Firefighter Clemons Mitchel is doctor in training
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April 12, 2023
Stephanie Banaszak
SERVICE IS HIS CALLING – For Clemons Mitchel, graduating from medical school and working at the La Conner Retirement Inn is not helping enough, so he volunteers with the La Conner Fire Department, where this photo was taken.
As of Wednesday, March 29 at just before noon the man known as Clemons Mitchel does not go by "doctor." The fact that makes this detail notable is that if he wanted to, he could.
Clemons Mitchel, raised in Woodinville, departed in 2015 to Krakow, Poland, where for six years he studied medicine, funded by American scholarships at Jagiellonian University. In the course of that time his parents moved to La Conner.
When Clemons Mitchel graduated and returned from school in June, 2021 he found himself moving here too. That same month he took up work at the La Conner Retirement Inn, where he held the most remarkable part-time schedule since the definition of the term: times eighty hours per week. In his words he doesn't do well with free time.
In December of the same year Clemons Mitchel joined the La Conner Fire Department. Since then his job has been responding to calls, the large majority of which are medical in nature. The work, he says, is humbling.
Clemons Mitchel's next stage of life is set to play out in Oklahoma City. There he will stay the duration of a three-year medical residency at the University of Oklahoma, which begins in July and for which he will move in June. He says he will remain at the fire department until then.
As perfectly as it could have, his interview ended with an emergency call. The best of luck to Clemons Mitchel, for whom right now all the firemen are knocking on wood. Perhaps after three more years he will finally be going by "doctor."
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