Rural Colorado doctors are retiring and dying — and no one is taking their place
ORDWAY — Inside Karen Tomky’s small medical office, the fourth patient of the day lifted up his snap-button shirt to reveal a liver-colored smear of a bruise.
“It was a heifer,” David Ragsdale said of the cow that trampled across his back. “She wouldn’t go in the chute. She came over top of me.”
Tomky, a nurse practitioner, looked at the bruise without alarm.
“Oh, man,” she said, “I hate that. It’s like slow-motion when they hit you.”
In a career spent caring for one of Colorado’s poorest and most rural counties, Tomky is accustomed to surprises. On any given day, she might treat colds or broken bones or addiction or chronic disease. Patients have walked into her office in the midst of heart attacks or labor. One time, a farmer came in with an amputated finger, blood spurting across the tile floor.
She grew up here in Crowley County, the daughter of a cattle rancher on the southeastern plains, but she didn’t intend to stay. She was working in Salt Lake City when she received a letter from the county’s doctor urging her to come home and join the doctor’s practice.
“You will be missed in Utah,” the letter said, “but you will make a difference here.”
That was 30 years ago.
There are no doctors in Crowley County anymore.
Read more at denverpost.com.
ROCKY FORD, CO – NOVEMBER 16: Doug Miller, a nurse practitioner who runs at the Rocky Ford Health Center, does a medical examination on Jeanne Smith on November 16, 2017 in Rocky Ford, Colorado. (Photo by RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post)
