Acceptance Speech (long version): 2022 Carol Eckert, MD Memorial Award, Maine Primary Care Association
(Maine Family Doctor of the Year Award - Published October 5, 2022)
(Click picture for more pictures from Award Day)
My name is Hans Duvefelt. I drove 232 miles this morning to attend this event and receive this award and I was told I have four minutes for my remarks.
That is less than the mean time of 5.4 minutes that 500 couples in five different countries spent on the act of lovemaking according to a 2005 study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
But, don’t worry, I am going to spend my glorious four minutes describing my love of being a family doctor in two Federally Qualified Health Centers 210 miles apart.
The full version, that didn’t fit in my four minute time slot, is online at ACOUNTRYDOCTORWRITES.BLOG, where I’ve been posting reflections about my work since 2008.
So let me start at the beginning.
65 years ago, when I was four years old, I made the announcement that I was going to be a doctor. Everybody seemed to believe me and I never doubted myself. I only applied to one medical school, Uppsala University, and I was accepted.
But before I began medical school, I developed a fascination with America. This seemed like a country full of initiative, optimism and opportunity.
A few months before I left Sweden in a Rolls-Royce engined turbo prop plane in August 1971 for a year as an exchange student in Massachusetts, someone introduced me to James Taylor, and the album was Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, the one with You’ve Got a Friend. I couldn’t wait to go where that kind of music came from.
Surprise! The change was somehow bigger than I was prepared for and by September I wrote to my parents – international phone calls were expensive then and required dialing incredibly long numbers on the rotary wall phone in my host family’s kitchen – and asked if I could come home early because I was so homesick.
By the time their reply reached me I had changed my mind. I got used to to the heat and humidity, the food and the school routines and I had bonded with my “brother”, whom I still FaceTime with every two weeks fifty-one years later – I had also developed a crush on a girl in my sociology class and had become a regular follower of Marcus Welby, MD, which I watched on a Zenith console TV from the shag wall to wall carpet in my host family’s living room. This was the now classic medical drama about a general practitioner in private practice in California.
By the time that year was over, I knew I wanted to be a country doctor in America.
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