Good Samaritan Annual Medical Staff Dinner
The Butterfly Pavilion made a festive setting for celebrating the ongoing contributions and unwavering dedication of our medical staff during the Good Samaritan annual dinner, held on Sept. 29.
Nomination Excerpts for the 2023 honorees
Physician of the Year: Stuart Weatherwax, MD
"Dr. Weatherwax is the entire package. He takes the time to sit down at the bedside, he is kind and courteous to his patients. He listens with full attention and provides explanations in detail regarding the plan of care to make the patient feel at ease. He is truly an exceptional physician, and is beloved by all of the nurses in the OB department.”
“Dr. Weatherwax is a very caring, thoughtful provider. He is respectful to the nurses and surgical techs on our team and treats everyone as a peer."
"Dr. Weatherwax is very patient and understanding with his patients and their families. He takes the time to sit with them and discuss their history and plan of care. He goes out of his way to follow up on patients and makes sure they are taken care of. Dr. Weatherwax is an asset to our unit, I don’t know what we would do without him.”
Inaugural Advance Practice Provider of the Year: Amy Kreeger, NP
“I can think of no one who is more deserving and more appropriate to receive the first GSMC APP of the year award than Amy Kreeger... She always has the patient in mind and does what is best and what is right. She sacrifices herself for her team and for her patients. Her communication skills are excellent, and she works with hospital medicine, urology, surgery, oncology, pulmonary/critical care, anesthesiology, and emergency medicine amongst many other departments in the hospital, always cheerful, happy, and collaborative to achieve the best outcomes and care for patients. Ask any one of a myriad of people in the hospital about Amy; I'm sure most of them know her and have great things to say about her. She goes so far as to sing to patients, comes up with rhymes to help them remember post-procedure instructions, draws detailed diagrams for them, and will sometimes spend hours on the phone or in the room with them to help them understand an issue or provide comfort toward the end of life.”
“Amy Kreeger is the most outstanding nurse practitioner I’ve had the pleasure to work with in my career. She has been completely dedicated to Good Samaritan and her patients from the day that Good Samaritan Hospital opened. She is highly skilled, empathetic, a great communicator, a mentor, and selfless. I cannot think of any one individual more deserving of this recognition. Quite simply, when she retires this year, she will be near impossible to replace.”
“Amy is the most compassionate, dedicated, hard-working, intelligent, and invaluable APP I have ever worked with. She is the face, heart, and soul of Interventional Radiology at Good Samaritan and is known and loved by all.”
A Blessing for Those Who Care About Strangers
During the event, Catherine Lazar, MD, shared “A Blessing for Those Who Care About Strangers” from the book of blessings The Lives We Actually Have by Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie.
What a waste.
That wasn’t going to get you a nicer apartment.
Bless those who give their health in service of patients who might not even deserve it.
What if that patient took unnecessary risks or was selfish or was never going to say thank you? You could have been protecting yourself or God forbid, sleeping through the night.
Bless those who listen to long, winding stories from lonely hearts.
Instead of rushing off to more interesting friends.
You picked boredom or patience instead of the warmth of being known.
That was your time and you’re never going to get it back.
Bless those who loved people who weren’t grateful.
The sick who endangered your health,
The deeply boring, who know you have things to do.
Loving people can be the most meaningful thing in the world, but it can also be hard and scary and boring and disgusting or sad or anxiety inducing with zero overtime.
Thank you to all those who make these bad investments.
Those acts of love that are not going to add up to success in the way that the world sees it.
You, my darling, are the definition of love.