{"@context":"http://iiif.io/api/presentation/3/context.json","id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/iiif/8g8ff3nt73/manifest","type":"Manifest","label":{"en":["Dr. Drew Dawson"]},"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":["2016-10-20 (created)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Type"]},"value":{"en":["Oral History"]}},{"label":{"en":["Agent"]},"value":{"en":["Sam Taggart (Interviewer)"]}},{"label":{"en":["Format"]},"value":{"en":["Video file"]}},{"label":{"en":["Keyword"]},"value":{"en":["Rural Medicine","Arkansas","Family Medicine","Family Physician"]}},{"label":{"en":["Subject"]},"value":{"en":["Drew Dawson, 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/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/293/482/small/DrewDawsonM.D.DVD.mp4_1759339534.jpg?1759339536","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161641/file/293482","type":"Canvas","label":{"en":["Media File 1 of 1 - Drew_Dawson_M.D._DVD_.mp4"]},"duration":5670.43144,"width":640,"height":360,"thumbnail":[{"id":"https://d9jk7wjtjpu5g.cloudfront.net/collection_resource_files/thumbnails/000/293/482/small/DrewDawsonM.D.DVD.mp4_1759339534.jpg?1759339536","type":"Image","format":"image/jpeg"}],"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161641/file/293482/content/1","type":"AnnotationPage","items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161641/file/293482/content/1/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"painting","body":{"id":"https://aviary-p-centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.s3.wasabisys.com/collection_resource_files/resource_files/000/293/482/original/Drew_Dawson_M.D._DVD_.mp4?1759339510","type":"Video","format":"video/mp4","duration":5670.43144,"width":640,"height":360},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161641/file/293482","metadata":[]}]}],"annotations":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161641/file/293482/transcript/84905","type":"AnnotationPage","label":{"en":["Dr. Drew Dawson interview transcript [Transcript]"]},"items":[{"id":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161641/file/293482/transcript/84905/annotation/1","type":"Annotation","motivation":"transcribing","body":{"type":"TextualBody","value":"Interview with Dr. Drew Dawson    \n\nGood evening, this is Sam Taggart and it is 10/20/16.  We are in the home of Dr. Drew Dawson and his wife, Denise in Pocahontas, Arkansas.  We are here to interview Dr. Dawson about his practice in rural Arkansas. Thank you for inviting us into your home; I appreciate it very much. Let’s start from the very beginning:  \n\nTell us about when you were born and the circumstances of your birth as well as who delivered you, in what hospital, those types of things. \n\n“I was born on January 12, 1973 in Jonesboro, Arkansas at St. Bernard’s.  Actually the delivering physician was Dr. St. Claire who is actually still in practice.  My mother still sees him on a once a year basis as her gynecologist and he served as her obstetrician for all three of her children; I have two sisters and I’m the middle child.  So, he delivered all my siblings and me via C-section and still is in practice today.”\n\n Talk about your sisters; how old are they and what are their names?\n\n“I have an older sister, Angela; now Angela Hilliard, who she and her husband live in Atlanta.  She is three years older than me, so that would make her 46 and she has four children.  I have a young sister, who actually lives here in Pocahontas and her name is LeAnn Rudder.  She took over the family furniture business and so, her and her husband now run Dawson Furniture.  She is four years younger than I am, so that would make her 39 and she has two children.”\n\nTalk a little bit about your family; did you grow up with a large extended family of Dawson’s here?\n\n“Not really; my father was an only child and his mom and dad, my grandparents, had a couple of siblings each, but they had moved off so there weren’t a lot of Dawson’s in the area.  There was one other crew that was related through my grandfather’s brother; but as my dad being an only child; there really wasn’t much of an extended family here.”\n\nWhere did your family come from?\n\n“My dad’s side, they had been Randolph Countians; if that’s even a word, for a long time.  They were raised here.  I think both sides, my dad’s mom and dad, both grew up in this area either up in the hills or around Dalton.  One was a farmer and the other one was a hill farmer; so I guess back in the day that was pretty much what you did.” \n\nHow do you differentiate a farmer and a hill farmer? \n\n“Well, one’s on flat ground and ones up in the hills; I think.”\n\nIt is interesting that ya’ll sit right here; you really are right there….\n\n\n“We are right here at the divide; so, literally my grandfather’s family, I think, was more a row crop family back in the day and my grandmother’s family was from the hills.  So, they still grew close to the same crops; cotton, corn…. ”\n\n“They had more cattle and more livestock.”\n\n“They had some cattle and livestock as well, but when you live here, you can do either.  You could share crop, row crop, or hill stuff.  My mother is from Ohio and so her family was all from Ohio, around Lake Erie, the Sandusky area.  She moved to Arkansas when she was 18 and her and my father met in college.”\n\nYou said your father had a business?\n\n“My grandfather and father started Dawson Furniture in 1967 or 1968; oh, I should know this date…I kind of want to say 1964, but that was when dad graduated high school.  But any rate, they started it off as an antique store and used furniture.  When my father graduated college, he came home, joined his dad, and they kind of turned Dawson Furniture into a big furniture business and served the county for a lot of years and still in business to this day.  When my sister got married, her husband came and worked with dad and when my parents retired from the business, my sister and brother in law took over.  So, Dawson furniture store still is in existence today.”                        \n\nSo, Denise tell me a little bit about your life and your family.  Tell me about your extended family and what your family does, where you were born, and all those kinds of things.\n\n“I was actually born right here in Pocahontas on June 18, 1976.  I was born at the Randolph County Hospital, which is on Hospital Drive and Dr. DeClerk delivered me; my great uncle.  In contrast to him, I have a huge extended family.  In research, Baltz and DeClerk are pretty much; that name is in some business in every corner of this town.  My grandfather was Mathias Baltz, who was the doctor here for a long time and his wife was a DeClerk.  They married and had 8 children.  I think of those 8 children; there are at least 6-7 of the grandkids how are doctors.”\n\n“More grandchildren than children; yeah.”\n\n“My Uncle, Albert Baltz, who was Mathias’s son was a family practice physician here in town.”\n\nAnd a previous partner of mine when I joined; Dr. Albert was my partner.”\n\n“My oldest brother; I have three brothers, Brent is a family practice doctor, a partner of his.”\n\n“Who is my current partner now.”\n\n“There are several specialists in Jonesboro who are cousins of mine that all sprang from that one doctor family.”\n\nIs Amy DeClerk part of that family?\n\n“She is married to my cousin; one of the DeClerk cousins.  Alex Balts who is also a partner of Drew’s is a cousin as well.  I have a very large, large family and I would say the majority of my cousins, aunts, and uncles are in the medical field; there are pharmacists and my dad is a dentist here in town.  My mom is a music teacher; she didn’t follow along in healthcare.” \n\nSo what do you guys remember about your childhood, particularly before you went to school, about growing up in Pocahontas?\n\n“Outdoors, I would say.”\n\n“For me, yeah for sure; it was a lot of outdoors stuff.  I ran around outside in the woods all the time.  We lived outside of town about three miles or so and three miles out of town back then seemed like a long way out of town.  Me and my two sisters, who both hated being outside; my mother would make them go outside to play with me, because I was the quintessential boy who would just pester them to death and so, she’d make them go outside to play with me.  Before the little one was old enough, there was a time where it was just me and the dog who spent a lot of time running around.  That was the time back in the day before there were car seats or anything like that; so, we had one pick-up truck for the furniture store that had a big metal rack on the back that  you could use to haul furniture with and then the other one had a camper shell on it.  I always remember the family outings piled n the back of the camper shell with my two sisters rolling around on bunk beds back there while my parents sat up front and enjoyed the air conditioner.”\n\nYou mentioned the dog; is that Jack’s dog.\n\n“Yes, I had a dog growing up that just became part of the family.  My dog’s name was Clifford and he was an English setter; just like Jack’s dog, Jessie.  I’ve always had a dog and Clifford was my first dog.”\n\nSo you are right here on the river and there are lots of woods around here.  I can see that, even though there may not be a lot of woods across the river; do you do a lot of hunting and fishing?\n\n\n“That’s right; there are 5 rivers in the county, so that’s kind of what you did.  You learned to hunt and fish; you duck hunted and deer hunted in the winter time, turkey hunted and fished in the spring and summer, and when it was too hot to fish, you ran the river and swam near the beach.”\n\nWhere was the beach?\n\n“Oh, there were beaches all over along the river; you could either float, canoe, or get in the inner tube or Johnboat and run up and down Current River and there were always a couple of  beaches up the Current River and there were always people there.  We used to do that some; my dad would put the boat in the water and we’d all pile in and run up to a secluded sandbar someplace with friends and spend a Sunday afternoon on the river with friends.”                   \n\nI noted that there were a couple of abandon Pylons across the river, right over the park from a bridge there; do you know when they started putting bridges across the river here?\n\n“Now, that’s an old train bridge.”\n\n“I was going to say that Pylon at one time was the longest revolving train-bridge in the United States, but I want to say maybe in the world at one time; correct me if I’m wrong and you may want to fact check me on that.”\n\nSo they could open it up for steam boats to come through?\n\n“Steam boats.”\n\n“So, they could rotate it and get barged traffic up and down the river.  Of course, that ceased years ago.  I’m not sure when they started expanding that; I would say early 1900s.”\n\n“We had the Sesquicentennial here, when was that?  It was before Jack was born; so it would have been in 2006.  We had our sesquicentennial and we researched what had happened in the county and the town at the time of that; so it was 250 years from the time of 2006; whatever date that was.  We did find out that that bridge, or the previous version of that bridge, was up and the steam boats would come through and there was a specific stop over at this point for cotton, or something else that they were loading on and off; but anyway it has been about 250 years and there was a bridge there.  I’m not sure if it was the same one that was the Pylon.”      \n\n Are we above Davidsonville on the river?\n\n“Yes, we are.”\n\n\nWe are above Davidson; I knew boats came all the way up to Davidson.\n\n“Yes; beyond that, there is a pretty good shoal and I don’t know if they ever went much passed that.  Maybe they did back in the day, but now there is a big shoal; it’s even hard to get a fishing boat passed Davidson very far; unless the water is up.”  \n\n Tell me about school a little bit; when did you start kindergarten or first grade, did you enjoy school, were there things you liked or didn’t like about school?\n\n“Uh, school was just always kind of a necessary thing; I don’t ever remember disliking school.  I guess, I was just fortunate because it always kind of came easy to me.  I started in kindergarten; never went to preschool because I don’t think there was but one preschool here and I couldn’t get in; that was the story I was told, but I don’t remember it.  From that point forward, it was just school and it was what you did; it was what was expected.  I enjoyed it and I mean you had your ups and downs like anybody else; bad years, you get made fun of, or your friends move away, your best friend is gone, or this, that, and the other.  But for the most part, school was a pretty good experience for me; I had no problems.”\n\nWhat about you Denise?\n\n“Well, we went to the same school in this town, so…”\n\n“You went to a private school though.”\n\n“I did; I went to a private catholic school up until the 8th grade.”\n\nWhere is the private school?\n\n“St. Paul’s is…at the time when I was young, the church here had a catholic school and they were, I guess you’d call it, decommissioned in the ‘80s; so, now it’s just an elementary school with kindergarten through 6th grade now.  At the time I was there, it was K-12.”      \n\nWas there a significant catholic population here?\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“I think there still is.”\n\n“Yes.”\n\n“I don’t really know why; at one point, that school had a high school basketball team that competed with some of the local schools here.  I guess; I don’t know if it was costs or what it was, but they have a great elementary school program.  But, she came over.”\n\n\n\n“It’s small.  I think now a days the fact that it is a private school; there is not as many Catholics that go there, but there is a lot of secular people, I guess you could call it that, that go there for the private school; because it is a private school.  It’s kind of the elite school to go to.”  \n\n Did you guys remember any people during elementary school, junior high, and high school who had a big impact on your life; grandparents, parents, family members, teachers, preachers?\n\n“Definitely in Senior High, but not before that.  I don’t remember anybody before that that had a huge life changing impact on me.  I still remember my 4th grade teacher, Ms. Brown; she was just a really great teacher.  But in terms of something that stands out to me; that this person directed my character or helped forge something, it was in high school for me when that happened; not prior to.”\n\n“I can’t think of any.  Growing up in the catholic school was very strict; it was the stereotypic catholic school nun and all that; so, it was more of a…..”\n\nDid you like school?\n\n“Yes; I loved school.  I like the social aspect and I liked the learning aspect; all of it.” \n\nNow, Denise you were from town?\n\n“Yes.”\n\nAnd Drew, you were from the country?\n\n“I was.”\n\n“Well, I take that back; I lived on the same road that he did.  We grew up about two miles from each other.”\n\n“Yeah, but you were on the outskirts of town; I was out in the country.”\n\n“I was technically on the border of the city limits.”\n\n“Those two and half miles make a big difference; she was on the border of town and I was out in the sticks.”\n\n“It did; but I did grow up in the same kind of…”\n\n\n“And we didn’t know each other growing up.  We didn’t meet until later.”\n\n“Our dad’s did.”\n\n“Our dads did, but we didn’t know each other.”\n\n“I have three brothers; so, there was not a whole lot of girliness.  I was outside climbing trees, fishing, swimming in the rivers, and doing all that too.”\n\n Were your families religious?\n\n “Very; both.”\n\n“Yeah, I would say….I don’t know…very, I guess, is a relative term; but, yes I would say my family was religious and knowing what I know about yours, I would say as well.”\n\nYou were expected to be there when the doors were open?\n\n“Yes; absolutely.”\n\nWas there one member of your family that was more religious than the other?  Maybe more spiritual than the other?\n\n“Ewe…I don’t know; there is a difference there though.  My father was by far the leader of the family; he was the spiritual leader of the family.  My mother brought a little different twist to things from a little different perspective, but they meshed very well together.  So beyond that, my grandparents were always there as well, my dad’s parents; they were always there.” \n\nYour father and grandfather worked together correct?\n\n“That’s correct.” \n\nDid you do well in school?\n\n“I did; I did do well in school. Like I said, it always came natural to me.  High school was never a struggle.  College; a little bit.  Med school; a different story.”\n\n Were you involved in sports?\n\n“I was.  I played high school football.  In the beginning, I played high school football, baseball, and all the above; but as l progressed through junior high and high school, I just did track and primarily football; that was the sport….”\n\nWere you good at football?\n\n\n“I don’t think I was very good.  I started and we had a very successful team, but I was just a very small spoke in a big wheel.  We won our conference every year and went to state every year; we actually made it to the state semifinals one year.  We never did win state, but our team was very successful and I was privileged enough to start two of those three years and play a fair amount as a sophomore.  But as far as me being very good, no I don’t think I was ever that good; I was just a small piece.”\n\nDid sports have an impact on what you did on your life? \n\n“It had a huge impact and that is what I was alluding to earlier about.  There were two parts of it that really impacted me; I guess I didn’t really realize the second part until later, but the first part was always just the character building.  That was one thing why my dad used to encourage me to play sports, because it built character.  Getting up at 4 o’clock in the morning and going to a two a day; running and lifting weights during the summertime when your other buddies were sleeping in and not doing anything; it teaches you something.  Getting up when you’ve been knocked down 50 times; it teaches you some of that character, it toughens you.  But my coach, Dave Williams; I didn’t know at the time, but the guy was just a giant.  A lot of people around the state knew Dave Williams.  In fact, right there on the wall is one of his favorite quotes that I had put in a frame just because of what he taught us; he taught me so much more than I realized.  When I was playing for him, the guy just commanded respect; he was just one of those guys that was just tough, almost like a Tom Landry character.  He was just tough and commanded your respect, but there was just so much that he taught you that you’d don’t realize until you become an adult.  His son was a year younger than me, so we played together throughout the three years; we overlapped two.  We were never super close friends off the field, but we’ve stayed in touch.  He was coach here forever and so when I moved back to town, I did all the sports physicals for the football team. I reached out to him and he was glad for us to reconnect; the coach and me. We had, I thought, a very good relationship and then he passed away two or three years ago of colon cancer.  He was probably the most meaningful person in my high school time in terms of impact on my character and what it taught me; life lessons for down the road. ”\n\nWhat about you Denise; were you involved in sports or involved in other activities in school that had the same impact on you?\n\n“No; I was involved in sports in high school for a little while.  I played basketball and I was in track.  I had a different dynamic when it came to family encouraging me to play sports or compete at things, I guess is the term.  I didn’t really have the drive to stick with anything; I don’t know if that is a plus or a minus, but I can’t say that I had any kind of influence by any sports or anything.”\n\n\nWhere were y’all in terms of school?\n\n“Three years apart.” \n\n“I was a freshman and he was a senior.  We were on the school yearbook staff together; that’s how we met.”\n\n“She moved over from the private school to join us public heathens and I was co-editor of the yearbook and she got on the yearbook annual staff and that’s how we met.”\n\nDid you start dating then?\n\n“Yeah.”\n\n“Kind of sort of; but I was a senior and I didn’t want to be seen with a freshman.”\n\n“I was going to say it wasn’t cool, because I was too young.”     \n\n“It was an under the table, on the side kind of thing; you know, she was too young to be seen with in public.”     \n\n“But yes; yes, we dated.”\n\n“I’d say probably was.”\n\n“He went off to college and we tried the long distance thing.”\n\n“We did.”\n\n“And then I went off to college.”\n\n“We did the whole back and forth where we were on again off again for several years and when each of us would make a major transition we’d say, “It’s not going to work” and then we’d split up and then time or faith would bring us back together.  We would reconnect and date again for a while until some other major change in life.”     \n\nSo when was the first time in your life that you remember thinking about what you were going to do with your life?\n\n“Good question; I don’t know if I can tell you exactly where I was.”\n\n“I can answer that for you.”\n\n“Answer.”\n\n\n\n“He’s always told me that during the course of, I guess, early teenage years and into early adulthood, whatever he does he wants to be the best at it. What can I do that is reaching that highest pinnacle of success and set a goal and reaching goals?  So, the greatest thing you could think of to do ...”\n\n“The hardest thing I could think of to do ..”\n\n“Would be to become a doctor.”  \n\n“I don’t remember where I was; but as a small town guy, the icons of your town were your doctors or at least for me; they were the guys that I looked up to.”\n\nWhich ones in particular?\n\n“Hal Barre stood out the most; he was my doctor when I was a kid. We didn’t have a lot of money, so we didn’t go to the doctor a lot.  But when I did have to go because of a break or cut, he was the guy.  He was the big guy in town when I was growing up.  He was just a great guy; really animated, very boisterous, and just quite a character.  He was somebody who you just loved.  He was just a very charactered personality for sure.  But just in general, that was the hardest thing I could think of to do.  So, I knew in high school that I wanted to be a doctor because I couldn’t think of anything harder; that was the toughest thing, golden ring for me.”\n\nDid going to school in Pocahontas prepare you for college? \n\n“I would say pretty well.  We have a really good math and science department here and at the time, some excellent math and science teachers.  There are a couple of areas where I wished we’d been a little more robust in, but in terms of math and science, I felt very competently prepared for college.”\n\nPrior to going to college; were there any crises in your life that changed the way you looked at things; a death of a parent, grandparent, or close friend?  Maybe financial changes that made it so that you couldn’t do something that you wanted to or maybe changed to where you could do something you wanted to?        \n\n“Never a crisis; we always grew up not having extra money.  My dad was working his tail off for a living; so, we grew up respecting the value of a dollar.  It wasn’t like we could just go do whatever; that was never the case.  But, I had one of those fairytale childhoods; nothing ever happened.  I had all four of my grandparents when I started medical school. It was just one of those deals; I think that’s right, defiantly in college.  I had all four of my grandparents on into my 20+years; I know.  It was just like I said a fairytale childhood; nothing happened.”\n\n\nDid you work while in high school or college and if so what kind of work did you do?\n\n“Well, you worked at the furniture store; since he was about 14.”\n\n“I started when I was 12.  My father and grandfather sold used appliances; so, I scrubbed greasy stoves, cleaned out nasty refrigerators and checked them out, cleaned them up and put them out on the floor and got them ready to sell.  I delivered furniture and did moving jobs on the side.  I worked after school starting when I was about 12 and every weekend and when I got old enough, it was every day after school and every Saturday.  Then, I went to college and the first two years I came home and started my own mowing business, so I mowed grass every summer and took summer school at the community college as a transfer.  Once I stayed at Harding in Searcy, I got a job in White County as a nurse’s aide giving baths and doing vital signs.  I was trying to make a little extra money and learn a little bit about how the whole medical deal works; so I’d work third shift.”\n\nDenise?\n\n“Yes, I worked from the day I turned 16.  Well before I turned 16, I taught private swimming lessons to kids.  Then, I worked at a pharmacy, I guess, my whole high school.  When I turned 16, I went and applied and got a job as just whatever they needed me to do.  I worked the register and helped stock supplies and things.”\n\nWhat pharmacy?\n\n“Well, it was Palace Drug at the time, which was Johnny DeClerk; Thomas DeClerk’s brother.”\n\n“But you worked for Mark Futrell.”\n\n“Yes; the Futrell’s Pharmacy, which was on the corner at the square; they had just purchased it from Johnny.”\n\nSo the same place?\n\n“Yes.  They closed it down finally and merged the two pharmacies and so, I went up the hill and worked at Futrell’s pharmacy.”\n\n“On the corner there.”\n\n“On the corner.” \n\n“Which is where my dad used to work when he was in high school.”\n\n\n“Yeah, so I worked there, I guess, until I left for college and then in college, I worked at a sporting goods store and a law firm for a long time.  I did do a little stent at the mental state hospital.”\n\n“That’s right; you worked at the state hospital.”\n\n“The Arkansas State Hospital; just in the administration offices.”                \n\nDrew, what informed your decision as to where you were going to go to college?\n\n“My parents told me that they wanted me to go to a Christian School for at least one year.  My sister had gone to Harding and so, she was there starting her senior year.  I looked at a couple of other Christian Schools, but that was kind of the gig; the expectation was that you go to a Christian School for one year and that was the closest one and my sister was there.  I had several scholarships that would pay if I stayed in the state, so that’s where I decided to go for the first year.  I got there and met some of the best guys on the planet; I made great friends and then I didn’t want to go anywhere else; that was home.”\n\n So you spend three or four years at Harding?\n\n“I spent four years in college.”\n\nAnd you enjoyed Searcy?\n\n“I loved it; it was great.”\n\nSo are you Church of Christ?\n\n“Yes sir.”\n\nSo that’s your tie-in right there?\n\n“That’s right.”\n\nSo what about you Denise? \n\n“My older brother Brent, who is his partner, was already at UALR in Little Rock, so it never was a….it was just a given that I would go there too, I guess.  That’s where he went and I got a full tuition scholarship; Chancellor’s Leadership class was a honorary program that they had there at UALR and he had applied and got a full paid tuition scholarship, so he said, “Why don’t you go ahead and apply and get the same thing?” So, I did and got the full tuition scholarship and I went down there and we lived together.  So, I went to college at UALR.”\n\nDid you both enjoy college?\n\n\n“I loved college; it was a blast.”   \n\nIs there anything about it that you liked in particularly?\n\n“I grew up in the country and was a country boy.  My first semester in biology, I met a great guy who he and his brother owned a 600 acre farm outside of Searcy that had a big lake in the center of it.  We became friends and over a course of time, he entrusted me with the keys; so I got to feed his horses, keep up his place, run his fences and he’d let me fish and hunt and have the run of 600 acres; it was paradise for me.  That’s truly an Arkansas country body story; going to college and getting paradise.  It wasn’t chasing women and wild parties; it was feeding horses and fishing in the lake.  Me and about three other guys, we had a ball doing that.  We spent a lot of time being very social at social fraternities, but when we weren’t in school or class, we usually ran out to feed the horses and fish in the lake.”    \n\nWas there anything about the academics of college that really caught your attention that you enjoyed or really got a kick out of?\n\n“Who was the guy that did all the bugs?”\n\n“Dr. Rushton; he was a biology professor.  He was a great guy and I loved those initial intro classes.  I had several professors that were influential for me.  Dr. Rushton was one of them.  Dr. Plummer was one of them as well.  But, the embryology genetics; I don’t know, I guess I’m a dork because I really liked that kind of stuff.  I have always been a physics fan; I had a phenomenal high school physics teacher who was just incredibly smart and was a great teacher.  I think that is what I would have gone into if I had not gone into medicine; I’d have gone into physics of some sort.  I would have found something where I could have used physics in as it just always made kind of logical sense to me.  So, I enjoyed those classes and I never really dreaded….the only thing I ever really dreaded was chemistry; it’s just not my strong suite, I hated it.  But the biology part and physics part, I never did mind those; it was just doing the work.  But logically, it just made sense to me.”  \n\nSo at what point did you start the real preparation process for going to medical school?\n\n“Truthfully, it was probably when I was a sophomore in high school.  I knew that if I was going to get in, I needed to have good grades; I had a 4.0 in high school and was valedictorian.  That was important to me; I wanted to make sure that I had done the best that I could do.  That was, I guess, one of the decisions to that lead me into Harding, because I knew it had a pretty good acceptance rate into medical school.  At the time, that was still what I had said I wanted to do; I wasn’t sure as everybody goes into college saying, “I’m pre-med.”  Every biology guy is pre-med, you know; that’s just what everybody says that they want to do.  So, I was one of a lot of people that said, “Oh, I’m just going to be pre-med.”  I knew Harding had a pretty good acceptance rate if you do well and that is a pretty respected school in the state.  So if you well in school here, \n\n\nyou’ll have a pretty good shot.  As long as you do well on your MCAT scores, you have a fair shot of getting into school somewhere.”\n\nDid you get encouraged by your professors?\n\n“Very much so; they were very encouraging.  Especially Dr. Plummer who was also my advisor, but he was very influential and encouraged me to apply.  He was probably one of those wonderful resources that I never utilized like I should have until right at the end of my college career.  When you are a freshman or sophomore, you think “Oh, whatever; I’ll do that later.”  But, he was a great resource that I never really realized utilized until later on.” \n\nWhat about you Denise; anybody in particular in college that had an impact on what you did or didn’t do?    \n\n“I had plans early on to go into dentistry like my dad.  Sometimes, I would spend my summers just down at his clinic helping out and learning the ropes.  That was my plan originally to go to dental school; so, I’d say that he was a major influence on what I wanted to do.  Life tends to take different paths and so when he was graduating and going to residency; if I was going to go to dental school, it was a  time where I had to decide whether I wanted to get married and start a family and go on that path or I wanted to go to Memphis to a four year dental school and then reconnect with him.  So, I chose marriage instead.  I did go to a dental assisting school in Little Rock for a year and I came back and eventually worked for my dad.  I work for my dad now; I actually did go into business with him; but I was his assistant for a long time until Jack was born and now, I’m his office manager.”\n\nWhen did you guys marry?\n\n“In 1999.” \n\nAnd you have one child and his name is?\n\n“We have one son and his name is Jack.  He was born in 2009 and is 7 years old.”    \n\n Talk about that first two years of medical school, especially the first year.\n\n“I started in ’95 and graduated in ’99. It was awful.”\n\n\n\n“We actually had broken up, because I was in Little Rock in college and he was in Searcy in college.  We had broken up and he had written me a letter; this was before email and everything, saying that he had just applied to medical school or had just gotten accepted, I can’t remember which.”\n\n“You knew I had applied; so, I was telling you I had gotten in.”\n\n“So, we kind of reconnected right before he started medical school.  Then, he was moving to Little Rock and I was already there anyway, so we reconnected then.”\n\n“I guess things had changed a lot and maybe I just wasn’t; maybe I had burned out all the student in me; because I hated the first two years.  I talk to guys now who are in school and they say, “Oh, I love it; the first year is awesome, I love it.  Medical school is great” and I’m thinking, “It was horrible.  I hated it.”  We had fun, we laughed, and you make friends; but in terms of if it was something that I enjoyed; no, it was horrible.  Yeah, I don’t want to dissect into all of that.”\n\nWere you prepared for it?\n\n“Um, like taking a drink of water from a fire hydrant; no.  I don’t know that you can be prepared for it.  I felt prepared for it in some areas and under-prepared for it in most.  Some of it was just me; like I began to question if I was smart enough for this or I think I made the wrong decision.  A lot of it was that I just never had to study before; I cruised through high school with a 4.0.  I cruised through college with a couple of little speed bumps with chem-101 that I had to get through and shake off; but I did pretty well at school and never really had to study.  I didn’t know how to study.  So, I got my ears pinned back for the first couple of years to a point where I was like, “Whew, I didn’t know this is what I was really signing up for” it was tough for sure.”             \n\nSo you say it took you a couple of years to get to the point where you were ok?\n\n“Well, the first year was awful in terms of just trying to survive and then the class really quickly separated itself into what we called the gunners and the normal people and I was probably at the bottom of that stack.  But when the second year rolled along, you could almost see the light at the end of the tunnel; at that point, I realized where my forte was going to be.  It was just like, “Get me in front of a human being” because I’m not any good in front of a microscope or in front of a board full of glass slides..put me in front of a human; that’s where I will see it and excel.  That’s where I feel comfortable.  Put me in front of a human being and let me talk to somebody and use my head to figure things out.  So, that was the light at the end of the tunnel; I could survive another year of this, just get me into the clinicals.  So, clinicals were much, much better.”       \n\n\nTalk about that; your junior and senior year.\n\n“That was a much, much better experience for me even though the hours are totally differentiated and more job like; or more so. When there is class; you could cut class and if you don’t want to go, you don’t go.  My first rotation was surgery; so at 4am at UAMS making prerounds and you round with your residents and then you round again with your fellow attending; so you round on these people three or four times a day.  You start at 4am and you leave when they tell you you can go home, which is usually 8-9pm at night.  So, even though the hours are exponentially more than the first two years; I never minded it, the hours didn’t bother me as I enjoyed being there.  It’s not like it’s always rainbows and butterflies; you know, you have the bad days too, but for the most part of that, I could deal with.”\n\nWhich rotations did you like the best?\n\n“I liked surgery a lot and of all the rotations that I did; I did pediatric/oncology at Children’s and that really made the most impactful rotation that I ever did.  Those kids were so inspiring to me, that I just didn’t want to leave it.  It is such an odd thing to say and I can see the expression on your face; you think going to a pediatric oncology ward is such a depressing place in the world right?  I came home every night just inspired by those kids.  The amazing fortitude, strength, and character, and courage that these kids had; if you work with them every day, it’s just a privilege to go to work with the attendings, which was just fantastic, and Children’s is just a wonderful facility…..but working with those kids everyday….”\n\nAbout what year was that?\n\n“It would have been ’98 and my third year.”\n\nWho were some of the attendings?\n\n“Keno Stein and Beckton.  Dr. Stein is who I worked with the mostly; there were some others, but Dr. Keno Stein is the guy that I worked with the most.  They had a great team of residents and attendings and the pediatric oncology ward almost made me change what I wanted to do; it really did.  It made me really sit down and evaluate; I was thinking, “Maybe, I really want to do this; I think I can see myself doing this from now on.”  It was just so hard to shake that feeling of just feeling privileged to get to work with those patients every day.”\n\nYou said, “It almost made you change your mind” had you already decided at that point what you wanted to do?\n\n“I think I knew I wanted to be a family doc from the time I said, “I want to go to medical school.”  I drifted back and forth and thought maybe I wanted to do cardiology, general surgery, and then you kind of get to learn the lifestyle of some of this stuff.  I thought, “I kind of want to be a dad someday and that could be really hard to be a surgeon and a dad.”  Well, one of the guys that \n\n\nlead me and I feel like I need to mention this guy as he really was one of the lower influential men in my decision making process; I was in college and it was me and my buddy running our lawn mower business, he is a cardiothoracic surgeon in Jonesboro; Rich Stevenson.  He had operated on my grandmother and on my buddies’ father; so, both of our families knew who he was, but he didn’t know us from anybody.  He was busy and wouldn’t have known that we were relatives of patients of his; so, my buddies dad knew him well enough to ask him and said, “Hey, you know both of the boys are in college for biology degrees and they both kind of want to go pre-med.  Would you care to sit down and talk to them?”  He said, “No, no; sure have them come by.”  So, I remember we went to Jonesboro one day and into his office in the back door.  It was around 8 o’clock at night and we sat in front of his desk.  I just remember seeing this guy’s larger than life figure and I didn’t really know who he was; I just knew that he was a big time cardiothoracic surgeon with plaques all over the wall and all these awards everywhere.  He had at the time a very prestigious looking office and he just kind of rolled up a chair and talked to us.  He asked us some questions trying to make that determination of “Are you really wanting to be a doctor because it’s time to push all your chips to the middle if you’re going medical; this is the time to do it?”  He gave us the pros and cons and kind of half way tried to talk us both out of it.  He let us know; yeah, it was tough, but then he went on to tell what all the benefits were.  He and I are now friends and I am honored to be his friend.  He is a good guy and we still talk, text, and email.  He was very influential and kind of pushed me at the fork; I was at one of those really influential forks and he nudged me down that path and I’m glad he did.”\n\nHow old were you at that point?\n\n“I think I was a sophomore in college.  It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore year, so I would have been 19 or 20.”\n\nDid you have a lot of debt?\n\n“Not by today’s standards; I don’t think.  When we got married, and I asked this question today to her; I think I had about $40,000.00 in debt from college, or maybe a little less than that, and right around $80,000.00 in debt from medical school.  So, I was thinking my rough debt total when we got married was about $110,000.00-$120,000.00.  I had subsidized and unsubsidized loans where I had gotten some scholarships for college and for medical school.”\n\nDid you have any trouble paying it back?\n\n“No, I had it paid back by the time we finished residency.  I worked my brains out and get it done that way.  We got to moonlight; that was before all the restrictions, so I was working 100-120 hours a week for a few weeks until she pulled the plug on it and said, “You’re done; you’re not doing  this anymore.”  But, I got all her debt paid off and all my debt paid off; so when we left residency, we were debt free other than just our mortgage.”                  \n\n\nSo you had kind of made up your mind, with the exception of pediatrics oncology, that you were going to family practice.  What informed your decision and I used that word “informed your decision” because you can carry it any way you want to about where you were going to go to get your training?\n\n“Good question; it just kind of happened.  I didn’t want to go to Jonesboro; that was not necessarily my first choice.  I knew I wanted to do family medicine and I knew that there are a lot of good family medicine training programs in the state.  So, I interviewed at all the AHECs and then I went to Birmingham, Springfield, and Chattanooga. I had several interviews and it was just a matter of looking around and wondering “Where do I want to live?” We weren’t married at the time, but we were planning on getting married.  We got married between medical school and residency and it was the matter of “Where do you want to live?”  So, I had done rotations at Fayetteville and Jonesboro, because they were close and easy for home; home being here.   I just liked the northwest part and I liked the lakes; I kind of had an eye for that, “maybe I’d want to live there.”  I could rotate close and kind of get to know the whole scene there.  When match day came and I got Jonesboro, I initially thought, “Uh, I don’t know if this is just right or not.”  But, it turned out to be a fantastic decision; I couldn’t have got better training anywhere else.”\n\nWho were some of the folks that trained you?\n\n“Joe Stallings; I stood in the shadow of Joe Stallings.  Elaine Gillespie, Connie Meeks, and Scott Lafoone; there were a lot of part time attendings, too many to mention who are still in practice today that had a huge part in training me.”\n\n“Who was the pharmacist?”\n\n“Of course, Dosha Cummins was the assistant PharmD, but then……\n\n“He always brought me flowers.”\n\n“Tom Frank also played a giant roll in teaching the pharmacology of medicine; the pharmaco connects and the pharmco dynamics of medicine.  He was very active in the residency program and a great asset to them, but a lot of it was Joe and his particular way of doing things.”\n\nHe and I are classmates.\n\n“You and Joe are classmates?”\n\nYeah and you are absolutely right, he was like that back in medical school.  \n\nSo you go to training and obstetrics was a big deal in Joe’s program.\n\n“Absolutely; absolutely.”\n\n\nObviously, you did quite a bit of obstetrics there.\n\n“A ton; I was known as “the guy.” If you were anywhere close to delivering a baby, you delivered when I was on call.  I delivered a lot more babies than anybody else, just because….it was well over 300 during the three years, but it was for whatever reason.  Most people would average 1-2 deliveries a night and I’d had 4-5; that was just the way it fell for me always.”\n\nDid you enjoy OB?\n\n“I did; it was a ton of fun.  It’s fun and great medicine with intermittent blocks of absolute terror when you have a problem.  Nothing is fun at 3am, but I did enjoy doing it.  I think there was never a part of me that thought I wanted to do this for the rest of my life because of just what it took, but I didn’t mind doing it.  I complained about it plenty like everybody does when you’re a resident, but I look back on those days kind of fondly; you know.”\n\n So, you went to school in Arkansas; you were born and raised in Pocahontas and went to school in Jonesboro; when time to start saying “fish or cut bait, where do we want to live for the rest of our lives” was there any question?\n\n“Oh, yeah.  No, No; there wasn’t in regard to here.  The answer when somebody asked, “Where are you going to go” the answer was “anywhere, but Pocahontas” for both of us.  Anywhere, but Pocahontas; we did not want to come home.”\n\n“Neither one of us expected to ever move back here.  We loved college and didn’t want to come back here.”\n\n“We didn’t want to come back here; I was going to leave to never return.  I found myself back in Jonesboro, because the really wasn’t my where my initial intention was; but seemed to be a pretty good fit and then we started having the discussion of “where are we going to live, where are we going to go?”  Well, it was going to be Mountain Home; I had a deal with Mountain Home and my whole residency was about Mountain Home.  I had done a lot of rotations there and I had let my intentions be known to particular doctors there in that practice that I wanted to be part of that group and I wanted to live there and put some roots down there.  We were sliding the contracts back and forth and I was right there ready to put ink on paper.  We were looking at houses and then, it kind of fell apart.  Then, I looked up and it was a couple of months before graduation and I thought, “I don’t have a job.”  I had been moonlighting the ER and I had ER offers and I had three different job offers to stay in Jonesboro; a lot of different business offers and good job offers, but it just didn’t seem right.  One day, these guys called and said, “Hey, we heard that you haven’t committed to anybody yet and we would like for you to really consider coming to Pocahontas.”\n\nWho were these guys?\n\n\n“The guys were my partners, but now they are retired.  I remember it was Drew Jansen who called and then her uncle, Danny Holt called.  They said, “Look, we’d really like for you to consider coming and talking to us and working with us.”\n\nHow big a group was it?\n\n“At the time, there were 4-5 of them; Albert Danny, Andrew, Roger Troxwell, and Randy Guntharp.  They were having some internal issues and one of the guys was leaving and they were looking to add on; it just kind of fell that way.  I ended up going up to do a rotation to just kind of see the very end of my third year residency and well, I guess one of the guys who had a really busy practice decided he was leaving.  So about the time I decided I was coming, he was leaving.  So, I stepped day one into a full schedule, pretty much; it just worked out that way for me.”\n\nNow what kind of practice; you pretty well know as you go around the state everybody practices a little different.  I tell the tale now that “we go in and get our training and the town molds us into what they want us to be.”\n\n“That’s true; very true.”\n\nWhat kind of practice did you do?  Did you do OB or do you do OB?     \n\n“I don’t do OB.  There was not an OB program at Pocahontas.”\n\n“There used to be.”\n\n“There used to be many years ago, but not anywhere close to since we’ve been here.”\n\nWhat about surgery?\n\n“I do a lot of intra-office surgery, but nothing in the hospital.  I don’t do appendectomies or gallbladders like a lot of the older guys did.  I never really got the training for that; I always kind of wanted to, but never really had enough.  I do a ton of stuff in the office, but I don’t do anything in the hospital in terms of surgery.” \n\nWhat other type of support physicians do you have around for primary care?  I’m talking about general care surgeons or OB; those kinds of folks.\n\n“It comes and goes in this town, we’ve had a lot.  Right now, we have one orthopedist and that’s it.  In terms of support staff; that’s it, it’s just us and it has always kind of been that way.  We’d have a general surgeon for a few years; he comes, he stays, he goes.  We’ve had ortho on and off for the last few years, but the most part; it’s just you and the ER.”\n\nIs your hospital and/or your practice independent?\n\n\n“We are independent from one another.”\n\nSo you are independent and not owned by a marginal organization.\n\n“That is correct.  Now, the hospital has been owned by multiple different organizations and currently, the city has took the hospital back over several years ago.  But, our clinic now had been bought out by the NEA Clinic years ago before I moved here and they guys had bought themselves back through the whole pie-core deal; they bought themselves back and had been a couple of years independent when I moved back here and we have been independently owned since then.”\n\nSo you have been in practice here since what year?\n\n“2002.”\n\n“Yeah; 2002, so 14 years.”                       \n\nHas medicine turned out to be what you thought it would be?\n\n“Not even close.”\n\nHow is it different?\n\n“I knew you were going to ask that as a follow up; I don’t really know that I knew what it was going to be and then you kind of form something in your mind while you’re in medical school of what you think it’s going to be like, but it’s not; it’s not even close to that.  It is just totally different and it’s different now than what it was three years ago and what it was three years ago is totally different from five years ago.  You know, we’ve just watched it change so much.  When I first started, it just seemed like such a simpler time even thought at the time, it seemed like it was all I could do to keep up; but you had just a paper chart and a Dictaphone and that was it.  You had paper film if it was on regular x-ray film and now you carry around a laptop and you can pull up lab, x-ray, digital radiography, or access anything you want from your laptop; it’s just totally different.”\n\nAre y’all hooked in with the hospital from an EMR standpoint?\n\n“We have our own EMR system.  No, we are not connected with them at all in terms of our technology either.”\n\nSo you have a guy walk in with an MI; what is your immediate response?\n\n“We have protocol and we work with our referring hospital, which would be either St. Barnard’s or NEA which is in Jonesboro.  We’ve had our meetings with the cardiologist…..”\n\nIs NEA old Craighead County?\n\n\n“Maybe the old Methodist Hospital became the NEA hospital and so, that may have been before it was NEA.  But, we work with the cardiology groups over there; there are two of them, and run an ischemia protocol.  So when somebody hits the door with an MI, they don’t have to go to the ER; it’s one of the things that we try to do.  Even though we are close, we can try to push them across the street; but you’re wasting time when you know what to do.  The staff know what to do; get a line in them, and when we know that is what it is, we take a picture of their EKG and go straight to the stemi-transport line and they call the ambulance.  We can have them in and out in hopefully less than 10 minutes from door to door.”           \n\nAre you pleased with your emergency transport system?\n\n“We’ve had some bumps in the road; but for the most part, they do a good job.”\n\nIs it locally run?\n\n“No; it was kind of locally run..”\n\n“It’s changed.”\n\n“It changed hands about five years ago.  There is local management; but in terms, I think its run out of somewhere in southwestern Arkansas.  I’m not sure exactly where the owners are.”\n\nAre you guys a critical access hospital?\n\n“No; we tried to get that designation a couple of times and kind of found ourselves in the time out zone.  They never could really get it worked out.”\n\nAre you not far enough away?\n\n“It wasn’t that because Walnut Ridge is actually closer to Jonesboro and is a critical access hospital.  There was something about the politics of it that I never could quite figure out.  I think they had put a moratorium on adding a new critical access because I know the administrator multiple times tried to get us to add a designation and we never could get it.”\n\nSo if you look at your practice; what would you say to “Ok, how much of it is office based and how much of it is hospital based?   \n\n“Now, its all office based.  When I started, it was a fair amount of hospital based.  You get up in the morning and make rounds, go to the office, then back to the hospital.  Sometimes, you’d go at noon if you had a bad patient and multiple times during the day.  You at least round twice a day, sometimes three.  Time has progressed and it seemed to be just almost a necessity over the other and it was hard to do both.  It’s hard to make a living doing both.  So, it happened over the course of 10 years; you see yourself doing more in the clinic and less in the hospital.  Then, the hospital added hospitalists and so, it was….”\n\n\nWhen did y’all go to hospitalists?\n\n“That’s been now probably about five years ago.”\n\nHas that worked?\n\n“Uh, I think it depends on who you ask.  I think for the most part, it has been a very successful change.  I kind of miss some of the hospital stuff, but it is hard to do both.  It’s really hard to take care of hospital patients and be as busy in the clinic as you need to be to do what you want to do.”\n\nHow many patients do you average a day?           \n\n“Depends on the day; but 25-30.”\n\nHas that changed?\n\n“Oh yeah, absolutely; for a while it was 40.  I could get through 40 a day; but as for my population, my patient group has changed.  When you first start, you see a lot of sick call, walk-in visits, and a lot of kids with sore throats; it’s easy to get 40 a day without feeling struggled.  It’s still a struggle; but.  My population is now more of an internal medicine type practice; older patients with multiple complicated issues and you know, you’re managing 6, 7, 8, 10 chronic disease states all at the same time.  We’ve turned into almost a diagnostic clinic in a lot of cases; so, there are days when 20 is hard to pull off and there are days when it seems like 30 is no sweat; it just depends on the patient mix.”             \n\nI think I noticed on the board that you have 4 APNs? That work for you? \n\n“That’s correct.”\n\nWhat kind of relationship do you have with the APNs of your clinic?\n\n“Um, we have two locations and so right now, we are short.  We are looking and been trying to recruit for several years, so we kind of filled the need to provide service through the APNS.  We have a really close relationship.  The initial oldest two who have been there the longest trained with me or my partners.”\n\nIn Jonesboro?\n\n“No, here in Pocahontas; they came and trained on site while they were getting their training before we ever hired them.  When they did come here, they trained with us and learned how we wanted them to do things.  We collaborate with them and are on site with them all the time.  Occasionally, they are at the building without a collaborating physician on site, but that’s a rarity.  At anytime, they can call and we have access to review their films or lab remotely.  So, \n\n\nwe have a very close relationship with them and that’s one of the things that all the guys really still take a lot of pride in.”   \n\nIn the last 25 years, medicine has changed dramatically.  In the last 16 years, since you have been in practice, it’s changed overwhelmingly.  Talk about that a little bit.  Talk about the changes that occurred; the changes in technology, the changes in medical records, and the impact that it’s had on your practice.\n\n“Yes, yes; we had gone to EMR when I was a resident.  When I started private practice, I was back on paper.  So, I made the transition a couple of times and it’s not ever an easy transition.  It’s meant to be a tool to help you, but what it really turns into or what it can turn into is a hinder between you and your patient if you let it; that’s one of the hardest things to not stare at a computer screen and look at the person that you’re in the room to take care of.  You know, I can talk forever about the ins and outs of it, but the business side of this has always been interesting to me; I like the administrative part.  Not necessarily the administrative part, but the business aspect, the service aspect of medicine, and what real people want when they go to see their doctor.  What do people want?  These are people that you go to church with, see at the grocery store, you buy gas from, or your kids go to school with.  So, you want to be a good guy; you don’t want to be just after a quick buck.  You don’t want to just try to run as many through as you can.  To me, you kind of have to fight that; every layer of technology seems to take the human element a little farther out of the picture and that’s the fight.  We are seeing you and you are the patient.  You are human and you have a name; you’re not just chart number something.  You are not just a data sheet or a face sheet on a laptop; that’s been hard and one of those things that’s easy to let yourself get sucked into that mode where you spend your time looking at the laptop and not face to face with your patient.  It is a great tool and can defiantly help you deliver better healthcare with fewer mistakes, but it can also be a downfall if you let it.”               \n\nLet’s go a little bit beyond Pocahontas in the state of Arkansas; I know that you have been involved in state family practice programs, but I don’t know about your other medical politics at all.  I know you have been involved in that, so where do you think that all of this is going?\n\n“You know, personally I think I’ve seen it even swing a couple of times when I was first starting.  It seemed like hospitals, or entities, have been gobbling up a lot of docs and then the pendulum kind of swung back by the time I got into residency to where people began to go out on their own.  Now, we see it swinging back the other way where the cooperate stuff….everybody is looking to make a buck from a business standpoint, you know, and you’re a commodity as a doctor.  You are a commodity and that is a real issue.  A lot of the doctors come out feeling like they are entitled and they have a list of things this long that they want and there is a lot of people competing trying to get them that long list of stuff.  It’s just changed the dynamic of medicine to a certain degree.  I think I sound like one of the old guy’s when I say that, but maybe \n\n\nI’m just being nostalgic and stubborn.  But I do, things are really different than it used to be.  I have been recruiting or trying to recruit another doctor for a long time and it’s hard to find somebody that wants to work.  It is hard to find somebody who is willing to get in, put the hours in, see the people and develop a relationship, lay their roots down, and do the family doctor thing.  You know, they want to punch in, collect their paycheck, see their allotted number of patients, and punch out at the end of the day.  I guess that may be the model that we end up in.  I just don’t think that that is the best model; I think there is a better way.”            \n\n Denise, how do you adapt to being the wife or dedicated family of a doctor; somebody who enjoys working long hours and is not apologetic for it.  How does a family adapt to that?  \n\n“On my wedding day, we had pictures taken at my grandmother’s house who is married to Mathias, the doctor.  She told me then; she said, “I’m not going to lie to you, being married to a doctor is a very, very, hard life.”  They were married for 60+ years and he passed away and she lived for a long time without him, but she said, “Being married to a doctor is a very, very, hard thing and it takes a very, very, patient person because you have to share him with every patient he ever treats.  You have to share the fact that he cares about people; every patient that walks through his door and so, you can’t be the jealous type.  Because, he is going to show that he cares to those people.  So, learn how to share him.  I’m not going to tell you that it’s not hard; because it is very hard.”   That has probably been the best advice that I ever got on being married to a doctor; from someone who has been married to a doctor and she knew that you have to expect to have to share him with his patients.  Our son, Jack has had to learn the same thing and I think he knows that daddy is not home during the day and there is a lot of things that maybe his friend’s dads get to participate in that he doesn’t because he has such a demanding job.  But, we accept that and we deal with it so that he knows that it isn’t something that he has to worry about.  We don’t try to compete for his attention.”       \n\n Are you guys involved in the community; church, school, business organizations, or those kinds of things?\n\n“Pretty much all the above; going back to what she said, I have always tried to be very cognitive of that.  It was some advice that Rich Stevenson gave me; he said, “I sacrificed my family for this; so if you do it, be cognitive because you could lose your family over this.”  That is something that I have always carried and remember those words and tried; especially for \n\n\nhim…it’s hard for me to be the head coach, but I can sure be the assistant.  I can be there at every practice.  Now if a chest pain walks in three minutes before walking out the door, you’re not going to leave them, you’re going to take care of it.  You might miss practice or be late, but he knows I’m at baseball practice, soccer practice, football practice.  I try to make time to do things together with the family and part of that is partially the question you just asked; yes, we are very involved in the church.  We attend worship where I grew up going to church now with my parents.  My grandparents passed away, but were very involved in the community at one time.  We were a little bit involved in the politics in the county and we do several community, I don’t know if you’d call them, out-reach programs.  We don’t really tell anybody about the stuff that we’re into; we are just involved.”\n\n“We like to do it anonymously.”\n\n“Some of the charity stuff; we have a couple of little projects that we make sure succeed every year and have a strong hand in.  Then, we are always involved in several of the races and 5-Ks and different fund raisers for different organizations; we play a pretty big role in some of that stuff.”          \n\nNow this is for both of you; would you do it all again?\n\n“Oh, I absolutely would do it again; the only thing that I would probably revisit, not saying that it wouldn’t turn out the same way, would be coming back here.  I think expectations of what we would find here were different than the reality..so.”\n\nHow is it different?\n\n“Well; it’s a small town, so you base your expectations on how it was when you were growing up and I guess, you expect to almost just phase out of one portion of life, your childhood, and you move off; you go to college and become an adult and being independent.  When you get married, you start a new life with your new family; but when you come back to your home town, you’re still that same….you’re not independent, you’re not a new family, you are still that kid that grew up next door or still the little boy at church. “We saw you grow up.” There still is a different mentality that the town has about us that I don’t this we expected.  We didn’t realize that that would be the case.  It’s almost like having moved someplace where we didn’t grow up, would have been a fresh start.”           \n\n\nHow long did it take to get comfortable hearing someone say “Dr. Dawson” or “Dr. Drew”?\n\n“I get called everything everyday in the book.  You know, it was several years.  Really, there are some people who when they say it now and I hear them say it, it still doesn’t sound right coming out of their mouth.  Most of those people don’t call me Dr. Dawson; they just call me Drew, because they’ve known me forever and I’m ok with that; it doesn’t bother me at all.  So, I would say several years; it was like “Who?”  Especially, when you start your residency and they start announcing “Dr. Dawson call so-and-so” and your walking thinking, “What? What? Is that me?”  So, that takes a while.”   \n\nYou interpret this however you want, ok; are you well compensated for what you do?\n\n“Yes and yes; there is always a lot of talk about monetary compensation, who doesn’t want to make more, right?  We made a great living and will make a great living even when medicine changes again; and it will, it will probably change again before the interview is done.  There will be something that changes as it is constant; as long as you keep your head in the game and obey the rules and play with the right outlook and take care of people, you will do fine.  You know, it all depends on how you look at it.  If you look at it as an hourly rate of pay; yeah, there is probably a lot of other things that you can do that would gleam you more.  Make a great living for your family, especially in a rural community.  I can’t think of another job that can be more fulfilling.  Now, it is a double edge sword and you asked would you do it again; some days that is a tough pill to swallow.  I can’t think of anything that is more frustrating, but part of that is the passion.  Your fulfillment, frustration, the laughter, the tears, and all the emotions that you share with your patients is really a reflection of how much passion you put into it; so the more you put into it the more you get out of it and that sounds so cliché, but it is only one of the things that you can learn after doing it for a while.  Yeah, you can go in and push a rock for 8 hours and then go home; yeah, you’re never going to get all that frustrated or never celebrate or cry or be angry; but  the flip side of that is when you pour everything into it, you get a fist pump when you see your guy who lost 10 pounds and you give the teenage high-five when they kept  their sugar less than 200 for the last two weeks.  You cry when the spouse of your long term patient died from the cancer that you have been battling with them.  So, when you see patients that you care about and you can’t fix them; it’s frustrating.  I can’t think of any other job that is more broad covering in terms of the emotional spectrum that you live with. So, am I well compensated? It’s quite a roller coaster ride; yeah, I’d say compensation is pretty amazing”  \n\nWhat is the most gratifying part of your work-life?\n\n“Just knowing that you made a difference in somebody; knowing that something that you did altered the course of their life.  You asked me in the beginning of this interview who was it or what happened that altered the course of your life and steered you?  I mentioned my coach and a couple of other influential people; knowing that I could be one of those people to somebody \n\n\nelse is pretty neat.  I mean yeah, saving a life; that is obviously great and the low hand truth, but deeper than that is knowing that you might be… something you say, or something you do, or something that you can guide a person; you might be one of those influencing factors in somebody else’s life and that is pretty gratifying.”       \n\nDid you have any really scary moments?\n\n“About 8-10 times a day, right?  Yeah, for sure; I wish I had a great neat story to tell you.  I have a bunch from residency, but I’d just bore you with those.  But yeah, there were plenty of scary moments where you’d just have to guess until you knew what you were doing.  The first time somebody fell out in the lobby and I was the only doctor in the building and I had been in practice a few months.  About 2 or 3 seasoned nursed came and grabbed me and said, “We need you out here.”  We had a lobby of about 30 people and I was the new kid in town and there was somebody that’s not breathing on the floor; do you know what you’re doing?  Yeah, that was pretty terrifying.  We pulled it off and everything worked out good; but yeah, there’s a lot of scary moments it seems and still yet.”        \n\n Will you encouraging Jack to go into medicine?\n\n”Um, it’s too early to tell; I don’t know yet.  I think he is too young to know.  It depends on his personality type maybe.”\n\nWhat do you both do for fun?\n\n“He’s got a big one; so..”\n\n“I’ve got two big ones.  I said tonight I’d rather just talk about my hobbies as opposed to medicine as I’m equally passionate about them.  I bass fish; I tournament bass fish.  A couple of years ago I entered into, I don’t know if you’d call it a professional league, but it is a branch of the FLW, so yeah; I guess it is a professional bass fisherman league.  I tournament fish as much as I can rationalize it.  Then a few years ago, I started mountain climbing.”\n\nMountain climbing; now, that I didn’t expect.\n\n“Right; that has become a passion that has become very meaningful to me.”\n\nAre you talking about rock climbing or tracking up mountains?\n\n“Both.”\n\n“Well, more so, tracking up glaciers.”\n\n\n\n“I’ve done both.  When we started we climbed Mt. Rainier a few years ago and then Hind Shasta and then, we went and learned how to ice climb and climbed Mt. Snowden.  Then, we went and did the rock climbing and climbed Grant Teton.”\n\nThat’s pretty good stuff; that’s pretty hard stuff.\n\n“And then, we went to Ecuador and climbed Cotopaxi and Chimborazo; I got to 20,000 feet.  Just this last summer, I took my niece to climb Mt. Baker for her high school graduation.”\n\nSo where did that come from?\n\n“Out of the blue; I had read a book a few years ago, the whole Everest deal of ‘96, I read a book about that and me and my buddy from high school that grew up here…”\n\n“The mowing John....”\n\n“My mowing buddy; we are still close.  He calls one day and said, “Hey, do you want to do something that is outside your comfort zone?” and I said, “What you got?” and he said, “I think we should climb a mountain.”  I was like, “Hmm; alright.”  We kicked it around and we were both kind of looking for something to just get into, so we did it and both loved it.  It’s awful, misery, and fantastic; I love every second of it.  We’ve climbed one peak a year since then and that was 2009.”\n\nWhat is the hardest thing you’ve ever done in climbing?\n\n“The scariest?”\n\n“It’s to keep going.”\n\n“Yeah, the hardest thing is to just take another step.  That’s a hard question because it depends on what scenario you’re in.  You wake up at 10 below zero and there is ice inside your tent and your hat is froze to your head; that’s hard.  I’ve been stuck to the side of a rock with about 5,000 feet of exposure behind me and paralyzed with fear.  My lips are stuck to my teeth because they are so…. and I’m hyperventilating because I don’t want to die; that’s hard.  But the whole thing has been phenomenal.  It’s become a passion.”\n\nSo you have been in practice for how long?\n\n“14 years.”\n\nAnd you are how old?\n\n“43.”                    \n\nCan you see yourself doing what you do right now when you are 65-70 years old?\n\n\n“Maybe; yeah, maybe.  Talking to several of the doctors, it seems to be the more common place; used to you were a doctor till the day you died and that was the way it was.  Now you talk to the guys and it seems more and more guys as they go through their career; they realize it’s hard to juggle eight chainsaws at one time.  So, they think “maybe I can do this; I can still keep my finger in medicine, and maybe do this, and do that.” So, I don’t know; I think it’s a “to be determined” kind of thing.  Like “Move back here,” no I have other options.  So if you’re going to stay here and be in medicine; yeah, maybe I can see myself doing this for a while.  I’m a worker bee; that’s what makes me happy.  So, I’m not going to retire at 55 or 55 as long as I am an able body.  Maybe, I’ll do something else; I don’t know.  Some days it’s a lot of fun and some days, it’s awful and I hate it; but that’s just honest.  But, it’s life, right; it’s just part of it.”    \n\n Is there anything unique about Pocahontas, Randolph County, or this part of northeast Arkansas?  There are 5 beautiful rivers that flow all year around and don’t dry up and go away.  Do you see anything medically or that you see in the people here; a mixture of hill people and river rats, excuse me; I’m from Augusta, so I can say that, that you might not see if you were practicing in some larger town?\n\n“You want fact or theory on that?”\n\nTheory is fine; I don’t care.  It’s what you perceive.\n\n“Well, I definitely think and I shouldn’t say it; but I truly believe we have a tick born disease in this part of the world that hasn’t been identified yet and it’s probably in Jonesboro too, because I don’t know practice in Jonesboro.  Whether that is just endemic to our area or the northeastern part of the Arkansas; I don’t know, because I don’t have exposure other places.  There is something here that I haven’t seen anywhere else and it can be awful.  It mimics Lyme disease and it completely flies against every academic that the infection disease guys from the highest ivory tower will tell you that you’re nuts.  So, maybe I am nuts; but something is out there that is making people really, really sick that can be treated and can respond.  Whether that is unique to Pocahontas, I don’t know.  That is just the one thing that I found that’s unique and do seem to have a lot of cancers here; but I hear that everywhere I go so I don’t know if that is necessarily unique to us either.”\n\n There are not any patterns developed that you are aware of?\n\n“Um, I don’t think so.”         \n\nMy questions are about all questioned out; are there any other subjects that you would like to make sure gets in this interview before I ask my final question?\n\n“I’m thinking about some of this and pondered on some of the questions earlier; I wondered if you had asked me what sort of practice I had and what motivated me and I’m not trying to be religious or angelical in any way, but there are a couple of things that resonated with me over \n\n\nthe course of the years that I try to be a good example and I messed that up almost every day.  Just a couple of passages that seem to keep me motivated that I keep in the forefront of my mind:  Matthew 25; do it to the least of ease you do onto me and Hebrews 13; hospitality to strangers whereby you entertain angels unaware.  Always try to do the right thing for even the smelliest, stinkiest, nastiest human that walks in your door; the stinkiest kid; the grossest, dirtiest, mud tracked all over my carpet guy trying to take the best absolute care of those people is something that is really important to me and never snubbing my nose at anybody; trying to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.  Maybe that hits the cunning room floor; I hope it does, because I don’t want to sound in the least bit sanctimonious or self-righteous.”\n\nOh you’re not.\n\n“No; not at all.”\n\n “I try to keep that in my mind when everything says, “Uhhhhh; no, go see this person.”\n\nWhat about you Denise?\n\n“What he’s not telling you is that the fact that he is a doctor, a trained physician, has lead to, both of us really as we are in this together, to an extremely extraordinary life with circumstances and experiences that not everybody, I would say probably the majority of everyone, never get to experience.  He hasn’t even eluded to all of his, we call it pudding on the cake; there always seems to be times when he has to become the superhero in situations and I’m thinking that that is probably true with most doctors; but he is always in the right place at the right time.  There are times when, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he and two other colleagues from residency did a lot of work down in Louisiana and Mississippi and areas where he got to go down and experience things that most people don’t, you know some people don’t ever leave the county they were born in.  So, it has provided him and me vicariously through an extraordinary life.  We got to go to Cuba this summer because of relations opening up, or trying to open back up after 50 years of the embargo.  The doctor relationship and their doctor program down there is something that they are proud of.”\n\n“They were looking for common ground; so there was a medical delegation that went down and they asked us to go.”\n\n“Because he’s a doctor.”\n\n \n\nAs part of what; a medical delegation?\n\n“Yes sir; one of the congressmen that represent the area lead a medical delegation and it was a really neat experience and I felt fortunate to be there for sure.”\n\n“There are so many aspects to it and it may never be known to anybody but us, but it lead to an extraordinary life.\n\nI have one more question and this again is for both of you; I want you to pretend I’m not here and you are talking to your great, great grandchildren.  For them you are a picture on the wall; what would you like for them to know about you and what would you wish for them in their lives?\n\n“Do you want to go first?\n\n“No.”\n\n“You don’t want to go first?\n\n“No; did you get to prepare for that question?\n\n“No; but I think I know what I’d want to say.  The same thing that I would hope to instill into Jack; do the right thing for the sake of the right thing.  Learn the right thing and get a set of ethics and morals and never compromise; develop them, you won’t live perfectly by them because you are not perfect.  Don’t let society dictate your morals.  Set your moral code and do your best to live by it every day.  Do what’s right for the sake of doing what’s right.  No matter what you do, try to enjoy the journey.  I gave that as my induction speech here last year and never; it’s one of the things I learned in mountain climbing from some of the guys that guided me in mountaineering.  “It’s hard, each step is hard and someday you will get to the pinnacle.  You’ll get to the end of the climb; enjoy the climb and enjoy the process.  Even when it is hard, try to find ways to enjoy the process and enjoy the climb.  Try to have a smile on your face when you can and that is one thing that is a struggle everyday to try to do that.”\n\nDenise?\n\n“Mine’s not near as….it’s eloquent and very simple; you live life so that someday when we all meet our maker, he will say to you, “Well done.”        \n\nThank you both, I appreciate it.  That completes this interview.","format":"text/plain"},"target":"https://centerforthehistoryoffamilymedicine.aviaryplatform.com/collections/2312/collection_resources/161641/file/293482#t=0.0,5670.43144"}]}]}]}