In January 2011, I plan to leave my position at Orcas Medical Center after 35 years as a Physician Assistant and 10 years at the Orcas Island Medical Center. No human being could fail to be deeply moved by the valuable opportunity I’ve had to serve, to care, and to treat the wonderful people of this island community that I’ve come to love so well.

It fills me with an emotion I cannot express. It’s been a unique reward to be accepted into the lives and trust of so many honorable people here on Orcas.

In the past four years I’ve survived two bouts of cancer. While in the hospital and during my recovery I felt and heard the prayers of my family, friends and patients. I don’t posses the eloquence of diction or poetry to tell you the metaphor of this feeling, but it definitely happened, it is very real and continues today.

It changed my life, renewed my faith and gave definition to my belief. During that first year of surgery, chemotherapy and slow recovery I saw and tasted the other side of existence. How I managed during those months has become clear and lucid now. Friends would ask me if life was somehow made abnormal by my disease and I would say for someone who is sick, this is their new normal. I had no choice or option but to survive.

When I improved and healed, I was a better person, a better listener and a better practitioner.  Time has become sacred.

Every morning I wake up and no matter what the weather may be, or what pitch life throws, I am blessed to live another day.

Thank you for your trust. It is you, my patients, that I shall miss the most. You were my great teachers because the study of medicine is the study of life, of human resilience, joy, sadness, perseverance, and survival.

Everyday and every patient is a new lesson, if you listen and look them in the eyes with openness.

“It is usually all in the history,” as Dr. William Osler once said.

Michael Bried

Orcas Island