A Medicine Warrior: Dr. David Baines

TC:  David, why don't you start off by giving us a little of your background and how you got into medicine.

DB:  I'm part Tlingit and part Tsimshian from Southeast Alaska. Metlakatla is where I grew up, a little village on an island near Ketchikan, Alaska. I was born in Sitka, Alaska, and I grew up mostly on the reservation, although we had some times where we were down on the lower 48 during my school years, but pretty much Metlakatla was my home. And after high school, I got a job there working in the saw mill, had no intention of going to college, originally had wanted to go into the Marines, but it was at the tail-end of the Vietnam War so they weren't really hiring at that point, since they were kind of demobilizing. And the Navy or the Marines is kind of a tradition in our family, and that's kind of been the long-standing, we had a few in the Army during World War II, but for the most part most of us went into the Navy or the Marines.

TC:  When did you leave and go to college?

DB:  Well, I got hurt in that saw mill. I got my legs crushed and got shot 63 feet when the main compressor blew, and so that was my introduction to medicine. I had got flown in a Coast Guard helicopter to Ketchikan and then fork-lifted into the back of a Boeing 727, and then taken down to Swedish (Medical Center) here in Seattle. Spent a couple weeks there, lost like 20 pounds, and had a couple surgeries. Then, pretty much there wasn't any orthopedic care in southeast Alaska. I had two casts and was in a wheel chair, so my mom and dad had an on-again, off-again kind of deal going, so I went and stayed with my mom down in Arizona. And she was going to a little community college and I pretty quickly tired of the daytime soaps and stuff like that so she didn't mind pushing me around in a wheel chair some and getting me to the school. I just tried to take a few classes that were at the same time she was going. And you know it was stimulating; it wasn't very hard.