HJBR May/Jun 2022

DIALOGUE 10 MAY / JUN 2022 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE   Dianne Hartley, Editor Dr. Godbee, you wear several different hats these days. Please describe them. Dan C. Godbee, MD Basically, it’s three — well, in addition to being a husband and a father, my two most important ones. First, I think the one I do the most often is my EMS job, where I’m the medical director of East Baton Rouge Parish EMS. The second one I have is as a colonel in the National Guard and the doctor for the 20th Special Forces Group. That one is quite demanding because it takes a lot to do it nowadays. The tradi- tional one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer doesn’t exist in the National Guard anymore, and the special opera- tions community is even more in demand than anybody else. Hat number three is as a doctor working shifts in the emergency department. Editor What drove a special forces soldier and Georgia Tech mechanical engineer with a master’s degree to be a physician? Godbee I joined the Army after going to Georgia Tech, and I really wanted to be in the Army Special Forces. I graduated high school in 1973, right near the end of the Viet- nam war. When President Nixon not only stopped sending troops to Vietnam in Janu- ary of 1973, but actually started withdraw- ing troops fromVietnam in that timeframe, my mother and father breathed a sigh of relief because they were pretty sure that as soon as I graduated from high school, I was going straight in the military some- how. As the Vietnam war wound down, at the good advice of my parents and being the proper thing in life to do, I went to college. All through college, I was really interested in the military, but I did not go into anything like ROTC. Rather, I was focused on becom- ing an engineer, to get a degree and do well in engineering. But I was always interested in the military. What got me interested in theArmy Spe- cial Forces specifically was the fact that they have this very broad range of things they do. The guys on A-Teams are cross trained in other fields — the communications guy will also do explosives and demolition, and the medic will also have training in heavy and light weapons. So, it was the broad nature, the diversity of the guys, and then of course the special skills — military free-fall para- chuting, scuba diving as part of being an underwater demolition and reconnaissance guide, and then language training — were very appealing to me also. I graduated from college and enlisted in the Army to be a Special Forces engineer. I got on an A-Team in 5th Special Forces Group, which, back then, was at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and I spent a couple of years on anA-Team. I was really impressed by the medics. Their training is long and exten- sive. They have a really, really large scope of practice on what they can do in medicine — to include veterinary medicine, dentistry, general aspects and simple-level under- standing of all these aspects and fields of medicine — and that really appealed to me. So, I reenlisted as a sergeant to become a Special Forces medic and absolutely, darn near with Maslow’s hierarchy, self-actual- ized as a medic. It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me, even though at heart, I’ve always been an engineer and am a very left-brain, algorithmic-thinking, linear- thinking, modular kind of guy. But I got into medicine and was as happy as I could be. That kind of stayed as an avocation; I never really thought I was going to do it full-time. I got off active duty in the Army, stayed in the Army Reserve, and went back to Georgia Tech to go to graduate school to be an engineer because that was where I thought I was going to be going in life. Mechanical engineering, industrial engi- neering ... I liked both of them and thought they were interesting. Again, parallel path- way, I was still in the Army Reserve as a medic, so I always had that going for me. I got my degrees and got married. We had a child fairly quickly after we got married, so I was a full-time daddy for three years and did mostlyArmy Reserve stuff all that time. Again, working the parallel pathways, I was a volunteer paramedic. I worked a lit- tle part-time as a paramedic, mostly with the county I lived in in Georgia at the time. And for literally over a decade, people kept asking me, “Why don’t you go to medical school? You seem to really like this. Go to medical school.” I kept telling all these people telling me this, “No, I’m really an engineer. I like working as an engineer. This medicine thing is kind of a part-time, amateurish, avocation kind of thing. I’m not going to go to medical school.” Being a full-time father for three years after the birth of our first child, I had a lot of time to think about what the heck I was going to do in life. At the encouragement of my maternal grandmother who made the oral statement to me in the kitchen of our house, way back when, of, “Danny, the only thing you have consistently done in your adult life is medicine. You really ought to consider going to medical school.” How do you disagree with your grandma, right? So, at the inspiration of Grandma Godbee, with two master’s degrees in engi- neering and never even having had a col- lege-level biology class, I took prerequisites starting with freshman biology. Going one class every semester in night school, I got my prerequisites. I applied, got in, and went to medical school. I kind of always knew I’d do emergency medicine, which is a natural transition from being a paramedic into emergency medicine. And, there’s your extremely long answer to a very simple, straightforward question, which you’ll find is very typical of me.