Thomas Leigh, an emergency room physician at Estes Park Health, retired last week after practicing medicine for 39 years.
His career took him from Colorado to Michigan to Alaska and back to Colorado, a journey that included caring for some 120,000 patients.
Leigh completed an undergraduate degree in cellular and developmental biology in 1979 at the University of Colorado. He then worked for a few years in a cancer research lab at the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in Denver which is part of the UC Medical Center. He began medical school there in 1985 and then did his residency training in internal medicine at the University of Michigan. It was there he developed a love for emergency medicine.
“At that point, I hadn’t really spent much time in the emergency room at all. But during that residency I did, and really enjoyed it, and decided to switch. So, I did a second residency at Denver General, which is now Denver Health,” Leigh said.
Leigh liked the fact that emergency medicine offered many challenges. “There was a variety, an infinitely broad variety of clinical issues and problems. I liked the fact that time passed really quickly while I was at work,” Leigh said.
Leigh moved to Palmer, Ala. in 1995 and for 13 years he worked at the Mat-Su Regional Medical Center, a small but busy critical access hospital. “An opening came up there, and I had always been fascinated by Alaska, since I was a little kid,” said Leigh who had to talk his wife into moving there.
During his time in Palmer, Leigh commuted to work at two different hospitals in Anchorage. “Those were both level two trauma centers, with a lot of trauma, a lot of drug abuse, social dysfunction, and poverty,” said Leigh who decided in 2015 that he needed a change of pace.
“I grew up in Colorado. We would come through Estes Park, sometimes on our way to Rocky Mountain National Park or Longs Peak. But I didn’t really know much about it. It was kind of a sleepy town, as far as I knew. So, when Anna told me in January of 2015 that that was her last year in Alaska – the next week she said she wanted to live in Estes Park,” Leigh said.
Leigh has been with Estes Park Health for nine years. Reflecting on his time at the hospital, Leigh says he is thankful for all the patients who allowed him to care for them. “When I came here, it was just amazing to be taking care of, almost universally, people who were centered, well educated, kind, pleasant. I got more thank yous my first year here, than I think I got in my first previous 20 years of emergency medicine. It was just a very nice population to take care of,” he said.
Leigh said he is also grateful for his colleagues and what they brought to the table. “The ER nurses and staff have made work so much better. The commitment that everybody shows, the professionalism of all the nurses and staff in the hospital, the fun during the quiet times – those things will always stick with me,” Leigh said.
Leigh hopes that EP Health will continue to provide expert medical care into the foreseeable future. “I’m hopeful that this hospital will always be here, and that it will continue to be a little gem of a hospital, when this is such a difficult time for health care in general,” Leigh said.
In preparation for Leigh’s retirement, EP Health hired not one but two new residency trained and board-certified emergency room physicians, Paige Machado and Zachary Blea. The doctors assumed their duties in July.