A Country Doctor Writes:

In the early 2000s at Bucksport Regional Health Center, I did house calls one day a week. I have written about many of them, for example here and here.

Covering for Galileo’s missing Bangor market provider the other day, I took our mobile unit down to that area and found myself driving through Bucksport. On the Mast Hill road I noticed a house I hadn’t thought about for twenty years. It is where Richard Westman lived. He was the visually impaired man who swore he saw little people outside his window and a family member of his guided me to his diagnosis.

Driving past his house brought back so many memories of my years down there and the many patients I saw in their homes. I have written this before, but seeing a patient in their own environment gives you so much more information and so much better chance of building a relationship than seeing them in an office for a few minutes.

Now and for the rest of my days, driving through Westfield, Mars Hill and Monticello, I will pass houses I will no longer visit after Galileo Maine ceases to exist. But those towns and those patient homes are on the road I will inevitably continue to travel to get from my home in Caribou to Bangor, Bar Harbor, Old Orchard Beach, Portland and all points beyond, more often than I now drive down the back roads of Bucksport.

It’s been three years. Three years of sanity, three years of road trips for house calls, instantly learning more about each patient than you could ever learn in an office visit, making friends with their dogs and having all their cats climb into my leather house call bag, three years of virtual visits from home with the dogs sleeping at my feet. But it is all coming to an end very soon. Read on and I’ll tell you…

The nitty gritty details are for my paid Substack subscribers. I need to figure out how to level the reader playing field for my WordPress subscribers.

Here’s some more from behind the Substack paywall, telling more of the story:

A couple of weeks ago, I found out that our practice lost its contract with our major (insurance) payer. Without them, we couldn’t possibly continue operating in Maine. So by the end of the year, our practice will cease to exist. My hours are, as of Monday, reduced from full time to 0.8 full time equivalents and I am slotted to go down to 0.6 FTE by November 1.

In the coming days, my quit date with Galileo and start date with two of Northern Light’s primary care offices in Caribou and Fort Fairfield will be nailed down. Each one is about 10 minutes from my house, so my driving will go from one extreme to another. My home territory with Galileo, Aroostook County, is as big as Connecticut and Rhode Island combined. And since last November I have also been serving, mostly remotely, the Bangor market which stretches 80 miles west, south and east of our Bangor office.

https://acdw.substack.com/p/no-choice-but-to-move-on?r=254ice&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web