More than 30 years ago, two physicians in residence training at a hospital in Kansas met over a shared passion for small town family medicine. 

One of them, a Powell native, convinced the other, from Oklahoma, to give Powell a try. To this day, both Dr. Kelly Christensen and Dr. Mike Bohlman are still family practitioners at Powell Valley Healthcare. 

Last week, the hospital celebrated Bohlman’s three decades at the hospital — Christensen will get a similar celebration later this year. 

“It's kind of unique to have both me and Kelly stay that long … because people don't do that anymore,” Bohlman said. “It’s like the old time small town doctors, you don't really see that much. So, I think that's kind of unique. You know, most doctors these days, coming out of school, it's rare for them to stay probably in the same place longer than three to five years, especially early in their career.”

It started at a residency program in Wichita for medical students wanting to do small town family medicine. 

Bohlman, who grew up in small-town Oklahoma, was inspired to the profession by his grandfather and an uncle who both went into the field of medicine. He even has a desk and other items that were once in his grandfather’s practice. 

“I wanted to do old fashioned family medicine, like go to a small town and deliver babies and do C sections, do procedures, take care of sick people in the hospital,” he said. 

Christensen looked to his late father, Dr. Ray Christensen, also a family practice doctor in Powell, as his inspiration. 

“I decided in second grade I wanted to be a doctor,” he said, noting that his father made the same decision after seeing his dog run over by a car. 

And, Christensen said, he wanted to be the kind of family doctor who could do everything, which is why he wound up in Wichita a year after Bohlman. 

“We became friends at the residency, and I always wanted to live in the Rocky Mountain West,” Bohlman said.

He recalled Christensen saying, ‘Well, my hometown is looking for a doctor, and even before I'm done.’ “And he said, ‘Go check it out and see what you think.’”

So Bohlman did just that, liked what he saw and wound up taking the job. 

A year later Christensen joined him. Bohlman said Christensen got him into big game hunting and fly fishing, and he was one of the first to see Christensen’s daughter, Brittany, when she was born. 

“They did everything back then,” Christensen said of the first small group of doctors he and Bohlman were a part of. “Delivering babies, C sections … We ran the ER. It was really fun.”

This was in an age before Powell began its hospitalist program and had specialized obstetricians for delivering babies. 

“We did everything at first, you know, we would admit our own patients to the hospital and take care of them, and then take ICU patients, if we had ICU, and just kind of did old fashioned medicine until the hospitalist thing started,” Bohlman said, adding “For the first almost 20 years, I did about everything.”

Both are OK with the slightly smaller workload these days, but their shared experience in Wichita and family histories led them to be able to do exactly what they wanted to do: To be old fashioned family doctors. 

And the family history is continuing. Christensen’s daughter Brittany is now a physician at Powell Valley Healthcare, like her father and grandfather before her, and Bohlman’s daughter Tristan is in medical school through the WWAMI program, which will bring her back to Wyoming.