Nurse Practitioner joins Garfield Co. Hospital District

POMEROY–Garfield County Hospital District would like to introduce the newest member to its medical team, Marybella Dodson, ARNP.

She was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Seattle. During her teens, Marybella, "Bella" began working in the Judson Park Retirement Home in the facility's restaurant as a dining-room server. Her mother was also employed there as a housekeeper in the Alzheimer's unit. Bella would often go and visit her and mingle with the residents. At age 15, she began working in the nursing home side of this facility, where her love of taking care of people began.

Her academic ambitions started early on as she comes from a long line of family members who pursued academic careers, such as an uncle who has been nominated for the Noble Peace Prize and several relatives that are authors, professors, and scholars.

During her high school career, she started taking college courses at Highline Community College, in Des Moines, Wash., through Running Start. Originally, she was taking law courses but eventually migrated into the nursing medical profession.

For two years she attended Northwest University, a private Christian school in the Seattle area, taking nursing classes before she transferred to Walla Walla Community College in Clarkston where she earned her nursing degree. Bella began working immediately as a registered nurse at Saint Joseph Regional Medical Center (SJRMC) in the Medical/Surgical Unit for one year. She continued her education and later graduated from LCSC with her BSN.

Bella became employed as a Plastic Surgical Nurse for Ozeran Plastic and Reconstruction Surgery Clinic in Lewiston, Idaho. "I really enjoyed working in the field of plastics and appreciated Dr. Ozeran's style of teaching," said Bella. At one point she considered becoming a nurse practitioner in this specialty but later finalized on rural medicine.

At the height of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, she accepted numerous three-month COVID deployments, serving at Queen's Medical Hospital Level I Trauma Center in Honolulu, Hi., and as an Acute Medical and Crisis Intervention Nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Long Island, N.Y. This was an intensive experience and at that time, a documentary, "First Wave," was filmed at this very institution interviewing several of her co-workers. Through these deployments she earned enough money to continue her education and was accepted into the Master's Nursing Program to pursue her Family Nurse Practitioner Degree and ultimately graduated in August, 2021.

Bella has a unique perspective on the challenges of nursing in today's society. "The nursing culture can be very task-oriented, but I believe we have a voice with great ideas, and I want to foster a nursing community of encouraging one another, lifting, and building each other up," she said. "As a nurse practitioner, people come to rely on your leadership, and I get to be an example for people that they too, can lead and achieve difficult things."

She sums up the message she would like to convey by stating, "Socially I want to change the medical culture and create an environment where men and women thrive and their opinions matter. We are all in this together. Every person has a job, and we can't do it without each other."

Bella does not believe in the "conveyor belt" approach of practicing medicine and caring for patients by following a standard algorithm of rules driven by the medical and pharmaceutical industry. Instead, she strongly believes in individualizing each visit by "taking our time with patients, talking to them, and listening to their concerns. If we don't look at the whole person, we miss out on so much."

Bella will begin seeing patients after Labor Day on Tuesday, September 6, 2022, at the Pomeroy Medical Clinic and is excited to be a part of the Pomeroy community.

In her spare time, she and her family love to spend time together enjoying a variety of outdoor activities such as camping, skiing, and boating.

Please welcome Bella to the Pomeroy Medical Clinic and the community.