A Little Pain Never Hurt Nobody: An MD’s Unorthodox Life in the Colorado Rockies

By John Peters M.D.

Elation turns to fear as the young doctor steps into the rundown clinic sixty years ago. He is twenty-six years old, a graduate of Northwestern University in Chicago with its hordes of specialists and well-equipped hospitals. On a whim, he decides to begin his medical career at a small remote town in the Colorado Rocky Mountains.

As he opens the door to the clinic, reality strikes--he is alone. All the helpful specialists are in a hospital 125 miles away. He, with his limited skills and experience, is the only thing standing between life and death for the severely injured and critically ill.

But he has an edge. He is a pilot. A plane becomes an integral part of his practice. He makes house calls at remote ranches. He lands on makeshift runways (dirt roads and two-lane blacktops) at accident scenes, at times in the dead of night with only a highway patrolman's car headlights to guide him.

He delivers babies and performs emergency surgery in midflight with only Sam, his fellow pilot, or his plane's autopilot as his assistant. His patients become his "family"--honest to a fault, tough beyond reason, and, at times, hysterically funny without trying to be.

For the ride of your life, come fly with him back in time to an era where the Wild West was still wild, where cowboys and miners settled their disputes with fists, broken beer bottles, and six-guns.

Where life was simpler. Where doing what was right was more important than doing what was politically correct. Where just being alive was a great adventure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781098089542

Book preview

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A Little Pain Never Hurt Nobody

An MDaEUR(tm)s Unorthodox Life in the Colorado Rockies

John Peters M.D.

ISBN 978-1-0980-8953-5 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-0980-8955-9 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-0980-8954-2 (digital)

Copyright © 2021 by John Peters M.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Prologue

Billy Bob Brown had his hat nailed to his head by an errant nail gun. Whisperin’ Dale Danforth had a voice so loud you could hear him whisperin’ three blocks away through a stiff headwind. Bent Blackburn, Rocky Norton, Deuce Becker—these are just a few of the folks you’ll meet up with in the following pages. They lived in the remote ranching and mining country of southwestern Colorado. I was their doctor for eighteen years.

But first, a little bit about me. It may help you to understand just how I ended up in that forgotten corner of the West, a hundred miles from nowhere, and why I practice medicine the way I do.

Being born on a farm in Iowa in 1933, moving to a suburb of Los Angeles was a big culture shock. I was shy and introverted. I’d never had a fight in my life. That all changed when the eighth-grade bully in a big Southern California junior high made me his designated victim of the year.

My life became a nightmare. For weeks I walked miles out of the way to get home after school.

Then one day he caught me, beat me up, and walked away, saying, See you after school tomorrow.

I realized I hadn’t resisted. I’d lost the fight before the bully landed his first punch. I vowed never to be beaten again, at least not without a fight.

The next day, armed with my bicycle chain wrapped in duct tape, I ambushed the bully. When the fight was over, the bully was a bully no more, and the victim had become a fearless avenger. I never walked away from another fight. In fact, over the next forty years, I went looking for a fight if the cause was just.

If it hadn’t been for that junior high fight, I never would have become a doctor, learned how to fly a plane, or parachuted into the mountains of Peru and the jungles of Honduras to aid victims of earthquakes and hurricanes.

And I never would have taught combat medicine under fire in dirty little brush wars from Afghanistan to Burma, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, and others, but those are stories for another time.

In 1960, I was twenty-six years old. I’d graduated from med school and finished an internship. With my experience as a doctor and a pilot, I’d landed a job with Aramco in Saudi Arabia.

I said goodbye to my parents in LA and headed east by car to New York City, the jump-off point for Saudi.

On the way, I decided to swing through Colorado and spend a couple of days visiting one of my med school buddies, Dr. Richard O’Connor. He had just set up practice in a little mining town called Telluride. Driving into southwestern Colorado from Utah, I stopped off for gas about thirty-five miles short of my goal in the small ranching town of Norwood situated at the base of the San Juan Mountains.

I asked the gas station attendant how many people lived there.

Nobody’s really counted, but I’d say maybe eight hundred, tops.

That was easy to believe. The commercial part of Main Street stretched for all of two blocks: a drug store, a grocery store, a bank, a gas station, a hardware store, a small motel, a farm machinery outlet, the Lone Cone Bar and Café, and, inexplicably, a Ford dealership (hard to imagine they sold many vehicles out there in the middle of nowhere).

One thing we ain’t got, and that’s a doctor, he added after I’d told him I was an MD. Any chance you’d consider moving here? he asked.

I thought about it for a millisecond.

No hospital.

No airport.

No train.

No bus.

No nuthin’.

No way.

Sorry, just passing through, I said.

Thirty-five miles later, I pulled into the town of Telluride—and what a town it was!

Telluride was a literal jewel of a place set at the bottom of a deep box canyon nearly nine thousand feet above sea level, with waterfalls called Bridal Veil, Ingram, and Cornet plummeting down off towering cliffs. West of town were broad green pastures where cattle grazed. Between and above the cliffs were thick forests of pine and aspen, and beyond were jagged peaks thirteen thousand to fourteen thousand feet high.

The town itself was like the set for a Western movie. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had robbed the bank back in the 1890s. Lily Renoir once sang in the Opera House, which is still being used today. Frank Wilson’s drug store still had a real soda fountain that sold old-fashioned egg creams and chocolate malts. In the back, Frank kept all the prescriptions he had ever filled since 1920, thousands of them, skewered on wires suspended from the old tinplate ceiling. Above Telluride there were ghost towns and abandoned mining camps to be explored at the end of dirt roads and narrow winding trails.

It took me all of two days to fall in love with Colorado.

I decided to stay for a year, hunting, fishing, roaming the mountains and mesas, practicing a little medicine on the side to pay for bullets and bait. Saudi Arabia would have to wait. I phoned Aramco and canceled my contract.

Saudi Arabia is still waiting…

Little did I know that that one year would stretch into eighteen and a half years filled with great joy and, yes, occasional sorrow, but years that were never dull. Come fly with me back in time when that corner of the Wild West was still wild. Cowboys and miners settled their disputes with fists, broken beer bottles, and six-guns. Hermits and outlaws still lived in places named Disappointment Valley and Maverick Draw. I cured their ills, delivered their babies, and heard their confessions. I became family to them. They were my kind of people—honest to a fault, tough beyond reason, loving and just, and at times hysterically funny without trying to be.

Life was simple and sweet, rough and risky; justice was swift and homegrown; and doing what was right was more important than being politically correct.

And ironically, I ended up becoming the town doc of Norwood, that little ranching town where I swore I would never live.

Everything you’re about to read actually happened, to the best of my recollection, although names have been changed, situations altered, and some characters combined. My patients and I sometimes solved our problems in unusual ways as you’re about to see.

Chapter 1

Bent Blackburn

Seventy-year-old rancher punches out my new partner, sending him back to New York.

Excitement, anticipation, unease, fear—these are the emotions I recall feeling on that day almost sixty years ago the day I began practicing medicine in a small isolated town in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

Six months before, I’d been on my way to work as a physician for an oil company in Saudi Arabia. I’d said goodbye to my parents in LA and started driving to New York City, my jump-off point for Saudi Arabia. On a whim, I decided to take a little side trip to visit an old medical school friend of mine in Telluride, Colorado, a mining town of four hundred people at that time.

It took me all of two days to fall in love with that forgotten corner of the world. Fourteen-thousand-foot mountain peaks; lush green valleys; streams filled with rainbow trout; hills teeming with elk, deer, and bear; real cowboys and Indians; ghost towns to explore—the Wild West was still wild on the western slope of Colorado in those days.

I’d canceled my contract with Arabian American Oil. I’d decided to stay for a year hunting, fishing, exploring ghost towns, and practicing a little medicine on the side to pay for bullets and bait.

Eager to start my new life, filled with excitement and anticipation, I opened the door to the little run-down clinic on that first day a long time ago. Within minutes, the excitement began to turn into unease and, finally, fear. Reality began to set in. Here I was, twenty-six years old, with almost no experience outside of big-city hospitals, alone—a long way away from any help. The what if syndrome began filling my naive brain. What if a pregnant lady came in hemorrhaging, needing an emergency C-section—no hospital here, no OB specialist. What if a car full of mom, dad, and three kids missed a curve on a mountain road and I was confronted with bodies scattered everywhere—broken back, collapsed lung, head injury, internal bleeding. No surgeon here, no orthopedic specialist here. I suddenly realized that I was it. When lives hung in the balance, when life or death depended on my limited skill and nerve, would I be up to the task?

And then as if all those fear-filled thoughts were not enough, in walked Bent Blackburn, rancher, self-appointed welcoming committee of one. He wasn’t sick. He’d just come in to check out the new doc. His first words were, You got any real coffee in here? Luckily, I did. I invited him into my office, poured us each a cup of coffee, and we sat down to chat.

He led off with a bombshell. There’s somethin’ you should know ’bout folks ’round here, he drawled. If we like ya, we’ll work ya to death. If we don’t, we’ll starve ya to death. Don’t matter to us.

As I sat there trying to figure out how to respond, he asked, Do you practice medicine?

Yes, I said.

Well stop it! We don’t like anybody practicin’ on us.

I squirmed in my chair. He noticed then chuckled, Can’t take a joke, Doc? Look, point is just better let folks ’round here at least think ya know what you’re doin.’

A little later, after he’d finished his coffee, he got up to leave. He paused at the door, looked back with a hint of a grin, and said, By the way, we starved the last five docs out. As the door swung shut behind him, he added, Or was it six?

Now I was really worried. What had I gotten myself into moving to this remote community of rural hard cases who ran doctors off the same way they did coyotes and cow-killing bears? But I needn’t have been concerned. What Bent was doing was just giving me some valuable advice. After I thought it over, it made sense: Act like you know what you’re doing, stand tall, and you’ll come out all right in the end. I did just that, and those hard-eyed, hard-hearted San Miguel County folks ended up accepting me for the next eighteen-plus years.

But back to Bent. Bent Blackburn was one of those rare individuals who was born at exactly the right moment in time. He’d grown up as a cowboy on a ranch back when the West was still young. He’d salted away his pay in the form of cattle. When he had a big-enough herd, he went into business for himself. He bought a small ranch. He worked hard until he got a bigger ranch then a bigger one and so on. All his life he’d been exactly where he wanted to be, doing exactly what he loved to do.

Bent wasn’t his given name. He got the name because after years in the rough and tumble ranching business, his spine was bent. When he walked, his upper body was nearly parallel to the ground. That disability, however, didn’t keep Bent from ranching. Every morning at dawn,