“Good morning!” “How are you?”
“I am just fine.” “I really do love your hair that way.”
“Do you like it?” “Yes I do.”
I’ve always felt that medicine was a vocation and a calling. It’s been an avenue to do
the things that I thought were the goals in my life and I’m pleased with it.
As an aside to my medical career, I have had a very strong and exciting marriage to my
wife Abbie. When I went into private practice, July 2,
1979, we had borrowed money from the bank, we had ordered instruments, we had rented
space and there were three of us, one employee, Abbie and I.
We saw three patients that day. At the initial portion of the day we promised
each other that we wouldn’t answer the phone on the first ring, we’d wait until it rang
three times, because we didn’t want people to think we weren’t busy.
There was a pediatrician here in town named George Clock who would introduce you to the
family by sending one of the children. That introduction was, if you did well of course,
an introduction to the whole family. Pretty soon grandma and grandpa showed up and mom
and dad, and so it blossomed. The thing that I always noticed about Dr.
Crawford was the loyalty of his patients. That always intrigued me because you could
just see it in the patients that would follow him for years and years.
I understand now because he was always there for them. Whether it was in the grocery store
or whether it was calling him at home, seeing him at the office, he was always their doctor.
I always admired him for that. He’s full of compassion, he’s full of
caring, he explains everything to you. He meets you where you’re at and he’s so
respectful of his patients. He’s the most humble human being I’ve
had the pleasure of meeting and I can’t think of enough adjectives to say about Dr.
C. He’s just a wonderful human being. This practice gave me a very rewarding, personal
benefit, a blessing so to speak. I think it was several years ago that we marked
the fact that I had seen four generations of patients and that I was continuing to see
the younger patients. I am blessed with the compliments and the
trust that these families have offered to me as a caregiver.
Well before I came Dr. Crawford actually worked with Pat Brookhouser here at Boys Town, so
Pat Brookhouser had a relationship with Mike for many years.
When it was at that point in Mike’s career when he wanted to find employment with somebody,
rather than private practice, we were thrilled, because Mike is, and was, Council Bluffs ENT.
If anybody needed ENT services in Council Bluffs, it was Dr. Crawford. That was the
name, so for him to join us and bring his reputation and together with Boys Town, it
was great for both us. Boys Town has been very kind to provide a
site, a staff and physicians that will be able to take over my care.
I feel very strongly about the continuation of care for this community. They are my people
and I want the best for them. Abbie and I are still fairly mobile. Now we’re
hoping to take a little bit longer trips of two and three weeks and that hopefully, will
happen over the next several years. I would like very much to be able to read
and speak Italian and I am proceeding through various avenues to try and learn that.
I have a granddaughter who is the apple of my eye and is now reaching two years of age.
I hope to spend a lot of time with her as a mentor and as a member of her very close
family. “And you’ll be in good hands.”
It has been a very emotional trip in the last six months or so when the prospect of retirement
was kind of looming on the horizon. It has been 40 years of trying to do good
for people. I had no expectations that I would have a
doctor crying or his patients crying about stopping some of this.
I have loved them, they have loved me and we have been blessed.
I think I will miss most the patient contact, the ability to talk to people, and to see
a lot of people in my day. I’ll miss the challenge of being able to sort out their
problems and being able to fix or manage what their difficulties are.
I’m hoping that, even though I’m not actively practicing, that I can now participate in
the functions of the community that are not necessarily medicine.
I want to thank Dr. Crawford for a couple of things. One, obviously, is he brought great
value to us in bringing his private practice to Boys Town, but even more than that, I want
to thank him for great care. He really cared for his patients, not just
provided ENT services, but he cared for his patients and I really want to thank him for
that. I would like to be remembered as someone who
cares, who was easy to talk to, a friend. I would have liked to have done good work
as well as made right decisions whether they were surgical or otherwise.
I would hope that I would be a good role model for a physician, a father, and a member of
the community. The staff at Boys Town and the general hospital
have been wonderful. The OR and the outpatient people have been absolutely terrific.
I want to thank the patients. There is a lot of different ways of looking
at this picture but there is no one finer than a person who trusts you, who brings you
their body, or maybe the body of their children, and says “here, we have a problem, let’s
see what we can do to fix it.” They have thanked me many a time and I would
like very much to thank them always, but especially now.