Rooted in Family

Our Pride and Joy

I want to take this opportunity to thank the Virginia Healthcare Association for inviting me to share my thoughts and feelings about working in a Community Health Center.  I hope that I fairly portrayed the struggles and accomplishments of the OB/Prenatal Department at the Johnson Health Center.  It has been my privilege to serve a wonderful staff and appreciative patients.

My parting thoughts are on family, friends, or whoever provides the emotional grounding in a health center provider’s life.  For me it is my wife and children that have sacrificed so much to support me in Lynchburg.  With a family business two hours away from my job in Lynchburg, they were forced to bear many of life’s struggles long-distance.  When I was home, I was often too tired to devote to them the time and attention they deserved.  I’m sure they felt some days that my patients got more of me than they did.

Mountain Lake Hotel

On May 19, my wife and I celebrated our nineteenth wedding anniversary at Mountain Lake in Pembroke, Virginia.  You may recognize this as one of the filming sites for the 80’s movie, “Dirty Dancing.”  While I’m more of a Clint Eastwood fan, I left deeply moved by the importance of family in such a publicized place.  While Patrick Swayze and his wife, Lisa, had no children, the passion and pain (doing his own stunts, he injured his knee so bad it had to be drained) he put into the making of this iconic film made the staff of Mountain Lake feel like his family.  From the general manager to the head chef, hotel staff can recount, in vivid detail, the personal excitement and stories of being just peripherally involved in the movie.  Long after his death, the staff remembers Patrick Swayze as the unpretentious actor that spent more time in the hotel kitchen drinking beer with the staff than he did in his room.  The head chef still rides the same motorcycle to work on which he rode the actor down the mountain one evening after the studio cars left.  The actor’s ashes are spread over his former ranch in New Mexico, but he lives on in the hearts of the people he touched so profoundly, not by his fame, but by his humility and genuine persona.

My wife and I realized during our fantastic weekend that an anniversary, or cancer, or everyday life should not distract us from investing in the family and friends that put roots to our lives.  We realized that any day can be the day that we decide to invest what time, talent, and wealth we’ve been given into the things that matter to us most: our faith, our marriage, and our children.  When we are gone, our children will not likely remember what kind of car we drove, or all the mistakes we made as parents, but they will remember the evening my wife and I came home and turned off the cell phones, the laptops, and made a family dinner.  For at least one day, their lives were more valuable than our own.

So it is with warm thoughts and memories that I sign off from the Johnson Health Center.