Annie Boesiger

The summer my dad passed away, I was scheduled to shadow Dr. Wong in Ogallala, Neb., for two weeks as part of an assignment for the rural and wilderness track at Rocky Vista University. However, instead of following Dr. Wong that summer, I would send him an email explaining that my dad had been tragically killed in a farming accident and that I’d need my last two weeks of summer to be with my family, our cows, and my little rural Nebraska community. I asked him to consider taking me on in my third year instead to fulfill my family medicine clerkship rotation requirement.

My second year of med school was marked by so much doubt and sorrow mixed with support that carried me through it. What words did I have for a grief so profound next to a call on my heart to push through and see it to completion? At the end of second year, my thoughts of belonging in medicine had significantly diminished. But I stayed in hopes of getting to clinical rotations, connecting with people, and seeing my purpose in the field again. I experienced an incredible amount of happiness and purpose in my first rotation, child and adolescent psychiatry, connecting deeply with hope-filled young people and again in pediatrics, where I cooed at chunky babies and clicked with witty teenagers. And then it was time to complete family med. So, I packed up and planted my life in Ogallala, Neb., centered in the Nebraska sandhills, for two months.

My dad was a cattle man. Gentle, steady, and devoted to his native grass preservation and easy moving horned Hereford cows. Many of my family “vacations” were spent in bull sale barns, shoulder to shoulder with producers. His favorite place to visit were the Nebraska Sandhills; “pretty country” he called it and joked that someday he’d sell our livelihood in southeast Nebraska to move west. The last time I visited the sandhills had been on a Nebraska Hereford tour, traveling from ranch to ranch with my family to meet and visit with fellow Hereford breeders. It was a fond memory I held of time spent with my dad in the sandhills, roaming amidst white faced cows. When I got to Ogallala on a Sunday afternoon, I wondered how it would feel being in a place that meant so much to my dad, one of the last places he knew I’d be experiencing in my pursuit of becoming a doctor.

On my first day in clinic, I talked to an 82-year-old rancher about his purebred Angus herd. We talked about the weather, calf prices, his hay crop. I thought all day about how my dad had showed up so clearly in the face of my patient. He would show up in many more “winks” over the course of my rotation. On the day of my mom and dad’s wedding anniversary, I delivered my first baby. And a week later, I would sit with a 97-year-old and her room full of family as she transitioned from one form of life to another, comfortable in the grief and complexity of goodbye and celebration of a good life. It felt like home to talk to patients about my own cow herd, my horse, my upbringing. I felt seen by nurses and doctors and patients alike. I was asked to come back, told that the community needed “people like me” to come care for them. What an honor. What a sense of belonging in a time of question and doubt and hanging on tight.

I hope that today, wherever my dad is, he knows how thankful I am for the grit, the gentleness, the sunsets, the glimpse of new life, the lessons in goodbye. And in the meantime of seeing him again, I’ll carry Ogallala, this “pretty country,” with me for a long, long time.