ROCK SPRINGS — Dr. Jay Bachichi has seen a lot of places in the world.

Now, he joins a distinguished list of honorees as a member of the Rock Springs High School Hall of Fame Class of 2018.

The inductees will be recognized and honored beginning tomorrow afternoon with a meet-and-greet at the Bunning Freight Station starting at 4:15.

In association with Tanner Family Dentistry, SweetwaterNOW is profiling the Hall of Fame inductees throughout the week leading up to the ceremony on Saturday night.

The banquet takes place at the Sweetwater County Events Complex and tickets are available at Rock Springs High School, the Central Administration Building, and Bi-Rite Drug. Tickets are $30 for adults, $15 for children 5 to 12 years old.

 

Dr. Jay Bachicha (in his own words):

Looking back on my life, I can credit being born and raised in Rock Springs as one of the most important influences on everything that followed.

Growing up in the “Home of 56 Nationalities” made diversity a part of the fabric of my life from an early age and certainly well before the time that I came to understand my sexual orientation as a gay man.

That fact never entered into the equation of success that I achieved at RSHS.

I was president of our junior class—with the awesome responsibility of helping manage the Prom for the seniors, working to get our class float done on time, editor of the school newspaper, and active in speech and drama, thanks to encouragement from John Beach, Dave Gutierrez and the world’s best Spanish teacher, Glenn Birch–and lots of other fun stuff.

That fun, busy stuff—and my love of learning—lead me to Stanford University where I majored in Human Biology.

I’d gone there to be a lawyer, discovered I was good at science—not a known fact in high school as my poor showing in Chemistry and John Chapman, the teacher at the time, can testify—and since I was too much a coward to try an acting career, I decided to try medicine.

I was accepted to Boston University’s medical school, among others, to my great surprise and delight.

Life in Boston was amazing and I learned so much, not only about medicine but about me, the hardest part was trying to decide which branch of medicine I liked best.

In the end, obstetrics and gynecology, with its blend of medicine, surgery, and pretty much young healthy people, won out.

My internship at St Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in New York City and my residency back at Stanford convinced me that, clearly, this was the right choice: delivering a baby is a miracle like no other.

Medicine has given me a good living and a great calling. I’ve been a faculty member teaching medical students and residents at a couple of medical schools, my favorite being Northwestern University in Chicago.

I met my partner, Jim Fane, in Chicago and that was the luckiest night out I could have ever hoped for: this year we celebrate 7 years of marriage and even longer as a couple.

I’ve had the great good luck to be a test writer, editor and chair of various committees and a member of the Board of the National Board of Medical Examiners.

This is the group that writes the examinations every physician in the US and Canada must pass in order to become licensed to practice medicine.

My proudest work there, and still ongoing, is my part as a founding member of the Diversity and Inclusion Task Force.

This group tries to make sure that not only are the employees of the organization diverse in every way but also that the questions that are written and the people who write and edit them reflect the great variety of people in our country, people that future doctors will see as patients.

The Board tries to make sure that not only are doctors competent and safe but that they treat patients the way they’d like, taking into account everything from gender to language to country of origin to age and sexual orientation and whether or not they live in big cities like San Francisco, where I now live, or small towns like Rock Springs, where my heart lives and where my sister, Emily Lever, still does.

I’ve had the great fortune to share my medical skills and knowledge on medical missions to places like Ghana, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Philippines, Haiti after the earthquake and, most recently, Panama.

These trips keep me humble: I work with people who are in desperate need and my skill really makes a difference. This is what medicine is about!