Bill Henry was destined to be a doctor. All other ambitions faded, and he found himself associating with this profession above others when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. For young Bill, being a doctor conjured images of delivering babies and treating earaches. Instead, he saw more than he wanted to see.
“For the doctor it was a life of sorrow and defeat and frustration. No one told me that real doctors cried some nights when they went to bed,” Henry writes in the first chapter of his memoir, Pay You in Hay.
With healthcare and greed in the news lately, the re-release of Henry’s memoir by Methow Press is a timely look back at healthcare in a community that was even more rural than it is now. The updated edition has an introduction by Henry’s daughter, Cindy Button, who has been executive director and a paramedic in Aero-Methow, which Henry founded, since 1984. There is also a collection of photos, a new biographical sketch by Button, and an epilogue describing the current state of emergency services in Methow Valley.
Doc Henry finished the manuscript and was looking for a publisher before he passed away in 1998. His wife Ann carried on the mission and published the book in 1999. The memoir was one of the best-selling books in valley history and the profits were donated to Aero Methow. When Ann’s health took a turn for the worse, the family contacted Greg Wright, publisher of Methow Press, to turn the book into a fundraiser for Ann’s care. When Ann died in early 2023, the family decided to continue with a final edition of the book that pays homage not only to the man, but to his wife and the family they raised.
Henry was a doctor in the Methow Valley from 1960-1990. It was a time when rural doctors took their own x-ray films, fixed their own equipment, and ran their own laboratories. There were some things his medical school didn’t teach him, like how to treat a rattlesnake bite. Henry, who completed medical school at the University of Pittsburgh, recounts how he and two visiting physicians, who completed medical schools in Chicago, frantically read printouts on rattlesnake bites as a patient lay on the examining table convinced he was going to die. Rattlesnake bites are not a problem faced in big cities, so they never learned about them. The patient survived and Henry went on to train other doctors in the state on how to treat snake bites.
Henry alludes to, but doesn’t reveal, the huge personal cost of being, for a time, Methow Valley’s only resident practicing physician. He more than once calls his profession his “mistress,” especially when he had to make house calls at odd hours, but he willingly succumbs to it.
“The Henry family didn’t take vacations because there would be no one there when your patients are hurting or injured,” Henry writes. “You take a bit of time on Wednesday afternoon to go for a walk in the hills behind the house (provided you are not in bed trying to catch up on lost sleep.)”
He notes that after six years, the family was about to embark on their first vacation when a woman brought her child with a wrist injury. Henry explained the situation with airplane schedules and motel reservations and declined to see her. She and her family never returned to him.
While hard on his family, Henry acknowledges the opportunity he got to know his patients during house calls in a way he never would have in his office exclusively. He witnessed the devastating effects of alcoholism in good people, the dangerous behind-the-scenes work performed by loggers, the treks in the middle of the night to reach hunting accident victims with only a doctor bag and a make-shift wheelbarrow. Doc Henry saw the guts of this community- both the good and bad.
For privacy, all the names have been changed. One wishes Henry would write more about the area at the time, how he started Aero-Methow, the death of one of his daughters and his own accident, which is only alluded to, but he makes his goal clear from the outset- the book is about his patients. Even in his retirement, he couldn’t let them go.
The new edition of Pay You in Hay, by Dr. William Henry, can be found at Valley Goods and Ulrich’s Pharmacy in Twisp, Trail’s End Bookstore in Winthrop, and through the usual booksellers.
A community reception for the republication of Pay You in Hay will be hosted by Sun Mountain Lodge on Thursday, January 16, at 6:30 PM. Cindy Button, John Bonica, and publisher Greg Wright will make tributes. Longtime family friend Linda Mendro will provide entertainment on the piano and light refreshments will be provided. The event is open to the public and all are encouraged to attend.
