Student inspired to study medicine after rural surgeon heals his broken finger

Noah Lyndall feared life as he knew it was over at age 14 when he emerged from a pile of football players with a badly broken finger during a fumble recovery.

The injury happened in Kelseyville, a two-stoplight-town northeast of Sacramento, near Clear Lake, where sports is intertwined with teenagers’ identity. 

Doctors in farther-away Santa Rosa and Ukiah offered to repair the finger, but assured Lyndall he would never again play competitive sports. Then Lyndall came across a third physician, a rural orthopedic surgeon named William Bowen. This doctor not only fixed the bone — which allowed Lyndall to play college baseball — but became a major influence on his life and career.

Lyndall is among the 139 new medical students who will be inducted in the UC Davis School of Medicine on Saturday. The memorable event known as a white coat ceremony signals the start of medical school.

The ceremony, at the University Credit Union Center on the UC Davis campus in Davis, will be broadcast at 10 a.m. via the School of Medicine’s Facebook page.

Getting into UC Davis and landing a spot on the Rural PRIME academic pathway is a dream come true for Lyndall. He was a firefighter and emergency medical technician and wants to follow in the footsteps of Bowen.

“I’m very, very thankful because I know there’s plenty of qualified applicants who didn’t get the chance I got, and I’m excited about rural medicine,” Lyndall said. “I definitely want to work in a rural area. Growing up there, I definitely developed a passion, and have firsthand experience, on how the lack of care really affects people.”

Meeting Bowen sets future goals

Lyndall was raised in a tight-knit community of 5,000 people where everybody knows everybody, for better or worse, in a place that feels like “one giant family.”

But because it’s out of the way, Kelseyville sorely lacks medical services. “For at least eight years of my life, I didn’t have a primary care physician,” said Lyndall. “The ambulance was like the only health care in my town.”

When he broke his finger playing Pop Warner football, Lyndall was surprised to learn there was an orthopedic surgeon, Bowen, who traveled a wide stretch of land to staff three hospitals.

Lyndall heard about Bowen through a family friend. Bowen agreed to meet one evening at 8:30 p.m. to take X-rays and assess the right index finger. “It’s a pretty bad break,” Bowen said, explaining how the metacarpal bone was shattered into about 13 pieces. Bowen ordered Lyndall back the next morning to reconstruct what was left of the bone and fuse it with a metal knuckle bracket. 

Lyndall was impressed with Bowen, whom he described as receptive, humble, compassionate and hopeful.

“I turned to him and I said, ‘I want to be like you.’”

An early career as firefighter and EMT

Lyndall graduated from Kelseyville High School in 2016, among a class of 125 seniors. He entered Sonoma State University on a baseball scholarship where he played infield and spent time off the field studying for two majors: biology and kinesiology. “That was my only way to get prerequisites for med school,” he said.

After graduation he planned to take a gap year to do research, which typically improves the chances of getting into medical school. But there was a big problem: The coronavirus pandemic. Universities closed. Research opportunities dried up.

However, he found a school in the Bay Area that was enrolling students for emergency medical technician work — surely, he could ride around in an ambulance during the pandemic.

He was hired by the Lake County Fire Protection District. Not long after, the district trained him to become a firefighter.

Lyndall and his crew picked up sick patients across the county, dispensed Narcan nasal spray to revive drug users who overdosed on fentanyl and tended to lots and lots of car crashes in remote areas with no cell phone coverage. 

He would tell medical helicopters where to land. And on cloudy days when they couldn’t fly, he consoled accident victims as they took their last breath on the way to a distant emergency room.

“There’d be a huge delay in care,” Lyndall said. It’s not just in Lake County, but in much of rural California.

Once patients arrive at a rural hospital, Lyndall said, they are placed in emergency rooms that are severely understaffed. “There’s a lack of medical workers, a lack of accessibility,” he said.

‘That’s where he belongs’

Throughout his life, Lyndall has always heard great comments about UC Davis Medical Center, a hospital that receives trauma patients from Lake County. It’s also the hospital where his wife, Madison, is a trauma nurse.

So, when he was accepted into the UC Davis medical school last May, his community erupted in joy.

Including Bowen.

“I’m excited to see him on his way to doing what he’s always dreamed of doing,” said Bowen, who sees patients in Lake, Mendocino and Humboldt counties, as far as Fortuna on the North Coast.

“We are short of every kind of doctor in our area, especially primary care, but we’re also short of orthopedists,” Bowen said. “I’m 78 and there’s two of us covering three hospitals and we need more help. And I would take Noah at the drop of a hat to come and work for us.”

“I’m proud of him,” Bowen added. “It’s really nice to have Noah at Davis. That’s where he belongs.”

I’m 78 and there’s two of us covering three hospitals and we need more help. And I would take Noah at the drop of a hat to come and work for us.”—William Bowen, orthopedic surgeon