Retiring Ottawa physician Dr. Manigold will miss family of patients

As Dr. David Manigold prepares to retire from a career in medicine, he finds himself mainly thinking about the personal bonds he’s made with patients.

And how much he’ll miss them.

Manigold is ending a more than 38-year career both due to a desire to spend more time with family as well as due to market pressures on hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic.

And while much has changed over those years, the passion he’s had for the field and for his patients has not diminished.

“The thing that is the hardest is to say goodbye to patients. Those that have become family members,” Manigold said with a touch of emotion in his voice.

Manigold was in grade school when he first pulled out an encyclopedia to learn about the human body.

His brother was preparing for open-heart surgery and he found himself fascinated by what his parents taught him when they came home as well as what he later learned in class with Grand Ridge science teacher Mr. Larson and at Ottawa High School.

“I really thought medicine and the human body were a pretty fascinating field to study,” Manigold recalled.

When Ottawa High School Health Career Club sponsor Ms. Strehl heard Ryburn Memorial Hospital was looking to hire an assistant for respiratory therapy treatments, she got word to Manigold.

“When they hired me I was 15, two months shy of 16,” Manigold said, noting he believed they were only hiring those 16 years of age or older.

“I think they noticed how tall I was and figured I must be legal,” he added with a laugh.

Every day after school he would put on a white coat and assist with setting up oxygen tanks and breathing machines. He’d continue his work between college semesters while gaining experience in just about every department from carrying bedpans to developing X-Ray films, cleaning and wrapping surgical instruments and even assisting in surgeries by handing off instruments.

“I was lucky enough that a lot of the physicians took me under their wing. It was a well-rounded experience,” Manigold said. “It made (my future in medicine) even more exciting. Just to be able to see it and participate in it. It made it even more clear that this is what I wanted to do.”

He graduated from the University of Illinois with the first year in Chicago and the last three in Rockford, during which he met his wife Maribeth Manigold. Afterward, he got a residency in internal medicine in Grand Rapids, Mich. before returning to work at the Ottawa Medical Center with the help of Dr. Don Morehead.

Manigold said he was always a “small-town kid” and had a longing to return to the area to be with friends and family.

“It was probably a great decision, I got a lot of patients that were classmates or friends of family. It made for a great practice building to come back home and a lot of patients like to have a doctor who they feel is part of their community,” Manigold said.

And Manigold has certainly done that and plans to continue doing so through his work on the Board of Police and Fire Commissioners, as volunteer coordinator of Friends of the Dayton Bluffs, president of Ottawa Concerts Association and prior work as the team physician for the Ottawa High School football team for 20 years, medical director for Ottawa Pavilion for 25 years and president of the Ottawa Medical Center for seven years.

Over the years, Manigold has seen a lot of change in the industry and has participated in a lot of firsts as well. He recalls being one of the first physicians in the area to have a computer at his desk to research medical conditions online along with being the first in the county to use the clot-dissolving enzyme Streptokinase on a patient with an acute heart attack.

He also used to work a lot more nights and weekends as physicians used to cover the emergency room themselves. Hospitals would hire emergency physicians that eliminated night time calls for Manigold and made for quicker response time for patients. Then in the past decade hospitals began to bring on hospitalists who remain in hospitals 24 hours a day, seven days a week on different shifts, which reduced the hospital visits Manigold would make to see patients.

That changed the game a little bit for Manigold and shifted the usual family physician responsibilities as it separated care among physicians and reduced the amount of connection Manigold had with his patients.

Manigold said it made for an easier lifestyle as it required less hospital visits and more undisturbed nights.

“I kind of miss the old days though,” Manigold said. “There was a certain continuity before, I knew everything that happened to a person. The division of labor went from one-stop shopping to different kinds of shops.”

And his business has changed even more recently during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has reduced the number of patients he would see a day from 18 to roughly four to six all over the telephone or through a computer screen.

Still, Manigold got to know his patients on a personal level and it's them he’ll miss the most following his retirement.

“There’s a real attachment there. And it is kind of a loss for people that I’ve taken care of for over 35 years and for both of us it's a certain loss,” he added.

He expects to spend more time with his family and three grandchildren as well as continue supporting the community in his current roles.