By Jim Woodring
Vision statements bore me. Our Alliance statement reads the following: “The Alliance is the volunteer voice of the family of medicine.” Except for one word out of the eleven, it would bring yawns. The word that brings it to life is “volunteer.” Oh my, are we ever volunteers and volunteered.
Years ago my wife worked in a group practice in Whitesburg, Kentucky. After nine years in the group, she decided to go into solo practice in Jellico, Tennessee/Kentucky. We moved to a farm in Bell County on the Kentucky side. At that time, four of our eight children were still at home. I tended to them as a full-time, multitasking soccer mom/housewife: Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, cooking, cleaning and managing our herd of dairy goats – the normal life of a physician’s spouse.
One day my wife came home from work and said, “I need you at the office. Things are not going as they should.” I became instant office manager, even when I hadn’t a clue of how to do billing, forms, coding, figure payroll, make appointments or take vitals. I barely knew how to operate the calculator. She volunteered me for the job. That’s normal for physician spouses. We get volunteered to do all kinds of things.
One of my jobs was to screen the incoming mail and put the clinic business on her desk that she needed to read, answer and sign. Since I now read the clinic mail, I started reading the Kentucky Medical Association Journal. I would scan it for relevant articles. That’s when I first met the Alliance. It had its own page in the journal. My wife fully supported KMA programs and she volunteered me to join the Alliance. I did.
I must admit that the Alliance doings made few connections with me. They announced lunch at tearooms, fashion shows and wine tastings, all while wearing silly hats and all in the faraway lands of Lexington and Louisville. After the first year I did not renew my membership. I became one of the large group called “former Members-at-Large.”
Later, I got a second chance. Again it was the KMA Journal – the Alliance page that drew me back in. I found topics dealing with areas of serious interest to me: domestic violence and bullying. At that time, I was a domestic violence counselor and wanted to network with groups and people with like interests. I joined and went to my first meeting. Ironically, I found myself at tea, the very place that turned me off the first time around. We met at the Historic Green Tea Room in Lexington, 130 miles from home.
I walked in and found myself in a room full of – I am tempted to say a room full of women, but that would not be true. I found myself sitting at the tiny tea table with physician spouses just like me. I can’t remember if they wore silly hats or not. I am thankful for the warm welcome I received. The rest is history. I got volunteered as MAL Committee chair and as representative from the Alliance to the KMA sub-committee on domestic violence.
Volunteering is good medicine. We should all take a double dose of it.
Jim Woodring, his wife Mary Anne and their eight children moved to southeast Kentucky in 1968. The children have grown and gone and Mary Anne retired from Family Practice in 2005. Jim is a Family Relations counselor, runs the farm at Chenoa in Bell County, dabbles in music and runs the roads for exercise. He also has a weekly column, “Kindling,” in the Pineville Sun and has published two books.