By Nick Tabor, New Era Staff Writer
During his 38 years running an internal medicine
practice on South Main Street,
Dr. Terry Fuqua says he brought in a smaller income than most of Hopkinsville’s
physicians.
He’d spend an hour to do every physical thoroughly.
He eschewed high-tech tests—“gobbledygook,” he says—preferring to test patients
with just his stethoscope and his five senses, unless he specifically needed
the assistance of a machine. He made house calls for patients who couldn’t get
to his building. Often he took patients into his private office to explain
their illnesses and treatment, said Patty Gamble, Fuqua’s nurse for many years.
When patients came to him and said they couldn’t
pay, he’d ask them to give him $5 a month. They could pay their full bills
later, but if they coughed up just a little, he’d keep treating them. It showed
they were trying.
Since the week after his retirement in 2008,
Fuqua, now 73, has spent every Wednesday morning volunteering at St. Luke Free
Clinic. Each time he sees 12 to 15 working people who can’t afford health
insurance, treating most for diabetes or high blood pressure.
To explain why he comes back each week, Fuqua
says doctors have a duty to treat people who can’t pay them.
But this doesn’t reach the heart of the matter;
Fuqua isn’t driven by a sense of obligation. Nor is it simply the chance to
stay connected to the medical world. Treating the indigent has become for him a
deeply-ingrained habit — a part of who he is, he says.
Plodding
pace
Fuqua’s family moved to Cadiz
from Hopkinsville
in 1944, when he was 5. He felt so attached to the area that he abandoned an
early career aspiration — to be a chemist — in favor of an occupation he knew
he could practice in Hopkinsville. He and his wife, Nada, met at Vanderbilt University
in Nashville, Tenn.,
and married before Fuqua was to start his residency in St. Louis, Mo.
They moved back here when his residency ended.
He found office space in the Croft Building
on South Main Street
and enlisted his wife and mother to decorate. At the time, doctors of internal
medicine worked in many fields — cardiology, endocrinology, hematology — for
which patients more often go to specialists now. In a city sorely lacking in
primary care physicians, finding patients wasn’t hard. He monitored 2,000 to
3,000 people routinely and saw countless others for only a visit or two.
Patty Gamble, who joined Fuqua’s office as a
nurse in 1977, described a plodding pace in the doctor’s daily flow of
patients. He took his time examining each one and made time to chat. He
scheduled spaces to catch up on work between appointments so he could see
patients promptly when they came in.
If the last appointment was at 5 p.m., but
another patient called and needed to be seen that evening, Fuqua and Gamble would
stay until 6.
“I didn’t necessarily agree with that,” Gamble said,
laughing. “But it was right. It was the right thing to do.”
If one of Fuqua’s patients went to Jennie Stuart
for a terminal illness, he’d stay at their beds for hours, Gamble recalled.
Some of their office’s indigent patients had no
insurance from their first visits. At the time, there was nowhere else to go.
Other patients lost their insurance after Fuqua started treating them. Fuqua
never showed a moment’s hesitation, never a flicker of uncertainty about
whether he would help them, Gamble said. It never seemed to cross his mind that
payment should be a necessary condition.
However, he never talked about it, she said.
When pressed, she couldn’t explain his commitment.
“If you want to see the insides of a person,
it’s really important that he does that for people,” Gamble said. “He was
almost like an old country doctor you used to read about.”
Simpler
work
Fr. Gerald Baker, a priest at SS. Peter and Paul
Catholic Church, created the foundation for St. Luke Free Clinic in the 1980s: a makeshift medical
operation in the parish’s basement. When clinic personnel couldn’t get a
patient’s blood pressure down or the person’s diabetes under control, they sent
the patient to Fuqua, who treated the person free.
Fuqua planned to retire when he neared the age
of 75. But in 2008, when he was 70, his longtime office manager, Linda Eaton,
had a recurrence of her cancer.
She had to quit. Not wanting to train a new assistant, Fuqua closed the office.
His kids had long since moved away: his daughter
to become an English professor, his son an architect.
By that time St. Luke occupied a small brick
building on West 17th Street,
beside Cumberland
Hall Hospital.
Fuqua and Gamble committed their Wednesday mornings to volunteering there.
In one of the clinic’s four small doctor’s
rooms, he cycles through 12 to 15 patients between 8 a.m. and noon. Most
physicals last 15 to 30 minutes — a speedy pace by Fuqua’s standards.
He estimates 90 percent of his patients have
hypertension, diabetes, or a chronic lung disease, but the clinic might send
him patients of any stripe. He can occasionally send clients to free
specialists, for ear infections or skin cancer, but most illnesses fall to him
for treatment.
Volunteering is simpler than owning a practice:
Now Fuqua can’t estimate how many patients he monitors regularly, nor can he
say how large a share of the clinic’s total caseload he’s handling. He can only
name a few of the other doctors who volunteer there.
Fuqua spent a month in a hospital last year
after a pickup truck hit him on his bicycle. It shattered his pelvis, broke
bones in his leg and broke and dislocated his left elbow. After two months in a
wheelchair, he switched to a cane, then to crutches. Now he rides the bike to
the clinic again, given warm enough weather. In January he doubled his clinic
hours to help reduce a backlog of appointments.
This way he stays connected to doctors he’s
known for years, and he keeps informed about new medicines and methods. And he
keeps the charitable part of his practice alive.
“It’s fun to try to make sick people well,” he
said. “If you got a sharp axe, why let it go to waste, you know? Keep using
it.”
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