House Calls in the Desert
A Tucson family doctor remembers the patients, drives and kitchen tables that taught him what medicine is for.
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Early in his career, Dr. Ray Castell made house calls to ranches and small towns south of Tucson, driving a pickup with a black bag and a cooler of vaccines. This memoir gathers the stories he still tells his students: the rancher who paid in firewood, the midnight delivery by headlight, the grandmother who taught him more about listening than any professor. Warm, honest and sometimes funny, it is a book about what happens when a doctor sits down at your kitchen table.
My first year out of residency, I worked for an old doctor in Tucson who still made house calls to the ranches south of town. He was sixty-eight, he drove a green Ford with no air conditioning, and he handed me the keys the week I arrived. “You drive,” he said. “I’ll sleep. You’ll learn the roads.” Our patients paid in whatever they had. Cash when there was cash. Eggs. A side of beef once, which did not fit in the truck. One rancher near Arivaca paid for three years of visits in mesquite firewoo
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Dr. Ray Castell
I have been a family physician in Tucson for thirty-two years, long enough to have delivered babies whose babies I now see for ear infections. For most of that time I have had about fifteen minutes per patient, and I have spent a lot of them wishing I could hand people a short, honest book to read in the car. So I wrote a few. They will not cure anything. They will help you ask better questions, notice the right things and walk out of the exam room knowing what happens next. I live on the east side with my wife, Carmen, two rescue dogs and a saguaro that has been growing its first arm since 2009. Nothing in my books replaces a visit with your own doctor. Please go.
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