Part 2 of 2: Band Aids, Babies and History

(Read the first post if you haven't at Part 1)

Government changes, technological additions, the coming home of physicians like Dr. Burke and the passing or moving away of other long time physicians, have defined the last 20 years at CH-F. In 2010, a new facility was built and the hospital moved away from the building that had been home to 60 years of healthcare in Atchison County.

The supporters of CH-F are a dedicated and loyal group. Just in the last five years, a capital campaign was established to support the new building. The goal was 1.5 million and donations were last reported to be nearing $2.2 million.

Despite a history of devout support, small town hospitals face many challenges. There is often the feeling that everything is better an Interstate’s drive away. Somehow, the nurses, techs and family practice physicians know more if they work in a 3 story building. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard this beloved hospital called a band aid station or an ambulance stop on the way to the place where you can get “real” care.

Having spent five days a week in this building for the last 3.5 years, I can testify to the heroes that make up the team of rural healthcare providers that take care of me, my family and my community. Rural healthcare is a specialty. Not one of the techs, nurses or physicians I work with show up to work and take care of one kind of patient each day. On any given day, an RN in this building can help deliver a baby, respond to a code on a heart attack or take care of a port for a cancer patient.  Our physicians do not send our patients to the next building over for c-sections or scopes. They do not call the ER doc when an emergency arises. They respond and save lives.

Just like your local grocery store, we can’t do everything in a cost effective manner. Our goal is not to be the Mayo clinic, but instead to provide the most services we can in a safe manner. Just this month, we added a digital mammogram, scoped our first knee and added a radiological group that will bring many new procedures to Fairfax.

Beyond the services, I am often struck by the enormity of the responsibility on the shoulders of the healthcare providers in this building. I can say with certainty that I can’t imagine being the person responsible for so many lives in a completely healthcare isolated area. Thankfully, the team of healthcare providers in this hospital knows when to take care of someone and they also know when they can’t. That knowledge gives me the confidence to put my life, that of my children and family in their very capable hands knowing that they’ll do the best for me.

 

The best endorsement a hospital can get is from the community it serves.  I’d say that 60 years of support from a community that knows a good thing when they see it is…well that is pretty much ringing isn’t it?

So there you go. If you didn’t get enough bragging in your mailbox today, read this. 

Harvest in Atchison County

For those of you who aren't fortunate enough to live where you get to see this every day, or for those of you (like me) who can't gawk enough at combines, Megan McAdams let us share her pictures for this little tour of harvest in Atchison County...


All kinds of lovely. Who doesn't want to bear witness to this every fall?









These guys spend serious amounts of time taking care of business. And the combine fellas don't do it alone. Somebody drives the grain truck. Somebody helps move the operation from field to field. Somebody (who really loves them) delivers food.



Early in the season, in years like this one, it's only a little dusty.









Emptying so they can hit the road, er, the field again.








Remember that dust at the beginning? Soon, it's a lovely memory.

Back, and forth. Back, and forth. Methodically reaping what was sown last spring.

Oh, the dust. Excellent for sunsets. Unfortunate for keeping your vehicle clean. Oh well. It's harvest. Dust on your ride is how you know you're even a tiny part of the event.


I haven't been in a combine since I was small enough to press my little self up against the glass and watch the corn be eaten up below me, but even for me, [forgive me, exhausted farm families, for waxing poetic for a moment] there's something almost spiritual about this time of year. Something about living among these fields where farmers toil, sun up to sundown, and oftentimes beyond. Where hours, days, weeks of tending and planting and praying and fixing and sweating all culminate in this beautiful pattern of accomplishment.

Plus, there are there big beefy awesome machines everywhere you look that should have their own Transformers movie!

HAPPY HARVEST everyone. Farm families - God Bless You and keep you safe this season!

~MMB

Neighbors

It’s funny how differently you define concepts throughout your life.

neigh•bor [ney-ber] noun

1. a person who lives near another.
2. a person who shows kindliness or helpfulness toward his or her fellow humans: to be a neighbor to someone in distress.

From 5th grade on, I lived ‘in town’ on Main Street in Tarkio. It’s hard to decide what comprised my neighborhood then. Obviously, it included Bob & Maurice, whose backyard bordered ours, who were neighbors in every sense of the word. Bob was retired and wouldn’t let us ladies touch the lawnmower; literally, he almost pushed us out of the way every time we tried. I don’t know what we did for them in return, aside from giving them hugs regularly, but they were one of my earliest examples of neighborly kindness. Surely our neighborhood included the family who shared a driveway with us. One of our greatest forms of entertainment was watching the dad as he would fly into the driveway each night after work, only to stop abruptly right before he hit the garage door. Because Mom had a daycare, our home hosted a revolving door of traffic – it often seemed that everyone in Tarkio was our neighbor.

In college I lived in Lathrop Hall for 3 years. It was definitely a community, and my neighbors were my friends, my extended family. We leaned on each other, entertained each other and literally lived in each others’ one-room “homes.” But once I left the dorms, neighbors became those people who happened to live around me, who were loud from time to time or parked near my vehicle, and were friendly enough in passing, but ultimately just occupied a shared space.

When Keith and I got married, we bought a house several miles north of Columbia. Although it was sparsely populated all the way to our road, our home sat in a random subdivision of 9 houses. We moved in during the winter/early spring, and for months we thought we were surrounded by aliens because we never, ever saw any humans outside the houses. Technically we had neighbors then, but even though there were people living a yard away, I never felt like I was connected to anyone.

The year we lived in Maine was the first time since leaving Tarkio that I felt it again – a connection with others who lived in my general vicinity. We had neighbors on our dead-end street in town, but unlike Columbia, but we shared a driveway with an elderly couple who were friendly and caring, in a classic New England way. They rarely initiated contact – in fact, I don’t recall them ever coming to our door – but they were thrilled when we visited them, invited us in with open arms, plowed our half of the driveway when it snowed, and gave us a place to check in when there was an emergency. I will always be grateful to them for their kindness…but it just wasn’t the same as home.

Today, we get to live in a big old farmhouse in northern Atchison County – on a Century Farm, how cool is that. We get to be a part of this house’s history, and in that history are a host of families who have called this Farmers City neighborhood home for decades. Our two closest neighbors are a mile away in opposite directions. I grew up with one of those families, and the other has shown kindness that only comes with sharing a road in the country. Out here, my neighborhood is not contained by a road or a couple of blocks. I’ve never mapped the exact parameters, but I’d estimate that it goes at least 4 miles in any direction.

I’ve spent some time analyzing the difference between life here and life on our little road north of Columbia. Are the people in rural Atchison County innately more kind than those who lived on Tracy Court with us? [My totally unbiased opinion is, um-OBVIOUSLY! ;)] Not necessarily. But, they were different. We did have cows in our backyard there, but I’d venture to guess that our Tracy Court folks weren’t there because they loved the land. More likely, they were there because (like us) they didn’t want to have neighbors quite so close. And that translated to a kind of indifference – we didn’t need each other, we weren’t friends, we had our own lives and this is where our house happened to sit.

This is the thing unique to rural neighborhoods – we are few, we are far between, and we need each other. Sometimes it’s for little things like a cup of sugar (because driving 10 miles back to town when you forget something is ANNOYING). In the winter months, we keep each other company (even over the phone), dig each other out after storms and discuss road conditions. Our remoteness makes it that much more enjoyable to drop off a plate of cookies and sit for a spell, or be a part of the Christmas cantata at the church up the road. I suppose community happens in all kinds of neighborhoods, but out here, it seems to be more of a sustainer than a byproduct. Out here, we really do need each other – and I love it!

~MMB