care of the community and we really felt like we were obligated to do that. I can remember on Sunday afternoon getting a call, the emergency room is backed up, the physician is doing the best they can, but we need some help. So you get in the car and go out and help them catch up. I can remember sitting in the medical records room one evening. I was getting ready to go home and the general surgeon comes by and says “I’ve got a patient that has a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm, I need somebody to hold retractors.” So five hours later I got to go home. But we took care of that little community. And I’m the first to admit, the younger ones, for their sense of lifestyle and what they want and all, I’m not sure you can do it 50% of the time. I’m dealing with now with one of our hospitals where an obstetrician, a patient came in with ruptured membranes. And those patients must be delivered because it makes it a high risk of infection with the fetus. And he’s giving the patient Pitocin to stimulate labor and tried to keep within that twenty-four hour timeframe that she’s supposed to deliver. But he turns off the Pitocin and stops the labor so he can get in his car and drive forty-five miles to a basketball game. First of all, I don’t think it’s ethical. But the point is, it’s this commitment that we have to have. It’s almost a covenant that we have to have with our patients. And I’m not saying doing what I did, work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for nine years. But it is an interesting profession. And I don’t know of any specialty I’d rather be in than the one I’m in.\n\n          \n\nAnd I would also like to note for the record, three other items that I’m aware of. One was you were able in 1991 to serve on a federal advisory committee on Medicare Physician Relationships which was historically, in my mind, huge. And at that time, you were appointed by Louis Sullivan, Dr. Sullivan, who was the Secretary of Health and Human Services. That’s quite an honor. And you have done a lot of medical mission work in your career. Again, not only helping those in the United States but helping those in very poverty-stricken countries. And helping them understand the concept of family medicine.  \n\nAnd believe me, that’s in my plans once I get freed up, for when I retire. I would love to work with the State Department doing short-term stuff, six weeks, two months, going into some countries and help them with their health care system about training. How you set it up and all. But that has been a part of my life. Not only what we did with Heart to Heart, but back in the 70s, between my third and fourth year of medical school, I lived a summer in Yemen and worked in a mission hospital. And that was an eye opener. I loved the Yemeni people. It would be tough to get in there now. And have been to Haiti a couple of times right after the quake a couple of years ago. But that is going to be part of my goals and ambitions once I retire. \n\nAnd then the last thing I want to bring up is you were the Family Doctor of the Year in Georgia. And when you think of the number of physicians that you were competing with in that arena from the state, that too is a huge honor.  \n\nIt is. And again, with my respect for family physicians all the more so, knowing what family physicians do and obtain that honor, it’s very humbling. Because so many of them, family physicians just do a darn good job and they just go unrecognized. And every time now in my job where I go out and meet with fifty-five different medical staffs, I never leave a meeting with other physicians without telling them, I want them to know that I have great respect for what they do and I really appreciate what they do for their hospital and their community. Because it’s a tremendous service.\n\nYou’ve done a great job on this. Probably one of the best I’ve ever done. But I didn’t know if you wanted to end on anything philosophically or if you have pretty well have covered what you wanted to cover?\n\nTwo more things I would like to say quickly. First of all, I want to talk about the AAFP. That is a class act – the people that work there the people that made it what it is today, including you. I have had the opportunity, since I’ve been here at this company, to call up and go out with a couple of people from my office here in leadership and sit down around the table with Bruce Bagley and Doug Henley, Rosie Sweeney, and talk about how we can do a better job. And having my cohorts here come away with saying that’s unbelievable – the leadership there and the knowledge out there and what they do is tremendous. So I definitely want to brag on the AAFP. It’s take a lot of work by a lot of people, but it really is a great organization. And then finally philosophically, one of the things I guess that frustrates me a little bit now is our reliance on technology. To me, I hope we never get away from the fact that it means so much for a physicians to actually talk to the patients. Make eye contact with the patients. Shake hands with them. Or help them off the exam table. They can tell you so much. And I learned that early on and I learned a lot of that when I spent the summer in Yemen. We did have an x-ray machine, had a little bit of a lab. But the things you can find on a physical exam and by history, to me that was the fun of medicine. The one-upmanship, that you could tell somebody had Horner Syndrome, when they walked down the hallway to go to an exam room. But family medicine I think, out of all the specialties, brings that into play. We’re not only the physician that takes care of the patient’s physical ailments but we’re good listeners. And I hope we never, ever lose sight of that, that we mean so much to our patients and that that’s such an integral part of how we deal with patients. I mean we’ve got to look at the physical side, but we also have this training in the sense of how we deal with patients’ needs. Needs aren’t always physical, they may be psychological and they may be hurting very deeply. So it’s a humbling experience for me to be a part of that specialty and it’s been a very rewarding life.\n\nThank you. And we will end this here. But I have a couple of things. Number one, it’s been my distinct pleasure to do this. People really do want to get all of the past presidents. But it is my pleasure because I’ve known all of you. I’ve worked for you for so many years. So I love doing this. Number two, I want you to make sure and say hi to Mica for me, and Susie, if you see her. Again, at the end of this tape, if there’s anything that you think of, that you just all of a sudden didn’t think of during the audiotaping of this, we can set up another time and add to this tape. Don will edit it and you’ll get a tape as well as the one that will go in the archives with the embargoed portion. And if you think of something else either now or after you retire, we can always do an addendum to the tape.\n\nAnd I would say Sandy, I can’t think of anybody I would much rather have spoken with than you. Like you said, we worked together and you’ve been a very integral part of making the Academy what it is today and I’m very appreciative of that. \n\nThank you. Like you say, you have been honored all your life and humbled to have been a family physician. My whole career was with the Academy and there wasn’t a day I didn’t come up that I couldn’t wait to get into the office. And it’s because of the physicians who were members of the Academy. There was one hiccup where I tried to go away, but I was fortunately smart enough not to do that. \n\nWe came out the winner there.\n\nI hope that everybody still feels that way. But it’s been fun. So you take care. I thank you so much for doing this.  \n\nGlad to do it. \n\nAnd we will get you a copy of the tape as soon as it is properly edited. It may be awhile because they really do go through it.\n\nThank you so much Sandy. 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