Starr Strong took a meandering path to health care.
Raised in Connecticut, she studied eastern religion at Beloit College in Wisconsin and went on to travel in India and Nepal and work a variety of jobs, including for a childhood lead prevention program in Massachusetts and counseling troubled teens.
Despite a complete lack of experience in medicine, as a white person traveling in India and Nepal she was often called upon by villagers to help with illness, she said. “They bring you their wounds. They bring you their sickness. I found that I loved it.”
Duke University had started the first physician assistant program following the Vietnam War for returning medics looking to put their skills to work, Strong recalled. Wake Forest University in North Carolina was one of the schools to follow. Strong entered physician assistant school at Wake Forest in 1979.
She came to Vermont in 1981 while in physician assistant school to do what the industry calls a clinical rotation – like an internship – with local ob/gyn Dr. Thurmond Knight and midwife Karen O’Dato. It was not her first experience in Vermont, however.
Strong’s family came from Brookfield. As a child they would visit the family homestead several times a year. Strong recalls her mother telling at her the end of one trip when she was 5 or 6 that is time to go home. “But I am home” was Strong’s reply.
Strong is the sixth generation to own that Brookfield property, where she still lives.
Strong went to work for Planned Parenthood for a dozen years. She worked mostly in Barre doing gynecological exams and talking about birth control.
In early 1993, Strong became Gifford’s first physician assistant and the first female health care provider at the Chelsea Health Center. Along with Dr. George Terwilliger, the duo formed a mentor-mentee relationship and a strong friendship. What she remembers most was that he would ask her thoughts on a subject.
“He gave me confidence,” she said. “I had so much respect for him that him asking me what I thought was enormous.”
Soon Strong was working at other Gifford health centers, including in Bethel, at the student health center at Vermont Technical College, in Randolph and recently in Berlin. Chelsea, however, has been a constant.
Strong found a home at the Chelsea Health Center.
“Chelsea’s an old time family community and people are fiercely independent and have a lot of pride. If they don’t have anything, it doesn’t matter. It’s down to earth,” Strong said.
Strong is 62, struggles with pain caused to arthritis in her spine and is slowing down. “I don’t have that vitality anymore,” she said.
Family medicine providers Dr. Amanda Hepler and physician assistant Rebecca Savidge have joined the Chelsea Health Center. Dr. Hepler comes from Maine and has a passion for rural medicine and Savidge is a Chelsea native. They’re skilled and compassionate and plan on staying for a very long time.