The year began wonderfully and quietly, and I believed it would turn to be an excellent year. Then on January 10th, or 11th, Pam Miller committed suicide. I received a phone call from John Drage informing me of what had happened. We hadn't been very close for quite some time, but Pam Miller is possibly the person most responsible for who I am now today. I believe there are God-ordained moments in time that influence our entire lives, and for me one of those moments came in the winter of 2002, the second semester of my freshman year at MU. I had grown apart from the friends on my floor I had initially made when their desire to go party and drink and my desire to stay sober led to our no longer hanging out quite so often. On a Saturday night I sat in the 4th floor lounge of Hatch Hall playing old school Nintendo alone, and most of the floor was gone doing other things. Pam Miller suddenly appeared passing through, and having met before she saw me and came and said hello. She invited ...
Excerpts of a rural hospitalist's thoughts and experiences