Medical Services in Nashville/Brown County

by Lonnie Ayers March 5, 2021

Brown County Souvenir Blog

If you are visiting Brown County or Nashville, or want to come here but are concerned about your health issues or disabilities and want to assure yourself that everything you use or need at home, can be found here in Brown County, have no fears. We provide excellent health services now, but in the far past things were very different.

In the olden days of Brown County, if you were injured and needed care, or had a heart attack or fell on a sidewalk and broke your arm or leg,

chances were good that any care you received would have been made by the one funeral home located in Brown County, right here in Nashville.

There was no ambulance service and no emergency medical personnel, and it might have meant much more to the hearse from the funeral home for you to die as it might have meant for you to be taken to a hospital in a nearby city for treatment. Brown County still has NO hospitals or trauma centers yet today, but it has progressed far along the line into getting better health service.

Several years ago a young woman became an EMT and worked in an office in Nashville where it was possible to leave her office and go down the street and help someone with her skills.

As she was kneeling over an older man one day after having taken his vital signs and talked him down a bit, this sort of sloppy, bearded guy wearing an old billed cap stopped by her, knelt down and asked about the man’s vitals. She started to tell this man then thought better of doing that. Finally deciding what to answer, she asked this stranger, “Who are you and why are you interrupting me”? she asked him.

With a kind of smile on his face he introduced himself. “I am a doctor and I am here to help you. I know you don’t know me yet but I am a new doctor in town,” he responded.

Kind of red-faced at her faux pas, she allowed the new doctor to assess her patient. He concluded she was doing the right thing and advised her to call an ambulance.

This young woman was able to help not only this one patient, but discovered another man who was having chest pains was actually having a real heart attack. The woman is very short and found that the man was camping at the local KOA Kampground inside a camper with the bed portion up over the cab of the truck. She had to step up on a chair, then onto the kitchen stove, and then pull herself up into the bed over the cab where her patient lay sweating and moaning. She assessed him and told him he was having a heart attack, and asked others in the camper with her for a back board and some straps. After securing the man to the backboard she then asked for 4 tall men to help her get him down off the bed and into the ambulance for a trip to a hospital to the east of Brown County. A few days later she received a letter from this same man, who lived in Michigan, and was just recovering from having open heart surgery, thanking her for being knowledgeable enough to recognize his symptoms for what they really were.

This same woman, along with three prominent businessmen in Nashville, spent about 4 or 5 years trying to tempt either the Bloomington or Columbus Hospital to set up a small trauma center here for just these kinds of cases so they could get prompt care prior to being moved to the hospitals. This group failed in their efforts but when the local YMCA was built a few years later, both these hospitals placed an office and treatment center just outside town in Salt Creek Park, so perhaps this group of hopeful, caring citizens did not fail after all.

Now Brown County has a fairly large cadre of well-trained first responders, EMT’s, proper ambulance service to any hospital in a surrounding county. We have a separate home for our ambulances and space for the EMTs to rest right next to the jail on State Road 46 right after the Brown County Inn complex.

I fell in my home over a year ago during a really awful winter storm and ice was everywhere you stepped outside my home. First responders and EMTs and an ambulance were at my home within 20 minutes total. After taking me to the hospital for my injuries to be treated, one of those who had responded to my call for help had come back to my home while I was gone, shoveled the snow from my porch and steps and then had spread ice-melt all over the area so I would not fall again as I returned to my home.

So be assured if you come to visit us, there is sufficient facilities for you to obtain needed health care.