A Dying Town -- When a rural hospital dies, the community around it starts to follow suit.
On the evening of December 28, 2014, Kourtney Bogan got an urgent call from her younger brother in Clarksville, a rural town of 3,200 bordering Oklahoma in far northeast Texas. Their mother, Gayla Bogan, who’d been fighting a respiratory infection over Christmas, was in bad shape. Kourtney jumped in her car and drove over. “When I got there, she was gasping for air, like she couldn’t breathe or something was blocking her airway,” Kourtney said. “I was panicking. She kept saying that she couldn’t breathe.”
Kourtney and her brother, Bristian, tried sitting Gayla upright in a chair, but it didn’t help. A minute later, she became “nonresponsive,” Kourtney said. She called 911. Within five minutes, an ambulance had arrived at the house, and workers loaded Gayla into the vehicle. They sped off to the nearest emergency room—a 30-minute drive to Paris Regional Medical Center in neighboring Lamar County.
Kourtney didn’t know it at the time, but Gayla, a 47-year-old who served as a church usher and worked as a nurse at a local nursing home, was having a heart attack. As the ambulance sped northwest on a thin strip of oak-lined highway, paramedics tried desperately to revive her.
The timing couldn’t have been worse.
If Gayla had gone into cardiac arrest just two weeks earlier, the travel time to the nearest hospital would have been only a few minutes. East Texas Medical Center had operated a rural hospital with an emergency room in Clarksville. But in December 2014, ETMC shuttered the Clarksville hospital along with two other facilities in surrounding Gilmer and Mount Vernon—casualties of low patient volumes, cuts to reimbursement rates from Medicaid and Medicare, and the cost of treating the uninsured. The closures rocked the small communities, upending what had been reliable sources of health care for decades.
Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/a-dying-town/
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