12/31/2024
Aw shucks, you guys! ❤️ It is a PRIVILEGE to practice medicine and to be part of the Elk City Community. Thank you for welcoming and supporting my family. Bless you all!
Erin Sloan is a doctor because she almost died giving birth.
She was born in the shadow of the renowned Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, so maybe she was destined for medicine.
Her father worked for IBM, and the company transferred him to Longmont, Colorado, when Sloan was a toddler, so the family moved from Minnesota to the Mountain time zone.
She was a National Merit Scholar at Longmont High School, and the University of Oklahoma came calling.
"OU recruited me and gave me a nearly full-ride scholarship," Sloan said. "I really enjoyed the campus tour, and I wanted to set out on my own away from home."
As an undergraduate in Norman, Sloan had already gravitated toward allied health and considered going into either medicine or physical therapy. But she enjoyed history and reading, so she took some history classes each semester to offset all the pre-med science.
The closer she got to graduating, the more apprehensive she became about the additional time and money that medical school would require. And since she was close to a bachelor's degree in history, that's what she got.
She worked at Borders Books in Norman for a couple of years as she finished her first degree and enjoyed meeting interesting people, reading, and learning.
In fact, she enjoyed reading and learning so much, she pursued a master's degree in library and information science at OU.
During the two years she worked on the master's, she was a graduate assistant at the university's Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center, and she stayed on as an archivist after finishing the degree in 2005.
While working there, she wrote about former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and McAlester native Carl Albert for the "Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture." Ironically, this became important for an Elk City author.
Though she enjoyed history and working for the Carl Albert Center, she thought constantly about medical school, and having friends who'd gone on to become doctors made her think seriously about medicine. "But to quit my job, take on that debt, be older than other applicants? It seemed like that ship had sailed," Sloan said.
Then she got pregnant with her first child, Jack. And during his 2008 delivery, she almost died.
She had an amniotic fluid embolism. "It is rare and usually fatal," Sloan said.
The condition causes a woman to simultaneously hemorrhage massively and have blood clots.
"It took them several hours and 14 units of blood to stabilize me, and I was in the ICU for five days," she said.
The morning after Jack was born, she decided to attend medical school.
She started taking prerequisite classes and applied to the OU Medical School in late 2010, just months after delivering her second child, Zella.
She got in, and her children turned one and three during just her second week of medical studies.
A month after graduating, Sloan moved to Elk City and opened her practice in August of 2018.
She was recruited by Great Plains Regional Medical Center's Chief Executive Officer, Corey Lively. Though she didn't go to work for the hospital, she chose to move here and open a private practice because she liked what she saw on her first trip to town.
"My visit here was just awesome compared to everywhere else," Sloan said. "I met with Corey and saw the hospital, got a tour around town from Andrew Albert, and had dinner at Cole and Patsy Wootton's house. There were about four other families there, kids running around, people helping themselves in the fridge. It just felt natural, congenial, and homey."
She chose rural medicine because she wanted to connect to people. Practicing medicine in Elk City allows her to do that.
"Every single day I have an encounter with at least one person who is healed, either by medical care or just by being seen and heard," Sloan said.
Sloan enjoys the kind of reciprocal relationship with her small-town patients that she couldn't enjoy in a big city. She takes care of them, and they take care of her.
"They know and support my kids, shine my boots, sharpen my knives, send pictures and cards, and bring food," Sloan said.
In the summer of 2018, an Elk City author was writing his book "Cold War Oklahoma." One hot day he was playing basketball in his driveway with his kids when a stranger walked up, introduced herself, said that she was opening a medical practice in town, and she was moving in across the street.
The author realized four or five years later that the information he'd cited in the book about Carl Albert that came from the "Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture" was written by his neighbor before she was a doctor.
The friendly and personable historian-turned-physician is content in Elk City—where she knows her purpose.
GPRMC helped Sloan with start-up costs when she opened her practice in exchange for her promise to stay in town a certain number of years.
"I completed that obligation a while ago, but my kids and I just love it here and have no plans to go anywhere else," Sloan said.
Dr. Erin Sloan is a long way from the Mayo Clinic, but she's right where she's supposed to be.
