Dr. Bacon is a Family Physician who graduated from Loma Linda Medical School in 1984. He completed his residency in Family Practice at Hinsdale Hospital in Illinois before serving in Malawi, Africa for three years. He and his family moved to Colville in 1990, and he currently practices in Colville, Grand Coulee, and Ethiopia. In Grand Coulee, he teaches UW medical students that travel there for family medicine rotations. In Colville, he has started a non-profit urgent care clinic. And in Ethiopia, he is fulfilling his dream to build a medical school and teach students to become family physicians in their own country.
Dr. Bacon's Reflections on Music
I’ve written and created five cd’s of personal music, mostly a personal expression of joys, sorrows, triumphs and crushing blows that happen to all of us. It’s hard to know what to do with life when you don’t feel like you can put one foot in front of another and you’ve ground to a halt. Writing about life and expressing life’s pleasures and pain through music is a way I’ve found to process things and find a way through them. The music doesn’t fix everything, but it helps me find a way for the emotions to escape through the right side of my brain and down through my pen, all of my laughter and tears can find a way to express themselves. The first CD, “Bacon” is a collection of early works about life and relationships. The second, “Blue Sky Day” is about patients and their lives, but also about a particularly dark chapter of my life when my son was taken into custody, into prison specifically, and had for a time cut off all ties to his family. It broke our hearts and these songs helped me to walk through those dark days. The third, “Mary’s Boy” is a collection of spiritual songs meant to celebrate God and worship. The fourth, “Quietly The Night” was written when my first grandson was born, songs, lullabies and stories, some traditional and mostly personally written, to celebrate the lives of our grandchildren and children. The fifth, “Beautiful Life” is my personal favorite. Some lighthearted, others more serious about creating a beautiful and wonderful life in spite of chaos and pain. Every year, I am joined by some of my physician colleagues in singing for “The Doctors’ Concert” to raise funding and awareness for causes that matter, currently our project to eradicate homelessness called “Hope Street.” We sing some traditional and folk songs as well as a few of these personal songs to create a fun family night, interact with our community and educate ourselves about the dilemma of living without shelter. Write to me to find out more about this or any of our other projects- the Bacon Bike Hostel, Gambella Medical School in Ethiopia, the Pokot Turkana Peace Initiative, or other projects abroad or close to home.
Dr. Bacon's Story - About His Son
I do not
remember one thing that I ate that day.
I don’t recall if it was a Wednesday or a Monday. I could not tell you one patient encounter, what car I drove, one conversation. I only remember one solitary, stunning, life
altering detail of this one day, May 31, 2017.
My son was alive, and he was free. I wandered wearily
down my hallway at the end of that long nondescript day, plunked my bags down
on the tile floor and stopped to listen to messages on our answering
machine. One message, 30 seconds long. “Hey, Mom, Dad? Uh, I just got released, so, I guess I’m
coming home. I‘ll see you in a couple of
days. I love you, see you soon.” I stopped and
held onto whatever was within my reach.
The unexpected had happened. Our
son, incarcerated for 13 years, was being released, today, unceremoniously, without
notice. I felt a palpable weight lift
from my shoulders, one which I had not known I was carrying, but a weight that
every parent carries when his or her child is suffering. Parenting is a life sentence that you cannot
lay down. My life came
into focus, and I saw with clarity what I must do. I must unclutter my life so that I could
spend time with my son. I had missed him
so much, and he had suffered unspeakable things in the system, seen things and
experienced things that surely altered his perception of life, yet which he
could not share with us because he wanted to protect us from the pain of
knowing what he had suffered. I left the
message, knowing that my wife of 38 years would want to hear it for
herself. As she walked into the home, I
guided her to the machine. “There is
something you need to hear,” I smiled. I
pushed play and held her as she melted, quivering, into my arms. My wife is strong, but when it comes to her
children, she possesses a love that is deeper than life. I recalled
so much of the pain we had suffered with our son. Random, unfiltered memories of a boy growing
up beautifully. The night of the phone
call from the Montana State Police, announcing that he was incarcerated for
bank robbery at the age of 19. An involuntary
mental health admission for danger to others.
The kind, gentle child who on the Zomba plateau in Malawi, surrounded by
a dozen Malawian children, announced to us, “Mom these are my new friends who I
don’t know yet.” He was everyone’s
friend, the kindest, most thoughtful child one could imagine. Alternating trips to the maximum security
prison in Florence Colorado, the ADX, where the Somali pirates, the Unibomber,
mass murderers and lifers are held.
Along with our son. Days when I
could barely put one foot in front of another. There is a
place in the Atlantic Ocean unique in all of the oceans of the world. It is a place that sailors of old avoided,
where huge masses of seaweed hide whole colonies of marine life, where the wind
never blows, and the sea weighs down your ship from moving anywhere, a place
where you just sit, unable to sail forward or backward. It is called the Sargasso Sea. In my mind, I have spent many days there,
mourning my son, not sailing forward, going through the motions of existence,
but not living. Life has a way of
grinding to a halt when those you love are suffering. But then we
lived glorious days during the summer of 2017.
My wife and I took every opportunity to join our son in the shell of a
house we bought for him in Spokane. It
was what he had asked for, a place to work on, to live in, to make beautiful, a
symbol I suppose of his own life being rebuilt from the ashes. There is a picture in my mind of my son
standing on a step stool, hanging a piece of sheetrock in his dining room, and
it brings a smile to my face every time.
There I am, looking up at this simple, every day event, smiling,
completely at peace in the moment, knowing my son was free. I wish I
could tell you that his freedom lasted, but that is not the case. After 70 days, four US Marshalls showed up at
this probation appointment and announced that they would be taking him back
into custody. He had been to every
appointment, been clean and sober, stayed out of trouble, gotten his license
and gone to work every day. But it
wasn’t enough. He was being taken back
into custody because of something that happened while still incarcerated in
October of 2016 which had never been dealt with while he was in. Instead, the officials, bless them, had
waited until he tasted freedom, was putting his life together and doing well,
and then they decided it was time to punish him again for something like what
happens on a Saturday night outside a bar in every state in our nation. Though the
judge, probation officer, court appointed attorney and defense lawyer all
agreed that he should be released on bail pending trial, the prosecuting
attorney had the power to extradite him to California and keep him incarcerated
until the trial, and that is what he did.
Who knew they had such power, but they do. His case was assigned to a judge who loves to
punish, and at his trial, any mention by his lawyer of what he was doing, how well
he was doing, the way he was putting his life together, whether he had a job
and was going to appointments was nixed by the judge. His defense for mental duress, coercion, etc.
was gutted. The jury was not allowed to
hear anything that could have been construed as a reason to consider why he
felt that he had no choice but to do what he did. It’s hard to see the criminal justice system
eviscerated like that. It’s hard to
watch your son gutted in front of the jury like a sheep without any means of
defense. We grew up believing that when
you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth,
that’s what you are able to speak. Not
so. The judge can shut you down and you
cannot speak anything except what he allows you to say. I grew up thinking the jury members were to
consider the evidence, all of it, and come to a conclusion based on the merits
of the case. Not so. The jury hears only what the judge allows them
to hear. The truth, whole truth and
nothing but the truth be damned. So we exist,
his mother and I, with the sorrow of knowing that our son should be free, but
he is not, that nothing good can come of further incarceration, though there
was a time when we believed it was necessary.
He wasn’t safe with the rest of us.
That is not the case now. Our son
needs to be free. There is a silent
sorrow between us, a bond that is unspeakable but remains in the room with each
conversation, bonds of enslavement that we share. We do not speak much about it, because, well,
life goes on and we must live it, for the sake of our son’s sanity if nothing
else. And there are other children and
grandchildren, and their lives deserve us as well. But the thinly hidden sadness that I see in
her eyes and that awakens me at night to hear her deeply sighing is a silent
pain that afflicts her every moment.
We do not
know if we will see our son free again, though we pray daily for his release,
for justice. We work for prison reform,
though we are in the minority in doing so, and it is politically unpopular for
any politician to speak about anything less than swift and merciless punishment
of the offenders. We have no idea
whether our solitary voices will change anything. But here is what we hold on to: There were 70 glorious days when our son was
free. We remember. But whether our son is free again while we
live, or whether he remains behind bars forever, either way, we serve a life sentence
of our own, a sentence that we both embrace and suffer. We are always Mom and Dad. We are family. We’re not going anywhere. We will be his link to sanity, to a world
worth hoping for. Wherever they move him
(and as I write this, he is as far from us as he could be) we will come to
him. We will be the ones who he calls, those
who write to him, we will believe in his worth and his humanity. On the day he is released from prison, we
will be there. Until then, I will work
on his house in Spokane, a quiet reminder that we believe in him, and that some
day he will be free.
About Dr. Bacon - Career Path and Bio
I was born and raised in rural northeastern Minnesota near the north shore of Lake Superior, where I gained an appreciation for rural life. My folks were poor, but we had our own place. Dad’s version of the American dream was to have his own business, in this case, a car dealership where his boys worked from an early age. The gifts my parents gave me were an appreciation for education and hard work. Both of those gifts have lasted a lifetime. I was the first in my extended family to complete college, the first to attend professional school. I attended medical school in southern California and family medicine residency near Chicago. In 1987, upon completion of residency, I moved with my family to serve in Malawi, Africa for three years. That was one other gift from my childhood. A desire to serve people for part of my career who could never pay me back. I had so many experiences in Africa which have influenced me for the rest of my career. In 1990 I took a position with Northeast Washington Medical Group in Colville, Washington, but I could never completely walk away from my patients in Malawi and what that experience taught me. I continued to look for opportunities to effect change for healthcare internationally, and to look for health disparities which need to be addressed here in the U.S. I was medical director for my group in Colville for 10 years, ER director for 3, board member for 15 years, finance director for 12 years, and I’ve taught rural family doctors at the family medicine rural training track in Colville, the first of its kind in the nation. I’ve worked in Kenya, Chuuk Islands, Guatemala, Peru, Zambia, Rwanda, the horn of Africa, and elsewhere, more recently teaching family medicine and developing a medical school in western Ethiopia near the South Sudan border. In 2017, my son was released from prison after 11 years. I decided to unclutter my life so that I could spend more time with family and help him transition out of prison life. Unfortunately, 70 days after being released, he was taken back in, though he was doing great on the outside. It’s a long story, but suffice it to say that by then I had already taken a job working in Grand Coulee, Washington one week each month, and I recently opened a direct primary care clinic and urgent care clinic in Colville. Additionally, my wife and I opened the Bacon Bike Hostel for people traveling across the country in bicycles; the Colville Oxford House for clean and sober living; started Tri-County Community Health Fund a 501c3 not for profit to support health disparities we have identified in the community; hold two community fundraisers each year, “Music on the Menu” to support homelessness locally and the Gambella Medical School in Ethiopia, and “The Doctors’ Concert” to support TCCHF; started Hope Street, a project to end homelessness in northeast Washington; initiated medically assisted treatment in our local jail for opiate dependency; and opened the Hope Street Rest Stop for people experiencing homelessness. My wife Shelley and I continue to live in Colville, Washington. We have four children and six grandchildren.