Story and photos by Sylvia Freire
Scattered on the top of a dark wooded shelf lie hundreds of animal figure clip-ons that would soon connect to her stethoscope.
A hand reaches for a few new animals to wear around her for the patients she would soon see.
Dr. Molly O’Rourke, the head pediatrician at the Primary Care Centers of Eastern Kentucky, walks down a hall, knocks on a door and is greeted with smiles from both a child and parent.
These smiles would soon turn into sadness, knowing a future for O’Rourke; her move that would end up making her leaving Hazard, Kentucky, in December.
“Today I had a kid who cried because I’m leaving,” O’Rourke said. “I’ve been working with him for a year and a half and he was really sad.”
Moving from Hazard to Murray would be a large change for O’Rourke, a single mother with two children, Olive and Oscar, to be closer to her family.
“It’s hard to leave people and just the thought. I’ve moved a lot in my life, but moving my children. It’s so depressing,” O’Rourke said. “It’s a very new experience for me.
This is the first time I have lived anywhere (Hazard) in my whole life longer than six years. I’ve been here 11 years.”
However, her passion would never go away with the move to a new office and a new life. O’Rourke drew back to her time in residency now, as she helps the last few patients she checks with until December.
“I worked with some adults, and I found, I just felt more comfortable with kids,” O’Rourke said.
“Like the adults simply they could lie, they could. Whereas kids, they’re so brutally honest sometimes.”
O’Rourke’s first experience in surgery rotation had created a space that made her realize her innate nature of taking care of children.
“I had gone and done what’s called an ID, which is an incision and drainage of an abscess,” O’Rourke said. “I did it (on an adult), but was such a baby about it, and it drove me nuts.
The next day, I did the exact same procedure on a five-year-old boy, and he barely cried.”
Finding that a child was the better patient and O’Rourke turned to pediatrics, a place where she found her home in medicine.
Her normal work day would come to a stop as her grief with the move came from more than just boxes to fill, but from her patients’ heart.
On Oct. 24, at 9 a.m. O’Rourke had to call the death of a child after a birth.
“Never in my 15 years have I had to call a death,” O’Rourke said.
Even through this, O’Rourke finds ways to comfort herself in her own grief, but another friend knows how to help her in a way she found hard to explain, Charlie, her 10-year-old great dane.
“You can always tell when Charlie knows I’m having a hard time,” O’Rourke said. “He’s got me through quite a few things. He’s been with me through everything.”
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