Did You Hear About Doc Ogden?

By MICHAEL WINERIP ( New York Times Magazine - 5 May 2002 )

t's early tuesday, Jan. 20, 1998, in Wellsville, N.Y., and the sky is beginning to show streaks of light over in the east, behind Madison Hill. On Main Street, at Texas Hots, the waitresses are already pouring customers a second cup. Each morning, a half-dozen men huddle out front, waiting for the bank clock to strike 6 and the restaurant to unlock its doors so they can replant themselves on their rightful counter stools. By 6:45, Main Street is lined with pickup trucks, their exhaust white in the frosty air as they head over for first shift at Dresser-Rand, Wellsville's biggest employer, manufacturer of electric-generating steam turbines.

Like most places, Wellsville has people with old money, new money, just enough money and no money. It's the old money -- oil money made in the nearby Pennsylvania oil fields at the turn of the last century -- that built those big homes along Main Street and gives Wellsville its special charm. As recently as 20 years ago, there were still ''oil widows'' in those elegant houses, but today it's the new money, mostly doctors, lawyers, business executives, who, for $200,000, own rambling Victorians that would go for a million or more in a New York City suburb.

On mornings like this, Oak Duke, publisher of the local paper, The Wellsville Daily Reporter, likes to get out early with his bow and arrow and hunt white-tailed deer before going into his office on Main Street. It is a measure of Wellsville's isolation -- the closest cities, Buffalo and Rochester, are each a two-hour drive -- that The Daily Reporter is still an afternoon paper, delivered by boys and girls on bicycles. And while there are those in town who refer to the paper as The Daily Distorter, the truth is, if you carefully read what's not on the front page -- the police blotter, the paid obits, the births, the daily list of patients admitted to and discharged from Jones Memorial Hospital -- you can piece together much of what's happening in this village of 5,241.

On this winter morning, Dr. Gary Ogden is heading down Main Street to the hospital -- the Jones, as everyone calls it -- to deliver another baby. Since moving here in the mid-1970's, Ogden, a general practitioner who's pushing 50, has delivered more than 3,000 babies, as many as 300 a year. In June, when The Daily Reporter runs a head shot of every graduating high-school senior in the county, Doc circles the ones who are his, and it's always a big number. He delivered Mindi Grant, and he delivered Mindi's daughter, Kylee. He delivered all 12 of Beverly Slawson's grandchildren, and if the parents didn't have money, they gave him half a cow. That's another thing about Ogden. He is what Stephanie McKinley calls ''a people's doctor.'' You wouldn't know it from Main Street, but this is one of New York's Appalachian counties. Out in the countryside, living in trailer parks, are some of America's poorest citizens. Among these folks, Gary Ogden is known as a doctor who treats according to symptoms, not pocketbook size. When Jeanene Austin could not afford to fill prescriptions, he gave her free samples. When Maryann Sparatta couldn't get a ride to his office, he made house calls to check her blood sugar. When Mark Sisson was having breathing problems, Ogden visited his auto-body shop and suggested ways to better ventilate the painting room.

Ogden's home phone is unlisted, but he's a soft touch and constantly gives it out, so naturally, people call all evening. From the day he arrived, he has been a 24/7 doc. He delivered babies on the first night of his honeymoon, and on more Thanksgivings and Christmases than he can recall. And he's not one of those ''slam, bam, here's your baby, ma'am'' docs. Women like Nan Allen say it didn't matter how many he'd done, Dr. Ogden had a way of letting you know he thought it was a miracle too. As Hope Zaccagni says, Ogden is ''concerned about who we are and how we feel emotionally, not just how the physical plant is doing.''

All of which helps explain why so many looked the other way for so long when they could see, plain as the restored cupola on the Wellsville public library, that Ogden was heading for disaster. Thornton Wilder once wrote, ''In our town we like to know the facts about everybody,'' and people sure did when it came to Ogden. Oak Duke, the publisher, first realized his friend had a serious problem back in 1982. It was during a weeklong camping trip that the Wellsville hunting and fishing club made to Canada. Some of the most powerful men in town belong to that club. All good friends of the doc. All of them knew, too.

And Nan Allen, the music director at her church and someone people tell things to (because, she says, she herself is not one to gossip), was aware he had a problem 20 years ago when she went shopping for a family doctor. But she chose Ogden anyway, because she felt that what he did in his free time was not her business.

For his part, Ogden thought he'd been pretty clever about hiding it. When his hands started shaking, he took Inderal, using the free samples the drug companies sent. He usually induced pregnant women so he knew when to expect the delivery and could be as alert as possible, for a man in his condition. And when a baby popped out in the middle of the night and Doc was bad off -- he either refused to come in or his wife, Julie, lied for him.

On this January morning in 1998, over at the Jones, a 19-year-old single college student is in labor, waiting, along with her mother, for Ogden to arrive and deliver the baby. There is a midwife present, but the young woman has been stuck at nine centimeters for several hours, and the midwife thinks it's time for Ogden to do a vacuum delivery. Truth is, the midwife thought it was time for Ogden hours ago, at 4:45 a.m., but when she called his house, he had refused to come in. Right away, the midwife, Susan Dougherty, felt a chill and thought, Oh, God, drunk again.

Ogden arrives at the hospital at 7:30, as usual looking a little disheveled, but chirpy. He always has a comment for the switchboard operator in the lobby, is such a jokester that Linda Trasks's kids call him Dr. Funny. This, however, will be his last lighthearted moment for a long time.

Very soon, a 6 pound 5 ounce baby girl will lie lifeless in his shaky hands, and in the terror of the moment, there will be many errors: he will fail to immediately call in a specially trained pediatrician to take over resuscitation; on the first try, he will place the breathing tube in the infant's stomach instead of the lungs; he will push away a nurse trying to revive the baby's heart and scold her, panicking his medical team.

Everyone present that awful morning can still, four years later, hear that poor 19-year-old wailing, ''Don't let my baby die.'' What happened in those few minutes changed an awful lot in Wellsville. Within two weeks, a state investigator arrived and was asking all sorts of pointed questions about Dr. Ogden. That was not easy for folks. Ogden was the family doc for many of the nurses who worked at the Jones. Several talked among themselves and decided not to say a word about his drinking. They feared the ramifications would be enormous. And they were right.

Of course, none of this was written up in the local paper, Gary Ogden and Oak Duke being such good friends. Information circulates differently in small towns. An ordinary citizen like Tammy McQueen Kokot didn't need a news story anyway; she heard the details from a nurse who was there that morning. Over time, the people of Wellsville figured it out.

Among our most basic longings is the wish for a doctor who will always be there for us. In ''Our Town,'' the first Grover's Corners resident we meet is Doc Gibbs, walking down Main Street, heading home after getting out of bed at 1:30 a.m. to deliver twins in Polish town. (Popped out ''easy as kittens,'' Doc tells Mrs. Gibbs, who rises at dawn to make him bacon, eggs and coffee.)

This is the pedestal we placed doctors on for a long time. I remember as a young reporter for The Rochester Times-Union in the 1970's having trouble getting a story on disciplining physicians into the paper, because my editor would not believe a doctor could be a drunk or drug addict. In those days, New Yorkers made just 160 complaints annually about their doctors, and the state disciplined a dozen a year.

In 2001, New York investigated 7,000 complaints and disciplined 379 doctors. Nationally, disciplinary action against physicians is up 50 percent in the past decade. Currently 1,200 problem doctors in New York are being overseen by monitors who may watch them urinate into a cup or stand at their side during surgery.