The retired El Centro doctor recalls three decades of family practice

October 12—Any rural family doctor is expected to take on a lot.

Not everyone can overcome the story of Dr. Mark Bjorklund on how he pulled his own shoulder out of his grip while delivering a baby and carried on anyway.

It wasn’t entirely an injury inflicted by obstetrics, said Bjorklund, now 70, who retired in recent weeks from a decades-long career at El Centro Family Health, a federally subsidized health center that provides clinic and schools in a dozen northern New Mexico. communities

Bjorklund had tripped while running at Los Alamos in shoes with long lace-ups and dislocated her shoulder. Helping with the baby’s delivery only made it come out again.

“I was kind of sitting there trying to get it back in,” Bjorklund recalled, laughing.

She was eventually successful and completed the delivery, but not before the laboring mother realized that all was not well.

“I think everybody knew what was going on,” he said.

It was just one of many adventures Bjorklund had during his more than three decades practicing medicine in northern New Mexico, including clinics in Española and Truchas, where he often cared for multiple members of the same family in the over time

Bjorklund, who most recently served as El Centro’s clinical director, had planned to retire earlier this year, but initially hoped to continue seeing patients on a limited basis. However, the onset of a serious illness put an end to that plan, he told The New Mexican.

Now a resident of White Rock, Bjorklund was born and raised in Los Alamos, the son of a laboratory chemist. After graduating from Los Alamos High School in 1972, he attended the University of New Mexico, where he ran cross country and majored in biology and chemistry. He later attended Penn State Medical School.

Bjorklund knew from the beginning that he had the heart of a generalist.

“I wanted to learn a little bit of everything,” he said. “I chose family medicine for that, not fully understanding what that meant.”

He toured emergency medicine, eventually spending eight years at a hospital in Carlisle, Pa., before returning to his home state in 1994.

Bjorklund was married to his wife, Heidi, at the time, a nurse who had also grown up in Los Alamos.

Getting back close to family was a draw, but Bjorklund said returning to northern New Mexico was also the fulfillment of a longtime desire to help the region.

Growing up in the relative wealth and privilege of Los Alamos, he said, he was aware that things were very different in the surrounding communities.

“I had grown up on a pretty easy course and felt the need to serve,” he said. “I wanted to go back to New Mexico.”

After a refresher course in obstetrics, she began practicing medicine at the Northern New Mexico Health Centers, as El Centro was known at the time, caring for entire families from birth to death. .

She always saw midwifery as “just the miracle of everything,” Bjorklund said, but she also found it could be terrifying. Once, he said, a woman walked into the organization’s Coyote clinic while she was already in labor. Doctors at El Centro always delivered babies in a hospital setting, but this woman was too far away to make it to the hospital in time.

Bjorklund wasn’t there in person, but he helped with the delivery as best he could, offering support to the practitioner over the phone. It was, he said, “a unique experience.”

He and his wife raised four children in the area over the years. Two of the couple’s daughters died young, one in a car accident and the other after being hit by a train. The oldest is now a pediatrician, while the youngest works as a paramedic in Albuquerque.

Bjorklund said he was able to observe from a doctor’s point of view a series of sociological changes that northern New Mexico has undergone over the past three decades.

When he first arrived, for example, he spoke enough Spanish “to get me into trouble.”

“But the older people who, when I was first there, were speaking … some of the originals, like Spanish, from when people came and settled in that area,” Bjorklund recalled.

That dialect “disappeared” with later generations, he said, although El Centro sees a number of migrant patients who still speak only Spanish, but of a variety from Central or South America.

He also saw the drug crisis reach and take hold especially in Rio Arriba County, where alcohol addiction, a lingering problem, had always been the number one substance problem. Opioid addiction was already starting to rear its head in the area when Bjorklund returned in the 1990s.

“My understanding was … they pushed a lot of the dealerships out of the metro areas,” he said. “You ended up with multi-generational drug problems. … It affected every community.”

Rio Arriba County was for years one of the areas that led the nation in fatal heroin overdoses. When the opioid treatment drug Suboxone was introduced after it was approved in 2002 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, it helped slow the number of deaths, Bjorklund said. “That made a difference because it was a little bit safer and it lowers the death rate.”

Seeing how the opioid crisis had swept the region, Bjorklund said he and fellow El Centro veteran Dr. Leslie Hayes helped develop a treatment program.

“Our philosophy was that we were not addiction specialists, but that it was part of primary care,” he said.

The idea, Bjorklund said, echoed his core philosophy about what it meant to be a family doctor or primary care provider: “When we took people on as patients, we took them on as a whole patient.”

Bjorklund said he is deeply concerned about the primary care shortage and what it means for northern New Mexico.

“In terms of family doctors, we’re fewer,” he said. “They can’t be produced fast enough.”