A life well-lived.

Byline: Randi Bjornstad The Register-Guard

EDITOR'S NOTE: Dr. Allison Willeford agreed to let The Register-Guard document his decision to choose physician-assisted suicide. The ongoing series explores the state's one-of-a-kind law and how people come to terms with it.

It's the pipe that many people remember first when they think of Dr. Allison Willeford. And the listening.

Patient after patient, they say the same thing. He made you feel he had all the time in the world, just for you. He never seemed rushed. He sat there, pipe clamped between his teeth, while you told him your medical and personal problems.

"That pipe was one of his trademarks," longtime patient Lona York recalls. "In the old days, he used to smoke it - you'd never see that now, of course - but sometimes he just held it. He listened to everything you had to say, and then he'd say, `Well, let's check it out.' It was all very comfortable."

Norman Rockwell could have painted Willeford's life as a small-town doctor: a waiting room full of housewives, toddlers and loggers; late-night house calls with his big black medical bag; breakneck drives in a blue Chrysler New Yorker 15 miles through the countryside to the nearest hospital.

He mended his neighbors and friends, delivering their babies, holding their hands when they needed comforting, sitting with the loved ones of those who died.

Now they're rallying around the doctor most call Dr. A.B. or simply A.B. - short for his given names, Allison Byron.

Willeford, 79, has terminal cancer that started in his kidneys and has spread to his lungs. His doctors say he has less than six months to live.

He's obtained a lethal dose of a barbiturate under Oregon's physician-assisted suicide law that will end his life within minutes if he decides to take it.

He's also signed on as a plaintiff in the state's lawsuit against the federal government and U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who seek to block Oregon's doctors from prescribing federally controlled drugs to terminally ill patients for assisted suicide. The state won the first round in federal court, and Ashcroft appealed. A decision from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals could come any time.

"Very down-to-earth"

Willeford hung up his shingle in Molalla in the early 1950s and practiced family medicine there for 40 years before retiring 10 years ago.

"He was a grand guy, very down-to-earth and easy to be around," said York, who visited Willeford several weeks ago while in town from Arizona, where she and her husband, Lionel, retired four years ago.

During their 31 years in Molalla, Dr. A.B. did everything from "fixing a split toenail to major surgery for everyone in the York family," Lona York said. Willeford and the Yorks also shared a favorite hobby, spending many hours together ocean-fishing off the coast at Newport.

"He didn't act above other people, he just had more knowledge in some areas," she said. "From high-class people to old farmers, he could be just what everybody needed - he wore many hats, and he wore them all really well."

As news of Willeford's illness and his participation in Oregon's assisted-suicide movement has spread, he's heard from dozens of people around the country - former patients and associates - who want him to know the impact he had on their lives.

He finds their good will both exhilarating and humbling.

"This dying is so much fun, I just might have to do it a couple more times," he joked.

"Coming to see a friend"

Tom Sims of Eugene started to cry when he picked up the paper one day and saw a story about Willeford's illness. Sims started his career as a medical administrator in Willeford's clinic in 1958. "Our friendship wasn't just an employer-employee relationship, it was the kind that stays with you through the years even if you don't see each other for a long time," he said. "But when you do, it's just like it always was - nothing has changed."

Much has changed in the practice of medicine, though, the now-retired Sims said, and Willeford's way of doctoring represents "an era that will never be repeated."

"He not only treated the illness, he knew the whole person, the whole family - he was totally involved with all his patients," Sims said. "I think that probably added to a lot of stress in his life - and I'm sure his family suffered from it - but he was completely dedicated to these people. And it wasn't to be able to say, 'I did this,' but because he really cared about them. When they came to see him, they felt they were coming to see a friend."

Being a small-town doctor devoted to his profession and his patients did take its toll both on him and his family, and Willeford readily admits it.

"One of my biggest regrets is that I didn't spend more time with my children," he said.

Willeford's first wife - he's been married and divorced twice - agreed, but believes he did what he had to do at the time.

"In a rural community with only two or three doctors, they were just busy all the time," Eddie Ruth Willeford said. Her husband seemed especially popular, a fact she concedes she later resented.

"He was so down-to-earth and easy to talk to - that was just who he was; he liked people," she recalled. "I think I got a little jealous of how much time he spent at work, but (medicine was) so different in those years - a wife now probably wouldn't let her husband do that."

Although he didn't spend much time with the couple's five children - four sons and a daughter - she nonetheless considers him a good father.

"I knew the children needed to be with him more, and I tried to get him to take more time off, but it didn't really work," she said. "I worried when drugs became popular, but he said, 'As long as they bring their friends home to our house, they'll be OK,' and they were.

"They all looked up to him - it was always, 'Dad's home!' - kind of like Father Knows Best," she said.

15-hour days

Sims, who ran the clinic for about four years for Willeford and his partner, said both doctors routinely worked 15 hours a day and rarely took time off.

They went to the Silverton Hospital first thing in the morning to do rounds, then returned to Molalla midmorning to begin seeing patients, he said. That went on until at least 7 p.m., and they often returned to Silverton after that to check on hospitalized patients. On their way home, it wouldn't be unusual for the doctors to make a house call or two, Sims said.

"They worked six days a week; each of them was supposed to take a day off during the week, but it usually didn't happen," Sims said. "Saturday was just like any other day, and they had office hours from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Sunday, but usually ended up working until at least dinnertime. I know this schedule went on the entire time we were there and for at least 10 years after that."

Back then, family practice doctors didn't see patients and then send them off to specialists for additional treatment, he said. "Other than extremely serious head trauma, there wasn't much that they didn't take on themselves," he said.

Sometimes that even meant pressing their office employees into service. Sims' wife, Barbara, remembers his first week on the job.

"Tom came home wide-eyed one day, after a farmer came in to the office after his finger had been cut off in a piece of machinery," she said. "Dr. A.B. sent Tom out to the field to find the finger. He did, they sewed it back on, and it worked. Tom came home and said, 'What have I gotten into?' '

Another time, Tom Sims became an on-the-spot blood donor after a logger came in with a badly shattered leg.

Willeford took off for the Silverton Hospital to get ready for surgery, instructing Sims to ride along with the patient in the ambulance.

"When we got there, A.B. said they were short of blood and asked me, 'What type of blood do you have, Tom?' I told him, and he said, 'Good.' He hooked me up right there and took a pint for the patient."

Driving to Silverton

On a recent Friday, Willeford returned to visit the Silverton Hospital, perhaps for the last time. He traveled over Highway 213, a winding rural road he drove thousands of times over the course of his career.

But this time, he watched the countryside from the passenger seat of his burgundy Ford Explorer as his son, Tom, drove.

"I used to be able to take every curve on this road at 80 miles per hour if I had the road to myself," Willeford said with a sly grin. "I had Silverton cops chase me all over town. I would stop at the hospital, and they'd come in to the emergency room, just to make sure I really had an excuse."

Outings rarely take him farther these days than the downtown Molalla clinic where he receives medical attention instead of dispensing it, or to Wilsonville for dialysis treatment three times a week.

The trip to Silverton brought back memories as Tom Willeford pushed his father's wheelchair along renovated corridors and added wings, stopping before a wall of photographs of doctors currently practicing at the hospital.

"I do know some of these people, but most of them aren't familiar," the doctor said.

Elizabeth Bohnstedt, assistant to the hospital's executive officer, led Willeford into the administrative quarters.

"This is the old surgery from when you were here - the autoclave was here, the dressing room over there, and this was the operating room," she said. "Does this look familiar to you?"

Willeford shook his head. "I don't recognize a thing," he said.

He did remember one of his old post-surgical habits, though - whispering into the ears of his patients as they began to come out of the anesthetic.

"I used to whisper, 'Dr. Willeford is the best doctor in the world,' ' he said with a glint of mischief. "I thought it was a good idea to plant that in their heads."

Although impressed by most of the changes at the hospital, he took exception to one - a pinkish paint used for some of the hospital's exterior trim. "Elizabeth, tell me, who picked out the color out there?" he demanded. "It's not my favorite - I hope they'll repaint someday and choose a different color."

Cancer worsens

On the way back to Molalla, Willeford instructed his son to turn in at the Miller Cemetery - the burial place of many of the area's pioneers - and slowly drive through its shady grounds.

"I used to turn in here and park and sleep for about 20 minutes after I'd left the hospital in Silverton on the way back to Molalla to see patients," Willeford said. "There weren't any cell phones back then, so I'd get back to the clinic, and people would be saying, 'Where were you? We were trying to find you.' But the way we worked, we had to get a few minutes' sleep when we could."

He delivered an average of 115 babies a year at the Silverton Hospital, which contributed to constant sleep deprivation.

"Sometimes I'd deliver a baby and drive back to Molalla to the clinic, and when I'd get there they'd tell me there was another one on the way, so I'd get back in the car and head back to Silverton," Willeford said. "I never got enough sleep, but I learned how to fall asleep instantly.

"Those were the good old days - I sure wouldn't want to do them again."

Ironically, as his health deteriorates, the one good outcome has been more undisturbed sleep than he's ever had in his life.

As the cancer worsens, Willeford has tripled the dosage of the morphine tablets he takes twice a day, to 180 milligrams each time, and has talked to his doctor about upping it again. In between major doses, he takes quick hits of a liquid form of morphine to ease sudden sharp pains in his kidneys.

Thanks to the medication, he no longer experiences his lifelong habit of waking every hour or two all night.

He's become more frail, and a series of recent falls - one resulted in several stitches after he hit his head on a piece of furniture - has forced him to stop using a walker in favor of a wheelchair.

As long as the morphine continues to control his pain, Willeford said he probably won't consider ending his own life, either by forgoing dialysis or swallowing his deadly prescription.

He doesn't speculate on how much time he has left - "That's up to my god," he said - although son Tom, a registered nurse, fears it may be weeks, not months.

"But then, just as I think that, he seems to rally and become stronger and have some really good days," Tom Willeford said.

THE STORY SO FAR

July: Dr. Willeford gets a second doctor's opinion to meet legal requirements for assisted suicide.

August: He picks up the prescription for enough barbiturate to kill himself if the time comes.

Today: Former patients, colleagues rally around the terminally ill doctor.

CAPTION(S):

Tom Willeford helps his father out of his wheelchair and into his car for a drive to Silverton to visit the hospital where the doctor cared for patients during his career. Rapidly becoming more frail, the 79-year-old doctor started using a wheelchair in September. Paul Carter / The Register-Guard Weariness - and frequent pain - take their toll after an exhilarating day. Dr. Willeford has enjoyed dinner out, a ride through the country and a visit to the Silverton Hospital. Elizabeth Bohnstedt, an assistant to the administrator at Silverton Hospital, says her farewell to Dr. A.B. Willeford after taking him on a tour of the hospital where he practiced for 40 years.