Next, If You're Sick!

CHAPTER 10

“NEXT...IF YOU’RE SICK!”

“The physician must have at his command a certain ready wit, as dourness is repulsive both to the healthy and the sick.”

Hippocrates, Decorum (c. 400 B.C.)

“Dear old Dr. Sam! - there will never be another one. I visited him in the nursing home and he had changed so much, I walked right by him and didn’t recognize him, I took fruit and fed him a banana and he ate like he was starved. H e couldn’t speak, but I told him that he used to say that he was the best doctor in Moneta (of course, he was the only one) and that I agreed with that, and he smiled. My husband used to ride around with him on Sunday afternoons to make his house and hospital calls.
I called him once for my husband about eleven o’clock one winter night. He said he had kidney colic and couldn’t come, but to get him to Bedford Hospital. We lived about a quarter mile ofF Rt. 122 and the snow had drifted in over the road and it was waist deep. I told Dr. Sam that he couldn’t get to our house anyway, so my son took my husband on the tractor out through the field and up to where the car was parked near Rt. 122, and they went to the hospital. About an hour later, Dr. Sam knocked at my door and he had waded that waist-deep snow and was out of breath and in pain, and he left actually groaning with pain. My husband had a history of ulcers and Dr. Sam said he was afraid one would bleed and he couldn’t get to the hospital. His father, the old Dr. Sam, died with a bleeding ulcer. I do not remember his father. We won’t forget Dr. Sam.

Sam was in Camelot in Salem. That’s where the VA put them-I believe it’s Salem Health Care now. I recall him saying when he was growing up, that times were so hard he went barefoot through the snow to feed the stock.
My husband was in the hospital with a bleeding ulcer and Jackie Thompson was there for the same thing. Dr. Sam told them absolutely no cigarettes or coffee and he gave orders at the cafeteria that no coffee was to be served to them. But they would sneak down to the break room and smoke and drink coffee. One Sunday morning when they were not expecting him, he walked in on them. He got so mad he said, ‘You all are not trying to get well!’ and stormed out. They were pretty shook up, but deserved what they got.
He had made several trips to see my father-in-law, and when they asked him how much they owed he gave a sum which was maybe a dollar a trip or less, and they said, “That’s not enough, you can’t do it for that amount.” He said, “I know what I’m doing. Mind your own business.”
I think the best story I know is about the bird dog. You may have heard it. He bought a dog, supposedly a bird dog, highly recommended by the owner. Dr. Sam said it was the sorriest dog he ever saw-couldn’t care less about birds! Sometime afterwards the man came to him with diarrhea and he told him he would fix him up with some medication. About a week later he came back very pale and weak and said he was worse, and said, “Are you sure you gave me what you aimed to give me?” Dr. Same said, “Yes, I’m sure I gave you exactly what I intended. Are you sure that was a bird dog you sold me?” He said the man never cam back.
I’m sure you recall that after he retired he doctored from the drug store for several years. He wasn’t one to give up. They gave him some kind of an award and it was presented at Bethlehem Church on Sunday morning and he sent his sister to accept it for him. He was seeing patients.”


Excerpts from a letter to the author by a former patient of Dr. Sam Rucker

“Why in the hell didn’t you call me sooner?” the cantankerous doctor bellowed into the telephone before slamming down the receiver.
Both bewildered and with tears in her eyes, my mother put her receiver down, too, yet more gently. One Saturday night, in the early 1970's, I developed a fever, and although I do not recall the particulars of my illness, I do recall my parent’s unease over calling Dr. Sam Rucker, an overworked, sometimes ill-tempered, but always badgered country doctor. Dr. Sam was known as much for his bouts of irritability as he was for his generosity, and, of course, my parents found the man in an ideal state of annoyance that evening. But my mother, who had a temperament similar to the doctor’s, decided to bite the bullet and make the call. She soon found, though, that she was no match for the tempest known as Sam.
My father stood nearby and watched. Probably thinking that the doctor might not be so harsh with a mother calling at an odd hour with a sick child, he had, by default, sacrificed my dear mother to Sam. He had witnessed Dr. Sam’s wrath enough to know what would happen. Perhaps when he suggested that my mother call Sam, he was thinking about the morning when, while waiting in the parking lot of the doctor’s old, Victorian-era home, he saw two sisters headed toward the one-room building that served as Dr. Sam’s office. One of the poor ladies was supported at the elbow by her sibling, and she was weeping silently, but not from pain. Daddy, who was talking to a neighbor while waiting for his own turn, noticed the two women’s misery and asked the weeping sister how she had been getting along. Through her sobs, she replied that Dr. Sam had admonished her on a prior visit to lose some weight. She had failed and she knew she was facing a tongue-lashing. She got one, too.

“I knew this would happen! I knew it!” my mother said, getting frustrated now. I’m now about the same age she was when she made this call, and I can imagine her saying to herself that if only I had been sicker, sooner, during Sam’s business hours, all would now be right with the world. But children can have bad timing, and it was now around 9:00pm. She had summoned the doctor from his comfortable chair and his respite from a busy week of caring for the health of a farming community. But she, like my father, knew what would soon happen.
My parents knew that after Sam had released some steam from his pressure-cooker temper, he would call back, and he did. He apologized to my mother, and she accepted the peace offering as if it was a three-carat diamond wrapped in a hundred dollar bill. Sam asked her a few basic questions, then told her to tell my father to come to his home in Moneta for some medicine.
For 37 years, Sam Rucker practiced medicine from a small frame wooden building and later from the large, Victorian-style main house that had been his home since 1912. Among the twelve Rucker siblings, there were two physicians, an RN, a pharmacist and a dentist. According to the Bedford Bulletin, Sam began his career in Elk View, West Virginia, and had the misfortune of having the same last name as a local family of hooligans. Once, on a house call to care for a sick child, the mother, who met the doctor at the door, was hesitant to let him in, for fear that her child would be afraid of a man whose last name was “Rucker,” so, the desperate but enterprising mother suggested he go by “Dr. Sam.”
The practice of medicine in a farming community did not make Dr. Sam a wealthy man. He was said to have purchased medicines at cost so that he could give them to patients who would, otherwise, be unable to afford them. As a recompense for his generosity, the Moneta Ruritan Club provided him with a car so that he could make his daily rounds after seeing patients at his home office each morning.

Patients, of course, contributed to Dr Sams’ temperament. Cars would fill his driveway early each morning, sometimes carrying patients whose condition did not warrant such an early visit. To one man who arrived at the doctor’s office at 6:00am one morning, Sam, who heard the car pulling up in the gravel driveway, raced outside as fast as a lighting bolt and yelled, “Don’t you have a bed to sleep in?”
In his final years, after he had discontinued his practice, Dr. Sam would set in the Moneta Pharmacy to pass the time and to talk with his former patients who came in to have prescriptions filled. By this time, in the late 1970's, Moneta had several doctors who practiced in a modern facility, but many old-timers still sought Dr. Sam. They would come into the pharmacy and describe their ailments to the nearly-blind old man, who would then instruct the pharmacist to take the patient’s blood pressure and temperature. If the sick person did not need to be sent next door to visit one of the other doctors, Dr. Sam would then have the pharmacist fill a prescription. On several occasions, I was one of his patients in the lobby of the Moneta Pharmacy, and I never received a bill.
I had the privilege, though, to visit the country doctor both in his small office and later in his home. I never witnessed the famous temper, but instead I encountered a stern but gentle man who seemed pleased to get a hug from a child. Sam’s departure coincided with the opening of the Village Family Physicians, and although I live in Roanoke, I travel to Moneta to see one of the doctors on staff there. Sam’s portrait hangs in the waiting room, and every time I pass it, I can still both see and hear him opening the door of his tiny office shouting, “Next, if you’re sick!”