Dr. Robert Hoyer is a Colorado Springs-based oncologist and hematologist with UC Health. Photo by Mike Sweeney, Special to The Colorado Sun
Dr. Robert Hoyer doesn’t bother buying groceries or using the kitchenette in the little room at the Holiday Inn Express where he lives for four days every month. By the time he and his staff finish 12-hour days at the clinic, they usually head for enchiladas at La Mission Villanueva or steaks at Tavern 1301. They’ve settled into routine by now in this small town on the southeastern Colorado plains, where they travel once a month to see patients with cancer who otherwise would have to drive two hours to Pueblo or three hours to Colorado Springs for doctor appointments.
Medical assistant Creston Potts’ mom takes care of her cat, Purdy, while she’s taking care of patients on the road, away from her regular job at UCHealth Memorial Central in Colorado Springs. She’s been working with Hoyer for 10 years now. Nurse practitioner Rose Gates, who retired and then returned for this, is exhausted by the end of the week but knows she would feel “restless” if she hadn’t. She walked through the Lamar clinic while eating a baked potato from the Prowers Medical Center cafeteria because she doesn’t have time to sit down. And Hoyer, known as the “outreach oncologist,” listens to audio books or logs into virtual meetings as he treks 400 miles each month on highways and two-lane roads across rural Colorado. After a long day at the Lamar clinic last month, he was watching his college daughter’s concert on a livestream, since he couldn’t go in person to the performance in Boulder…