All about community: Family doctor leaving Estancia after devoting 35 years to the small, rural town

Feb. 25—ESTANCIA — Every drawer, shelf and flat surface in Dr. Linda Stogner's clinic office reveals memories of more than 35 years practicing family medicine in this little Torrance County town, population about 1,000, give or take.

There's the small plastic cactus in a small, plastic planter, a gift from a patient.

"I thought it was real for the longest time," Stogner said. "I watered it until I noticed it wasn't growing."

She reached atop a bookcase and plucked down a grotesque, long-nosed plague mask she got in Venice, Italy. People battling the Black Death hundreds of years ago in Europe wore masks like this.

"They would fill the mask's nose with garlic, wear a hat, long clothes and gloves and carry a stick to remove bed clothes," Stogner said. "We still have (bubonic) plague in New Mexico. I treated two cases in Mountainair about seven years ago and one in Las Vegas in the mid-'80s." She did not use the mask, however.

And then there's the numerous cards and letters. One of them reads in part, "Many thanks to my 'Physician of the Years' for your vital part in making me whole again."

"I keep these and go back to them," Stogner said of the cards. "But I've been clearing things out little by little."

Thursday is her last day at Estancia's Esperanza Family Health Center. Stogner, 66, is retiring from full-time practice to return to her childhood home of Cubero, in Cibola County.

Usually outgoing and funny, Stogner grows quiet and her eyes mist over as she lets that settle in.

"I have five generations of families here — grandpatients and great-grandpatients," she said. "It's all about being part of a community."

Sweet corn and peaches

The Esperanza Family Health Center is part of the Presbyterian Medical Services system, which has 100 locations throughout New Mexico.

"We go to places that can't usually keep a doctor, can't keep health care," Stogner said.

The Estancia clinic was called Hope Medical Center when Stogner started work there in 1988, and it was located in a different part of the town than the present clinic, which opened on the north side of Estancia 14 years ago.

Today's Esperanza clinic offers dental and behavioral health services as well as medical care. It draws clients from Estancia and neighboring communities such as McIntosh, Moriarty, Edgewood, Torreon, Corona, Vaughn, Encino and Willard. Stogner estimates she sees an average of 25 patients a day in Estancia.

Esperanza Family Health Center's staff includes a dentist, a dental hygienist, two dental assistants, a behavioral health therapist, a couple of front-office employees, two medical assistants and a physician assistant. But Stogner is the only MD.

And she actually did not set out to be a physician. She had planned to study nursing after graduating from Grants High School, but she said Rex Robinson, her high school science fair adviser, suggested she go to medical school.

"He was from Corona, and when I started here I took care of his parents," she said. "Things kind of came full circle."

Stogner did her undergraduate work at New Mexico State University-Grants and New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro and obtained her medical degree from the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. After doing her residency in family medicine at Texas Tech University, she returned to New Mexico to work at clinics in Las Vegas, Roy and Wagon Mound.

Then she went to Estancia to check out the position there.

"They took me out to a farm to eat sweet corn," she said. "That's when I learned you can eat corn without butter or salt. Then they took me to a man who had peaches and put up preserves."

It was a small, agricultural community doing the best it could to attract a doctor. And it worked.

'What happened?'

Not all of Stogner's memories are in drawers or on top of bookcases. She keeps some with her all the time.

She remembers riding in an ambulance to Albuquerque with a pregnant woman who was about to deliver prematurely. Once at the hospital, she assisted in delivering twin girls. Years later, Stogner was the speaker at the Estancia High graduation and presented those girls with their diplomas.

And there was the year-old baby girl accidentally left overnight in a car seat in a van with a door left open in cold weather. The baby was brought to the clinic, numb with cold and barely alive.

"We were heating blankets in a microwave, trying to get some warmth in that baby," Stogner said. "Every mom in the clinic helped warm that kid. Warm and rub. She's 22 now."

One time, a man was brought into the clinic all muddy and bloody. He had been riding across a field on a four-wheeler and ran into a sprinkler head suspended from an irrigation rig. Stogner provided the initial care before he was helicoptered to Albuquerque.

"One eye was so swollen they thought he'd lost his eyeball," she said. "During surgery they found his eyeball down in his cheek. The optic nerve was still attached. Then about five years later, the same guy gets slammed between a gate and a fence by a bull. He had some broken ribs and a punctured lung."

John Perea, 55, who lives in Torreon and is employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farm Service Agency, has known Stogner for at least 30 years. She is his family doctor.

"I'd come limping in there, and she would roll her eyes and say, 'What happened?' "I'd say, 'Got kicked by a horse,'" Perea said. "Another time, I'd come in, and she would say, 'What happened?' 'I got bit by a black widow.' I go in there with my hand all wrapped up. 'What happened?' 'Lawnmower.' She has seen it all.

"She was there for us at a real scary time when my daughter, who had just started middle school, got wiped out at school. A kid was coming fast around a corner and blew right over the top of her and she banged her head on the concrete." He said Stogner not only treated his daughter's injury but soothed and reassured him and his wife.

"As a doctor she is very real," Perea said. "She makes you feel comfortable and lets you know what is going on. There's no such thing as office hours. I have never known her to turn anyone away. She treats people around here as family. She knew she was not only going to see them at the clinic, but at the Dollar Store and the gas station."

Rural roots

Stogner said her mother, Lorraine, went to a teacher's college in Massachusetts and then moved to New Mexico with the goals of teaching Indians and marrying a cowboy. She taught at Laguna Pueblo and married Alex Gonzales, who was part of the Cubero Land Grant.

"My father was a gentleman rancher," Stogner said. "He did not have enough cows to make any money, but enough to take all his time. It was a great way to raise kids." She said she and her brothers and sisters trained horses to make extra pocket money.

"Training horses is a good way to learn how to deal with patients — strong hand or gentle hand," Stogner said. "They (horses and patients) need to learn what you are doing is for their own good."

Her rural upbringing has proved valuable in working with the ranchers and farmers who make up a large number of her patients. She said if a rancher needs surgery, you try to do it after the calves are weaned but before he has to break ice on stock tanks or other sources of water for his livestock. For farmers, surgeries are scheduled in winter or early summer before the growing season or harvest seasons kick in.

Perea said Stogner's role in the community went beyond her medical duties.

"Anything we needed in the community, she was always there," he said. "She was involved in the (Estancia) Rotary Club and the (Rotary's) Pumpkin Chunkin event. A huge thing for us is our county fair, and she was always an avid supporter of the fair. She always purchased three to five animals at our junior livestock sale. She knew those kids had worked hard with their animals."

Beware the white coat

The white coat hanging on Stogner's office door still has a sales tag on it. She hardly ever wears it.

"When she puts that white coat on and starts down the hall, it's like, uh-oh," said Dolores Lujan, a medical assistant at Esperanza Family Health Center. "It means someone needs to know who is boss."

Lujan, 38, of Torreon, has been on staff at the clinic for 13 years, but she has known Stogner for 25 years. Stogner has been her family doctor since Lujan was a young girl and now provides care for Lujan's 4-year-old daughter, Agatha.

"I only let Dr. Stogner give (Agatha) her shots, so I don't know what I can do now that she's leaving."

Lujan said Stogner is a special breed of doctor.

"A lot of doctors beat around the bush, but she is going to tell you like it is," Lujan said. "'You fix this diabetes or this is what is going to happen.'"

She said what she will miss most about Stogner is more personal than professional.

"I will miss our one-on-one talks about life, her counseling me before the first patient of the day comes in," Lujan said. "She has helped me a lot — on a personal level, not just with work."

'Hugely desperate'

Stogner gave notice two years ago, but so far no medical doctor has been found to replace her. A physician assistant will be the ranking medical staffer at Esperanza when she leaves.

She describes the need for doctors in rural New Mexico communities as "hugely desperate."

"We are using a lot of mid-level providers — physician assistants, nurse practitioners," she said. "We need physicians to support them. It takes a team."

She said it is difficult to place doctors in rural communities when they have family needs such as school systems for children, proximity to larger towns and any number of other issues.

Stogner and Michael, her husband of 44 years, do not have children. But early on Michael, who had a career as a petroleum engineer, and Linda had to make sacrifices. Michael had an office in Santa Fe and commuted to where his wife was working.

"We were married five years before we lived together," Stogner said. "I can practice medicine on a rock. But when you place a physician, you usually have to place a family, too."

Since 1992, she has worked with UNM to teach students — medical, pharmacy, nursing — about rural medicine.

"These are people who may never have been out of (a big) town," she said. "They come out here and find there is only one place to eat and you do your shopping at Family Dollar. They can't understand the joy of rural medicine unless someone shows them."

Stogner intends to practice medicine from Cubero, working as a temporary physician on call, filling in for vacationing doctors, providing video visits. She will always be a rural doctor.

But it is time for her to leave Estancia. She has a house in Cubero, her 92-year-old mother lives there, as do several siblings. She's going home.

"Her heart was always in the right place," Perea said. "She was never too good for anybody. She will be missed."