If you’ve ever been to St. Charles’ Bend South Family Care clinic, chances are you’ve at least seen and maybe met Mark Welch, a patient service representative there for about eight years.
He’s hard to miss, in part because he’s good at his job.
“When we’d been open about a year (clinic manager) Daggi Stafford came to me and said, ‘You know, you’re the face of this place. You keep smiling and doing what you’re doing out there,’” he said. “And that’s what I’ve done.”
He’s also a veteran of the United States Navy, where he served for 20 years on submarines patrolling the Pacific Ocean. He’d go weeks at a time without seeing sunshine, so when it came time to settle down, he wanted to go somewhere “where the seasons change and the people are friendly,” he said.
He found it in Central Oregon.
“One of the things I really enjoy here is that you’re close to all kinds of outdoor opportunities — from the beach and the mountains, fishing, skiing, hiking, the middle of the desert,” Welch said. “You’re four hours from anything!”
As you can probably tell, he’s young at heart, too. Which is why it took him about 10 years after leaving the military to realize he was a veteran.
“Veterans were those guys in World War II,” he joked. “They were recognizing veterans at an event and my wife poked me and told me to stand up. That’s when it finally hit me that I was a veteran.”
Welch says working in patient access at St. Charles is his second favorite job ever. At the top of that list: Machinist mate and engineering laboratory technician on Naval submarines, which essentially means he was the on-board nuclear chemist and radiation specialist. He also earned his “Dolphins” — a qualification pin given to those with the ability to operate every system on the ship.
“We’d go out for weeks or even months at a time, and if somebody got injured, everybody was able to step up and do anybody else’s job,” he said. “So when you went to sleep after your shift, you had full trust that the guy who was awake was going to save your life if needed.”
When his submarine would dock for a while, Welch had a chance to visit a number of different countries, where he would skip the bars and other entertainment offered near the port and head into the adjacent neighborhoods to learn about the local culture. Ever since he was a kid in a family that moved around a lot — 17 different schools from Kindergarten to 6th grade, he said — Welch has had a curious mind and an affinity for meeting new people.
“I came home from a new school one time and my mom said, ‘Did you make any new friends?’” he said. “I said, ‘Well, they’re the same old friends with new faces.’”
That’s an approach he carries through to his current job at the clinic.
“At the front desk, I figure when somebody's coming in that front door and they’re worried about their daughter or they’re low on gas or they have a bill to pay or whatever, it’s my job to get a smile on their face and make them feel better,” he said. “That way, when you get in front of the doctor, you can talk about why you’re here and not all those other problems you’ve got.”
He continued: “This is probably the first job where I love to get up in the morning because I know I'm coming to work to make a difference in somebody's day.”
With Veterans Day on the horizon, however, Welch is also thinking about the job he used to have — and that millions of others had, and still have, too.
“Veterans Day is the day I get to say thank you to my fellow veterans for being willing to write a check for these United States (and) for their sacrifice for their country, including being willing to give their life,” he said. “And to know that no matter what branch we all served in we always had each other's back. I was and am a part of the greatest military on our planet.”
