Drs. Howard Cookson, Howard Hayashi, Dykes Johnson, Charles Clark, Ed Paulding, Andrea Tackett, Scott Davis.

The SLO Trib series on how hard it is to get a primary care physician was both excellent and immensely sad.

My childhood physician, in Arroyo Grande, was Howard N Cookson, who practiced out of the beautiful office on Traffic Way that now belongs to Dr. Morgan.

Here is what Cookson did for us:

–Dug a BB out of my cheekbone.

–Dragged me by my skinny ankles from beneath his desk for my polio shot. (Yes, we believed in vaccinations in those days. The alternative, polio, terrified parents.)

–Came out to our house on Huasna Road to treat me for chickenpox with the proverbial black bag.

–My Mom miscarried when I was eight or nine Cookson was there within minutes and he stayed for a long time in my folks’ bedroom, talking softly to them. I could hear their voices but not the words.

–Oh, yes. Cookson founded Arroyo Grande Hospital in 1962.

Tragically, he died of cancer soon after.

Arroyo Grande has been blessed with good doctors, general practitioners like Cookson and Dr. Matousek, orthopedists like Ed Paulding, pediatricians like Charles Clark, a Civil War veteran (a cavalryman under Geroge Custer).

What Clark treated, other than the occasional adult with a stab wound incurred on a local farm, is heart-breaking:

–A teenaged apprentice tending the printer at the Arroyo Grande Herald who got his fingers caught in the press.

–A little boy, thrown from his horse, who suffered a skull fracture.

–Another little boy who lost fingers from a home-made firecracker.

–A little girl, her mother distracted for just a moment–something that all parents share–who fell into the fireplace in her flannel nightshirt.

I am not from Arroyo Grande. I was born in Taft and we moved here in 1955. But when I was born, I was premature and I was a “blue baby.” The umbilical cord was strangling me. Mom’s doctor, Dykes Johnson, was an amateur pilot at an air meet in Shafter.

He sensed, I guess from the nurse’s voice over the phone, that something had gone terribly wrong. He flew his plane back to Taft and saved my life.

And then there are doctors like Howard Hayashi, who once operated on me and who once called the wife of another patient whom he’d operated. She was frightened. Had something gone wrong?

“No, no!” Hayashi replied. “He is doing fine. I was calling to see how YOU are doing.”

I had an a-fib incident once in cardiologist’s offce, Dr. Andrea Tackett, whose soft Kentucky accent must’ve mirrored my grandfather’s. She held her appointments, plopped my sorry ass into a wheelchair, and accompanied me over the French Hospital’s ER, where she gave the attending doctor detailed explicit instructions on what she wanted done. Then she squeezed my hand, smiled at me, and went back to her practice.

Tackett became the first female Chief of Staff in French Hospital’s history. She also did the physicals for all the AGHS young women athletes.

My favorite primary care doctor, in nearly 70 years of seeing them, was Scott Davis. What Dykes Johnson had done at my birth Davis did in my 60s. Like me, Scott, who died suddenly of a massive heart attack few years ago, was an alcoholic. That made him absolutely unafraid to call me out  when I was lying to him.

What the Trib reported, and so well, should not be. We should not have to wait endlessly for the good and skillful people we need.

Neither should they be hamstrung by the immense power, and the greed, of insurance companies. There’s a wall between doctor and patient now, and it’s immense, and it was built by corporations like United Healtchare. The wall has led, more than once, to violence.

The murder of United Healthcare executive Brian Thompson, December 2024. Pennsylvania policeman Andrew Duarte was killed by a distraught husband, whose wife was dying in a local hospital.

We can do better. We need to do better.