Blythe Zeug began seeing patients this week as Sanford Tracy’s new family practitioner
Blythe Zeug is just a few days into her stay at Sanford Tracy and already feels comfortable. The tough part is, the longer she is here, the more she knows her comfort level could shift.
“A lot of people here have to care for their neighbors, their family members, and that is really, really challenging, especially in an emergency situation,” she said. “I’m able to stay more objective now … the hard part is, the longer you’re in these communities, the more people start to feel like family. It feels like you’re caring for your parents and your grandparents.”
Zeug works in the family practice clinic at Sanford and will also eventually be serving in the emergency room with in-patient work. Coming from a large city in Texas, she has grown to appreciate the small-town perspective she now has.
“In emergency medicine, you have to know a little bit about everything, because you might not see something for 10 years, and then you’ll see it three times in a row,” she said. “I think that’s the really amazing part about rural medicine … we have to have all of this knowledge and skill-set and have the ability to ask for help when we need it. We do see a lot of sick people, and we’re the front line to get them stabilized and to where they need to be.”
Zeug has clearly accepted and adapted to the small-town way of life. Her hometown of Sherman is about three times the size of Marshall.
“You could go the grocery store 100 times and not even see someone you recognize,” she said. “This is just a different world where you can drive down the street and know people by their car.”
Zeug lived around the Dallas area until she was 8 before the family moved to West Lafayette, IN, where he father earned his PhD at Purdue University. The summer before her eighth-grade year, the family packed again and moved even further north to Marshall after her father was hired as a professor at Southwest Minnesota State University.
“I gradually moved my way north,” Zeug said. “That’s what I always tell people. I always say that I’m from Minnesota now, because I’ve lived here longer than I did in Texas.”
Zeug, an accomplished swimmer most of her life, graduated from Marshall High School in 2015, then was recruited to swim at Minnesota State University, Moorhead, where her boyfriend at the time, Brent, moved to. The two were married after her freshman year.
“He was getting his associates in diesel technology and finished out his degree there, but he was getting homesick, so we moved back to Marshall,” she said. “I finished my biology degree at SMSU.”
Zeug’s original intention was to attend Physician’s Assistant school, but since the couple was committed to the area, that plan was replaced by a new one. Instead, she earned a nursing degree through a hybrid program at St. Scholastica. She did her clinicals in St. Cloud in a 16-month program to earn her second Bachelor’s Degree.
After spending a year in Marshall, Zeug was “cherry-picked” by an anesthesiologist and brought to Slayton, where she worked as a nurse until being hired at Sanford Tracy.
“I’m really familiar with working with critical access, working in a small-town community,” she said. “I felt like I knew more people in Slayton than I ever did in Marshall — I took care of lots of people from the community; you get to know people really well in that type of environment. I love rural medicine because we’re constantly challenged and encouraged to work to the highest level of our licensure.”
It’s been about 10 months since she graduated, Zeug spent some time learning what her resources are here and getting to know her colleagues. But she isn’t exactly a stranger to Sanford Tracy. She did some of her clinicals here, so she wasn’t completely disoriented upon arrival.
“That’s helped a lot in the transition,” she said. “I already knew some of the providers. Everyone’s been more than welcoming. In healthcare, there’s so much to worry about in general, so to not have to worry as much about personalities and fitting in has been really great.”
