A joyful, pioneering spirit

Becky Ilgen’s high school counselor advised her to go into teaching as a career. Her patients at the McCready Outpatient Center are glad she didn’t listen.

The Baby Boomer with boundless energy grew up on a 130-acre farm in central Pennsylvania, where as a youngster she helped with milking cows and baling hay.

The latter was not among her favorite chores, but she recalls the rural life with fondness. She loved to swing from the rafters of the barn, which also was home to a kids’ “clubhouse” requiring a pass card -- a penny flattened on a nearby rail line.

By the time Ilgen (pronounced Ill-jin) got to high school, science was her favorite subject. She loved organic chemistry, learning to make 99% pure aspirin and such, but she notes, “calculus almost got me.”

Becky confesses she “did really badly” in home economics, which apparently left an indelible imprint. Today, she freely acknowledges she doesn’t have an oven in her rustic home near Snow Hill she shares with her physician-husband, Robert Reilly. {She does own a microwave oven, however.}

When Becky graduated from high school in the mid-1970s, the culture was starting to change. Doctors still tended to be men and women were nurses. Her friends choose traditional career paths; farming, becoming secretaries, pursing a business degree.

Her late mother, Goldie, had been a World War II Army nurse based in England, where she ran a tuberculosis clinic.

So it was no stretch when Becky channeled her interest in science into becoming a medical technologist. Lab work was confining and offered little interaction with people.

She read an article about an evolving new approach to health care with roots on the battlefields of Vietnam and returned to college (at Penn State-Hershey) to get training as a physician's assistant

An internship at a Pocomoke physician’s office brought her to the Eastern Shore – and eventually to her job as PA to Dr. Michael Atkins at McCready.

Living on Delmarva appeals to her because of its bountiful seafood, lack of heavy snow and the slow familiarity of small-town life.

Her specialty is family medicine. Her oldest patient is 94; the youngest, 16.

With help from the U.S. Coast Guard in Crisfield, she travels to Smith Island with her nurse, Jill Rayfield, to see patients.
 
One family on the island in particular has touched her heart; a couple with five adopted Down syndrome children with whom she looks forward to sharing a laugh when she sees them.

Becky also makes house calls on the mainland, too, one of the area’s few health-care professionals who does so.

Patients who see her at the McCready Outpatient Center in Crisfield often encounter an atmosphere more like an elementary school classroom than a doctor’s office. Becky is big on seasonal décor and is known for her creative approach to brightening up her work area.

Becky relaxes by taking in a movie or dining out with her husband or five close female friends – “the Ya-yas,” as she affectionately calls them. The sextet meets in local restaurants sporting T-shirts and shorts and sneakers. Or they’ll don costumes for Halloween and add green food coloring to their beverages in celebration of St. Patrick’s Day.

She and her husband also like to get away to a cabin they own in the woods with no electricity - except when a generator is needed for water. They use oil lamps for light - no TV, no radio and definitely no oven. They spent a week there in 1997 only to learn Princess Diana had died and was buried when they returned to civilization.

At home, Becky can be found relaxing on her sofa with her cats draped around her, reading. Among her favorite authors: Chris Bohjalian, Jodi Picoult and John Grisham. She will re-read her favorites multiple times … and keeps them in a "mother-in-law” cottage on their property.  “I have at least one book in me, maybe a mystery,” she says.

Practicing medicine in one place for a long time, she said, is not unlike a murder mystery.

“You get to know the patients and the things that happen in families over the years. Sometimes, you get to know the endings,” she said.

“In primary care, it’s amazing how everything comes together – kids, moms, and grand moms… (you) get to know how things happen in a family, sometimes sort of a domino effect.”

Her farmhouse in Snow Hill reminds her of the farm where she grew up, but the animals in her life these days are eight black cats she rescued.
 
They're named for favorite authors, actors and films. To wit: Bogie, Cagney, Capers, Elmore, Fannie, Fargo, Garb and Dickens. The latter was found in Crisfield in the middle of a snowstorm and has known “the worst of times and best of times.”

Photos by Patty Hancock