Welcome to CRMEF!
Everything you read below regarding our residency has long been true. Unfortunately, effective July 1, 2020, we closed our doors as a residency, ending 49 years of training family doctors in Iowa, most of those physicians still practicing. To know us as we were, still are to this day, read below...
Hello from CRMEF!
My own first contact with the Cedar Rapids Family Medicine Residency was as a sub-intern back in 2003.
During that rotation, I was on call one night, when, at maybe 2 am, I had to call the attending.
As a med student from the nearby medical school, I had already learned what to expect when you called an attending at 2 am, so I called Dr Tony Myers, the CRMEF faculty attending that night, with some trepidation.
“Hey, buddy!” Dr. Myers said, cheerfully, in response to me muttering who I was and what I was up to that night, he acting for all the world as if I’d called him in the middle of the afternoon, not night.
I had two patients to present, and I did so in typical med student fashion, Dr. Myers patient himself on his end of the phone, listening to me rattle through the usual, right down to the assessment and plan.
“Sounds good to me, buddy!” he all but chirped, as I, nervously, stumbled to the end.
I truly hung up the phone that night thinking to myself that this is where I fit in, that these are the faculty who will teach me what I need to know in order to be a family doc, and that they will do so with utter respect.
And, now, some ten years after that phone call to Dr. Myers, I am not only an alumnus of the residency program, but a faculty member since 2008, and now Program Director.
To this day, hardly a week goes by that I do not recall what Dr. Myers said to me that night, those years ago.
“Hey, buddy!”
Tony’s words then acknowledging the camaraderie we, as a residency, still have, the camaraderie I want us to always have. Tony’s words now my own in welcoming your interest in our program, your prospect of becoming a resident here, your desire to be the family doc, you, like me, dream to be.
Want to see what a Family Medicine residency should be? How you can be a good doctor without losing sight of the good and decent person you are?
Hey, buddy, come here--and come home!
Dónal
Dónal Kevin Gordon, MD
Residency Program Director
Cedar Rapids Family Medicine Residency
