A passion for health care in rural areas is one of the many things that brought a new surgeon to Comanche County Memorial Hospital after becoming a doctor.
Dr. Connor Wilkinson is the newest General Surgeon at the hospital. The Oklahoma native attended the University of Oklahoma and did his training there until he went to Comanche County Memorial Hospital for his third year of residency. He said while here he fell in love with the community.
“Everybody here was really nice and friendly, first off,” he said. “And that wasn’t always the case back in the city, and it felt like you could make a difference helping people here because some people don’t want to go to the city for their health care.”
Dr. Wilkinson said his transition has been smooth because of the doctors he works with.
“The leadership here, like our senior partners, Dr. Sawyer, Dr. Morgan, and Dr. Aguilar, and they’re very talented and the door is always open if we have a complex patient,” Dr. Wilkinson said. “I can walk in there and go through the scan with them, like the CT scan, the labs, and the history, and kinda discuss what I have planned to treat them and see if they would do anything different or the same.”
Dr. Wilkinson said he decided to go into surgery because he was relaxed in the operating room and enjoyed it. As a general surgeon, he said he can operate on anything, generally from the mouth to the rectum.
“We do a lot of foregut or hiatal hernia stuff,” he said. “Antireflux procedures and then we also do a lot of colon and small bowel and hernia and your gallbladder and your appendectomies. We do a lot of dialysis access, just a little bit of everything.”
He said one of the big things that they like to treat and can be done at CCMH is colon cancer or colon screening.
“With colon cancer being the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in America, and the incidents increasing in the younger population under 50 years old, I think it’s really important to make sure people are getting screened appropriately,” he said.
That can generally be done through a colonoscopy every 10 years or with a yearly fecal occult blood test.
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