By Marc Donadieu
Glacier City Gazette
A nurse practioner for 18 years in Girdwood, Kerry Dorius and her husband Chuck are moving to western Colorado soon.
Nurse Practitioner Kerry Dorius worked at the Girdwood Health Clinic for 18 years before recently retiring. In doing so, it has opened up new possibilities for her and her husband Chuck Dorius.
In an interview conducted outside The Grind, Kerry revealed she and her husband are moving to Colorado shortly to be around family and friends.
“We just got back from Colorado where we spent a few days,” Kerry said. “We are going to be moving to Colorado in the near future. We’ll be on the west slope, south of Grand Junction, north of Montrose in a town called Delta. It puts us right smack dab in the middle of family.”
When asked what she would miss about Alaska, she replied, “My friends and the scenery.”
Chuck’s family lives in Nebraska, and their son and grandchildren live in Minnesota. The main reason for the move is for Kerry to look after her mother who lives in Utah.
“My mother is getting elderly, and I want to be able to spend time with her,” Kerry said. “That’s the main reason to go down there. It really is about family. My mother lives by herself, and I’ve always been concerned about her as she gets older. I need to be able to be down there and check in a lot more frequently. I can’t do that here. That’s really the main impetus.”
Kerry hopes to work as a NP in primary care or maybe urgent care. Three days a week would be her ideal, and nowhere near as demanding as the clinic. She is eagerly looking forward to one of her favorite activities: gardening, at a location with plenty of sunshine and not as much rain.
“I’ll probably work a little bit. I really look forward to having a big garden where I can actually grow vegetables instead of growing world-class slugs. One of our friends there has an orchard. He has 150 peach trees. You can grow all of your food down there. So I’m looking forward to that. They have a lot of sunshine. We’ll still be able to go skiing.”
Kerry said Chuck has been handling her retirement well, and he likes having her around the house more.
“He likes the part where I cook,” she said. “He loves having me around. I’m getting a little bored, but I do like retirement. I think I’ll do it again. I’m going to work for a little while longer, but not nearly as hard as I worked here.”
Kerry is fond of cooking shrimp she and her husband have caught in Prince William Sound. She also has a soft spot for lasagna enchiladas.
“I’ve been cooking way too much. I need to stop the cooking thing. I’m not much of a cook, so the fact that I’m making anything is the story. It’s not anything that requires more than a few ingredients.”
Since retiring, she has had more time to go boating in Prince William Sound, particularly College Fjord and Deep Water Bay. Kerry and Chuck enjoy shrimping, fishing and sightseeing in the sound.
Kerry remembers the exact date she began working in Girdwood 18 years ago.
“I started June 24, 1998,” she said.“I worked for Providence for about a year and a half, and they closed the clinic. I took it over.”
Kerry devoted herself to the clinic and dealt with a lot of urgent care, which she likes to do. She also likes making sure patients have good preventive care. She found the unpredictable nature of her job appealing because she never knew what would come through the door on any given day.
“I had some really interesting cases. I saw a case of leprosy. How often do you see leprosy? I had a case of acromegaly, which is one in two million. It’s caused by a pituitary tumor. It’s growth hormone excess. It causes people to grow abnormally tall, abnormally large. They have strange features. I had all kinds of interesting cases. We had a buffalo goring. We had a reindeer attack. We had a fox bite. It was a fun clinic to run. Plus all of the ski injuries.”
Looking back on her 18-year career in the community, she really likes the people she got to work with and help when they needed it. She hopes to be remembered for the significant achievement of what she did for the clinic and the community.
“Getting the Community Health Center Grant was the culmination of my health goals at the clinic. I had been looking toward that for 11 years. We achieved our goal and got a Community Health Center Grant a year ago. They’re doing fine now, so it’s just time for me to move on. I think my legacy is the clinic. It just took a lot of persistence to make sure that happened.”
This article was sponsored in part by Kenai Mountains-Turnagain Arm National Heritage Area.
