On the rural Colorado plains, cancer patients with no local options rely on this traveling oncologist ...Middle East

LAMAR

Dr. Robert Hoyer doesn’t bother buying groceries or using the kitchenette in the little room at the Holiday Inn Express where he lives for four days every month. By the time he and his staff finish 12-hour days at the clinic, they usually head for enchiladas at La Mission Villanueva or steaks at Tavern 1301. 

They’ve settled into a routine by now in this small town on the southeastern Colorado plains, where they travel once a month to see patients with cancer who otherwise would have to drive two hours to Pueblo or three hours to Colorado Springs for doctor appointments.

Medical assistant Creston Potts’ mom takes care of her cat, Purdy, while she’s taking care of patients on the road, away from her regular job at UCHealth Memorial Central in Colorado Springs. She’s been working with Hoyer for 10 years now.

Nurse practitioner Rose Gates, who retired and then returned for this, is exhausted by the end of the week but knows she would feel “restless” if she hadn’t. She walked through the Lamar clinic while eating a baked potato from the Prowers Medical Center cafeteria because she doesn’t have time to sit down.

And Hoyer, known as the “outreach oncologist,” listens to audio books or logs into virtual meetings as he treks 400 miles each month on highways and two-lane roads across rural Colorado. After a long day at the Lamar clinic last month, he was watching his college daughter’s concert on a livestream, since he couldn’t go in person to the performance in Boulder.

On their travel week, the UCHealth team leaves Colorado Springs about dawn on Mondays, driving two hours straight south to Las Animas County, where they visit patients in borrowed space at Mt. San Rafael Hospital in Trinidad. On Tuesday mornings, they drive northeast to Lamar, where they use an empty suite of rooms at Prowers Medical Center. They head home to Colorado Springs around noon on Fridays.

In five days, Hoyer’s team sees about 130 patients, some to explain their diagnosis for the first time, and others to discuss test results or the next round of chemotherapy. 

There is not a single oncologist based in the southeastern quadrant of the state.

The hospitals in Prowers and Las Animas counties are community-owned and not part of UCHealth’s 14-hospital system. The rural medical centers partner with UCHealth because, otherwise, residents in their region might either forgo treatment or have to drive hundreds of miles for care. 

Specialists of any kind, including cardiologists, pulmonologists and endocrinologists, are nonexistent in many counties on the Eastern Plains. Even family physicians are few and far between. In the 17 counties of the Eastern Plains, there is one physician for every 995 residents, compared with one per 295 residents in urban Colorado, according to the Colorado Rural Health Center. 

Hoyer has been traveling to southeastern Colorado since 2011, when he took over for a doctor who was retiring. He attended medical school at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., worked at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and became the medical director of oncology at Memorial in Colorado Springs. He had no experience in rural health care until he was “voluntold” to report to his first day on the job in Lamar.

“It really opened my eyes to the situation,” he said, sitting at one of the desks crammed into an old exam room that is now his team’s office space. “I was shocked at how access was so challenging for patients, and how few doctors there are. Coordination of care was very spotty.” 

The traveling clinic began as just one day per month and slowly expanded to a full week as word spread about the traveling oncologist, and as the number of patients with cancer has grown. 

“The travel element initially was not something that I greatly enjoyed, but recognizing the impact this clinic has had for the patients in rural Colorado, I am happy to do this, and I would do it daily if I had to because it’s such a critical element,” he said. “The lack of specialty providers in this area is really striking.”

Patients are coming not just from Lamar, population 7,700, but smaller towns in the region, including Springfield, Walsh, Eads, Holly and Cheyenne Wells. Some of Hoyer’s patients drive an hour just to see him in Lamar.

Diagnosed on a Tuesday  

Michelle Cooper comes from her home in Springfield, about 45 minutes south of Lamar in Baca County. Her best friend of 25 years, Glenice Wade, drove her to a recent appointment, where Cooper learned her cancer had spread. Both women had tears in their eyes even before Hoyer walked into the exam room, a mostly bare space equipped with a leather patient chair that looks like it spent decades in a dentist’s office. 

Cooper, 54 and the mother of a teenage girl, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer two years ago. It was a Tuesday, she remembers, because the details of that day have not faded. 

By the following week, Cooper was already at her first appointment with Hoyer, who arranged for her to start chemotherapy at the hospital in Lamar. The director of the small infusion center, which is a cozy, living room-like space with a few leather recliners, is a woman Cooper knew from high school.  

In two years of infusions, Cooper has not had to drive to Colorado Springs. She has talked to Hoyer in person, via telehealth and when he has called her at home, even on a Sunday, to see how she was feeling. Getting her care in Lamar has meant that she’s been around to watch her daughter compete in basketball, volleyball and track, instead of driving to Colorado Springs for regular infusion appointments. 

“My first eight rounds of chemo were seven-and-a-half, eight hours long, so if I would have had to drive four hours, do eight hours of chemo, go four hours home, I mean, if you could make it home, right?” she said. “Because sometimes, just from here to Springfield, it was a little iffy. You’re just so tired. So tired.” 

These outreach programs are lifesaving. They are essential to rural areas.

— Michelle Cooper

Cooper’s husband and her best friend have taken turns driving her to Lamar and running errands while she gets her infusions, which decreased from eight hours, to four hours, to about one hour. They’ve continued every three weeks for almost the entire two years, minus four months when she had a break.

“Because I was able to come here, I had the energy to chase my daughter with all the ballgames, track meets, all that stuff,” she said. “I mean, I can’t even imagine how many lives it’s saved.” 

Some patients would not get treatment at all if driving to Pueblo or Colorado Springs was the only option, said Cooper, who works as a registration clerk at a family medicine clinic in Springfield, called Southeast Colorado Medical.

“A lot of them can’t afford it,” she said. “A lot of them aren’t as lucky as me, and have people who can take off work to do this. Most of the people that I know that do travel, they have to stay the night. They’re away from their kids, and they miss them.”

Part of her job at the Springfield clinic is helping patients get appointments with specialists, so Cooper knows how hard it is to find care in southeastern Colorado. When a family doctor in La Junta died a few years ago, people started driving two hours to Springfield, she said. As for getting an appointment with a visiting cardiologist, orthopedist or nephrologist, expect to wait six months, she said.

“These outreach programs are lifesaving,” she said. “They are essential to rural areas.” 

In addition to the oncology team, UCHealth has five cardiologists who hold clinics in southern Colorado, including in Lamar, Springfield, Eads, La Junta, Walsenburg, Trinidad and Cañon City. Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers sends oncologists to Burlington and La Junta.

There are about 90 oncologists in Colorado with active licenses, according to data from the Colorado Medical Society and the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies. Nearly all of them are along the Interstate 25 corridor, with a few scattered on the western side of the state, including in Durango and Grand Junction.

For Cooper, it’s been a comfort to talk through the scariest diagnosis of her life close to home, in a place where she doesn’t need directions or have to navigate a giant parking garage, with a doctor who is connected to a renowned hospital system and the latest research. 

“He is kind, and straight at the same time,” she said. “He just wants you to feel the best that you can possibly feel while you’re going through whatever you’re going through.”

“Without this treatment, I don’t have any hope”

Dennis Leathers, 77, has been getting a shot of chemo in his stomach once a month in Lamar since his diagnosis a year and a half ago. He and his wife, Kathy, drive about 30 miles from Holly to see Hoyer about his treatment for multiple myeloma, a rare type of blood cancer.

“It’s been a lifesaver,” said Leathers, who learned about the traveling doctor in Lamar from a friend in Holly.

Leathers and his wife did have to to travel to Colorado Springs for a 7 a.m. vascular surgery. They spent money on a hotel room the night before, plus meals — expenses not covered by insurance. 

The monthly injections don’t make him feel much worse than a flu shot would, he said, but he’s still glad he has a short drive home afterward. Kathy Leathers has a friend who had to pack a portable toilet when she drove her mother to chemo treatments in Colorado Springs because the treatments made her mother so sick to her stomach.

“She had to drive four hours to take her mother for her treatments, and they had to stop several times on the way,” she said. 

The couple has such a trusted relationship with Hoyer at this point that they get choked up thinking about the day he will stop coming to Lamar. “He is beyond reproach,” Kathy said. “He is kind and compassionate and he listens. If you need to talk to him for an hour, he will.” 

Dennis Leathers likely must continue his monthly shots for the rest of his life. “Without this treatment, I don’t have any hope,” he said. “So what do we do?”

One family nurse practitioner, 1,900 patients

Shelby Casper, a family nurse practitioner, opened her practice in Wiley in 2022 when she decided to move back home to the Eastern Plains after years studying and practicing medicine in Pueblo and Denver. 

She has 1,900 patients. To see them all, Casper works 10-hour days Monday-Thursday, then spends Friday on administrative tasks, including paying the clinic’s bills and her staff.

“There is such a lack of care and it’s hard to turn people away,” she said. “I’m maxed out.”

Casper said she has been trying for months to hire another medical provider for her office in Wiley, a tiny town northwest of Lamar with a population of about 430. She’s hoping for a nurse practitioner but she will take what she can get. 

“We are constantly looking for providers,” she said. “It’s very challenging to get people to understand this way of life and come to this little rural part of Colorado. They tend to come to this area and there is just not a lot to do. We surround a lot of our fun around our family. We create our own fun. They are used to urban life and shopping at their fingertips.” 

Her patients are complex, often with multiple risky conditions, including heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, obesity and pulmonary disease. And because of the lack of specialists, Casper helps them manage all of those illnesses. There is no doctor at her clinic.

“If people have to travel out of town and can’t afford to do so, they just don’t,” she said. 

Casper is grateful she can at least refer patients with cancer to the clinic in Lamar. “Obviously that’s a relief when they are facing such a challenging and scary diagnosis,” she said. “They can stay close to home.”

Chemo mixed under complex safety protocols, driven to Trinidad

Smaller, rural hospitals don’t often have an infusion center in part because of the complex process of mixing chemotherapy. 

In Lamar, the Prowers Medical Center has a specialized pharmacy with the required ventilation and safety protocols for hazardous materials, so it can mix chemotherapy for Hoyer’s patients. For Trinidad, however, the chemotherapy is mixed in Colorado Springs and driven to the Mt. San Rafael Hospital, a 25-bed hospital owned by the nonprofit Trinidad Area Health Association. The timing of the transport is imperative, since patients must receive the chemo within hours of its production. 

Behind the scenes, what patients don’t see is that Hoyer and his team are creating chemotherapy plans for their patients with the help of UCHealth’s electronic medical records system. Each patient’s dosage is tailored to them, and it depends on what other medications they are taking, their liver and kidney function, allergic reactions and a host of other information, said Dr. Wells Messersmith, chief medical officer for oncology services at UCHealth. 

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