The old order changeth, yielding place to new ....
— Tennyson
If it hadn’t been for that barbecue sandwich ...
Dr. Chet Amin laughs at himself when he tells the story.
Of course, the barbecue sandwich wouldn’t really have made a difference.
But on the other hand, if they’d gone to some fancy restaurant, or even not-so-fancy restaurant, just something a little more formal than College Barbecue near Dr. Don Lomax’ office at the Ketner Center, would he have moved here?
Sure he would have.
He was already in love with North Carolina and fast falling in love with Salisbury.
And he already knew that the Lomax’ practice was exactly the kind he wanted — a “solo” family practice in which the family doctor inevitably becomes the family friend.
But he clearly remembers the lunch and how they happened to eat there and, to be honest, that barbecue sauce!
He had finished medical school and an internship and residency in family practice, and he and his wife, Dr. Hetal Patel, a dentist, had decided they wanted to live in North Carolina. His sister lives in Greensboro, and they had visited often and liked it much better than New Jersey, where they were living.
And doctors can’t just pick up a practice and move around.
“So we wanted to find a place where we wanted to live and raise children, bring up a family,” he says — and a place where they’d both have an opportunity to work.
“And we had looked in Raleigh, Greensboro, Charlotte and had two or three options,” he says, but then they came to Salisbury, responding to an ad by Rowan Medical Practices.
Rowan Medical Practices, a sister corporation to Rowan Regional Medical Center, says Director Tracy Castor, “is a non-profit organization that recruits and employs physicians for family practice in areas of the community which might not be served if the medical center didn’t step up to the plate, so to speak.”
And while they talked, Castor and Linda Alexander, the practice manager, told him about Dr. Lomax.
Amin responded immediately.
“He sounded like the kind of person whose practice I wanted to be in,” Amin says, “the type of person whose footsteps I would want to follow, like just a great role model, and that was important. It was always emphasized by my dad to always follow a good role model.”
So he asked if they could go meet him.
“And they said the building was kind of old but they’d remodel, and I said, ‘That doesn’t matter. I just want to meet Dr. Lomax,’ and after we met ... “
It was time for lunch.
One of the women suggested a restaurant.
“And Dr. Lomax said, ‘No, no, we’re not going there. We’re going to College Barbecue,’ ” Amin says, and that’s where they went.
“And I was going to order a hamburger, and Dr. Lomax said, ‘No, no, no, I’m going to order it for you,’ and he ordered a barbecue sandwich. And that’s how we got together.”
Amin clearly remembers Tracy Castor saying, “I hope Connie Lindsay doesn’t find out Dr. Lomax took you to College Barbecue.”
Connie Lindsay is the physician recruiter for Rowan Regional Medical Center, says Castor, “and she would expect us to put our best foot forward to impress upon the doctor that Salisbury was the best place to be.”
From Amin’s point of view, that’s exactly what they had done.
That was the kind of thing that told him, what? He searches for the right words.
“It was,” he says, “the simplicity of it ... “
He knew he had found exactly what he wanted.
“We came the first of July, and we worked together six months. He had decided to be there for me. He wanted to do everything to make sure that patient care didn’t get affected, and he did that until the very end. He’d come in and call the patients for me.”
He laughs.
“Nobody called a family in New Jersey.
“He comes in as needed now. And he really enjoys coming back. He’s still keeping up with the journals, still telling me a lot of the news.
“I think he’s got such a vast amount of experience. I don’t think any textbook can come close to that kind of experience. He would look at a patient and say, ‘I’m going to put this lady in the hospital ... ’
“The closeness that you see here among people is one of the things I wanted, to be with somebody like Don Lomax. In family medicine, your practice is made of who you are. There is a chemistry between the patients and the physicians. His patients have been with him such a long time, and he is the person he is ... ”
Born in India, Amin lived in the same state recently devastated by an earthquake but far enough away that none of his family was injured, and he never dreamed that someday he’d be a doctor in a small town in North Carolina.
Now 31, his family moved to America when he was almost 13, but the move started much earlier when an uncle came to the United States as a student. He stayed and is now working with the National Cancer Institute.
“My dad came to visit him,” and while here, he applied for a job. A chemist, he was curious to find out what would happen. The company wanted him to start work the next day.
Of course, that was impossible, but eventually the family did move to this country, his father took a job in New Jersey, and after he finished high school, Amin enrolled at Rutgers University to study computer science.
“My parents always wanted me to be a physician,” he says, and laughs. “That’s probably why I went into computers. But programming became mundane, and I was looking into graduate schools, and I thought about medical school. That’s when reality kicked in. I took a senior level genetics course just to find out what it was like.
“And that was probably the perfect course for me. There are a lot of similarities with computers. It’s very, very logical. I just sort of fell in love with genetics. That’s when I knew.
“From that point on, it was decided. I knew what I wanted to do, and it was much easier.”
But he needed a pre-med degree.
He had entered college when he was 16, so he finished his undergraduate degree in computers, working part-time, and continued to work part-time and go to school part-time for that pre-med degree.
“Dad had paid for the computer degree,” he says, “and I paid for the pre-med degree. And my parents never said, ‘I told you so.’ ”
Then, he entered the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey — and met Hetal. She had finished dental school at Columbia and was starting her residency. In 1997, when she finished her residency and he finished medical school, they married and moved to Patterson, N.J., where he did his residency.
He wanted to work in primary care, either internal or family medicine.
“And I chose family medicine because it had more of an emphasis on geriatrics, and that was sort of what I was going toward. My brother is a geriatric psychiatrist; my uncle, a family practitioner.”
His uncle had trained in England and when he returned to India, he set up clinics in small villages.
“He didn’t make any money, but there are a few figures in our family who have had a lot of influence on all of us, and he was one. This uncle told me to come a geriatrician before I knew what a geriatrician was.”
If he can make a difference like his uncle ... But he’s quick to point out that where he is is different, and in this country times have changed.
“What I’m doing now is different from what Don Lomax did. He was a true solo, on call all the time.”
Amin is part of a three-physician team, sharing on call duties with Dr. Desiree Johnson and Dr. John Barr. Each is on call every third night and every third weekend.
“Everybody has his own way of dealing with that,” he says. “If I’m around on the weekend and not on call, it’s a lot easier to see the patient myself because I know what’s going on.”
And he can’t believe how happy he is.
“In the beginning it was sort of a challenge, but Dr. Lomax was there with every challenge,” he says. “And I look forward to every day.”
He’s impressed with Rowan Regional Medical Center.
“I’ve had cases here in the hospital that have gotten better care,” he says, than they would have gotten in a major medical center.
The hospital has good ancillary services — physical and speech therapy and the like — and a good support staff.
For example, he says, he was debating the need to send a patient to a larger center, even discussed it with a consultant, and they decided the patient was better off here.
“She was going through mental changes, and she needed to be around people she knew and physicians she knew. And we were able to keep her here and get her through her illness.
“It makes a difference if you’re being cared for by someone who knows you or where nobody knows you. This emergency room knows you or knows your doctor.”
He has another example.
At 4:30 a.m. recently, he got a call from the emergency room about a former patient of Lomax’s whom Amin had not met. The patient had gone to the emergency room with chest pains. Emergency room personnel thought he could be sent home but didn’t want to release him without arranging a follow-up the next morning.
Amin did the follow-up. The patient was fine. But the reassurance was only possible in a community hospital that knows its community and its doctors.
Amin has been here long enough to know and be proud of both.
And that makes Tracy Castor happy.
“He’s the perfect doctor for us,” she says. “He’s a great man and a very fine person, and he and his family are great for Salisbury.”
Dr. Hetal Patel also is happy working as a dentist for the Rowan County Health Department.
And Salisbury is great for them for many reasons, large and small, beyond his enormous pleasure with the practice which he plans to buy from Rowan Medical Practices during the summer.
Like not being in New Jersey traffic.
Like the mountains.
“We both love the mountains,” he says. “The rest of my family is convinced we moved to Salisbury because the mountains are only an hour and a half away, but we haven’t been able to get there yet.”
But they will.
Like being able to work with Dr. Lomax. “He’s been tremendously helpful and a great mentor.”
And he understood immediately that someone who wanted to raise a family in Salisbury needed to know about barbecue.
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