Dr. Arnie Vainio MD on health issues in Indian Country
By Arne Vainio MD The whole getting into medical school thing was not something I was aiming for. My parents owned the Good Luck Tavern in Sturgeon, Minnesota and my dad wasn’t a good businessman. He committed suicide with a gun when I was four years old. My mom kept the tavern going for a […]
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By Arne Vainio MD How long have I known you? Since I started at the clinic over seventeen years ago. From the first day you were a resource and you took on tasks for me that weren’t really even your responsibility. Insurance companies expect a doctor to stay on hold while they preauthorize a medicine […]
By Arne Vainio, MD I missed the print deadline for my last story. Something always happens around Christmas to make me appreciate the gifts we have and the things we do for each other and our interdependence. This year I didn’t have anything. The snow was coming down hard and it was the beginning of […]
By Arne Vainio MD “Has it really been sixteen years?” “It has.” She answered. “I still think about him every day.” She was 78 now and I could tell seeing me brought back a flood of memories. When he was dying, I saw them almost every week and I hadn’t seen her since his funeral. […]
By Arne Vainio MD I was a brand new physician on call and he had fallen off a barstool about a week earlier. Eventually he had trouble breathing and the ambulance took him to the Emergency Room. A chest x-ray, then a CT scan showed he had bled into the pleural space around his right […]
By Arne Vainio, MD I was looking for an old truck someone had told me about and I thought I had the right place. She slowly stepped out of the house into the hot summer sun. She was thin and pale and I didn’t recognize her until she spoke. “I heard you’re going to medical […]
By Arne Vainio, MD “I don’t have the friends I thought I had. My family doesn’t understand me. I was told I should only grieve for a year, but this was my son.” She’d been coming in to see me for almost a year before she volunteered that information. I should have asked her earlier […]
By Arne Vainio My Ojibwe grandfather was taken from his family when he was young and was put into a boarding school. I don’t have many details and he never wanted to talk about it. Ojibwe was his first language, but he didn’t speak it around his grandchildren as he didn’t want us to be […]
By Arne Vainio, MD Editor’s note: this article was originally published in 2016. We were at the graduation ceremony for the Harbor City International School in Duluth, Minnesota and the commencement address was by Gaelynn Lea Tressler. She is the winner of the 2016 National Public Radio Tiny Desk Concert series and she knows about and […]
By Arne Vainio, MD Seattle is a beautiful city and was a great place to do my residency. I spent 3 years at the Seattle Indian Health Board and Providence Hospital and have many stories from there. This is one of them. Harold lived alone with his dog, Albert. Albert was a big, happy, slobbery […]
By Arne Vainio, MD. Warren was dying and there was no changing course. His lung cancer had spread since he was in the hospital last time and his liver failure was worse. He tried to stay sober when he got out of the hospital and that lasted less than a month. He lived by himself […]
