![Coach Matt LaFleur with arms crossed](/sites/bellin/files/styles/responsive_16_9_300w/public/acquiadam/2024-03/Coach-Matt-LaFleur-with-Arms-Crossed.png?h=c9762c18&itok=nStE70UF)
We know how important it is to receive care close to home from providers you trust. Share your positive experience of receiving exceptional, life-changing care from a local Bellin Health provider.
You want healthcare that is both high-quality and convenient. Bellin Health offers both, with local patient care only minutes from home. Talk about a home field advantage!
Making the right choices today can have an impact on your health. And it can have an impact on your life, allowing you to do the things you want and spend time with the people you love. Prioritize your life, your lifestyle and your future by getting exceptional care from specialists you know, close to home.
Benefits of The Home Team
Lower Medical Costs
Patients shouldn’t have to travel for affordable and high-quality care. Get the treatment and low-cost care right in your own neighborhood.
Preventive Care
Early detection of medical conditions, illnesses and diseases saves lives. Run interference on expensive medical procedures by joining the Home Team to access amazing preventive care at a low cost. Bellin Health’s Primary Care Team is among the best in the nation. Countless health systems travel annually to learn from our experts.
Trust in Local Community Members
Get high-quality care you can count on from the people you trust the most. Just within the Marinette and Oconto areas, Bellin Health has over 300 healthcare workers ready to serve their community members.
Mysterious abdominal pain when you’re hundreds of miles from home. Pain from a joint injury and having to make a long drive before getting it treated. Patients like these know from experience how important it can be to receive care close to their home, families and support systems, delivered by providers they know and trust. Read their stories to see how, when their health was on the line, there was no team like the home team.
Do you have your own story about an experience with Bellin’s home field advantage?
![Bellin Health patient, Jim](/sites/bellin/files/styles/responsive_3_2_300w/public/acquiadam/2024-03/Jim-Vojcihoski-bio-hometeam-story-02.1.png?h=7fde3583&itok=M1gitq2A)
Joint repair without the drive.
Jim Vojcihoski - Peshtigo
Jim Vojcihoski is a retired man with a love of the outdoors, and he knows all about the importance of friendly, experienced, skilled, local healthcare providers. With a decades-long history of orthopedic injuries – and repairs – to both knees and both shoulders, he’s practically an expert.
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And he knows that having familiar doctors close to home makes a big difference.
“My first knee surgery was in 1983. I tore my meniscus and ligaments downhill skiing,” he says. “My first doctor there wasn’t with Bellin, but my second one was. I injured my right knee at work around 1999, and that was Bellin as well. I tore my right shoulder at work, and Dr. Freeman operated on that shoulder, and when I tore my left shoulder two years ago from a fall at home, Dr. Spears operated on that.” That care team was particularly polite, patient, and open to any suggestions he had; he recalls. “Very nice, very caring people.”
Traveling from Peshtigo to Green Bay – while hurting from his most recent injury – was itself a pain. “I had to miss a lot of work,” Jim says. “My wife and I would often get a hotel room the night before, and that was costly, too.” Finally, being able to get his care from familiar doctors right there in Peshtigo was a major development.
“It makes it a lot easier, I didn’t have to miss as much work because I didn’t have to drive as far. And I feel very comfortable with the doctors. I’m not concerned about the surgery. I’m very at ease. It’s nice to have providers closer to home.”
Being able to get the same high quality of care from Bellin’s top specialists, closer to home, has been a big plus. He’s been able to go to all his pre-op visitations, get the information he needs about the procedure, and spend the night in his own bed. And he’s been able to get physical therapy to bounce back from his injuries, as well as exercises to do at home. “All in all, with the therapy and the exercises, and following all the instructions, I’ve become a successful recovery,” he says. “I’ve lost some strength, mostly because I’m older now, but the surgeries were done very well, and I’ve had no issues. I feel just fine.”
“Every experience I’ve had – and I’ve had numerous ones – has gone very well,” Jim says. “I’m very happy with every part of the whole team.
![Bellin Health patient, Timothy](/sites/bellin/files/styles/responsive_3_2_300w/public/acquiadam/2024-03/Timothy-Young-bio-hometeam-story-04.1.png?h=eca2bf06&itok=qAo6HYDw)
Two knees. No driving.
Timothy Young - Oconto
As an upholstery engineer in the marine industry, Tim Young was used to being on the move, always working and creating. Going into retirement, his biggest worry was that he wouldn’t be able to find projects to keep him active – not that debilitating joint pain would make it impossible to be active at all. But it did. Familiar activities and even brief shifts at a post-retirement retail job were too much for his knees.
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“I told my wife, ‘This is not the quality of life I’m willing to put up with,’” he says. “’I need to explore my options.’ And that’s when I started looking to Bellin for different answers.”
He visited Bellin’s Dr. Bryan Larson, who performed an X ray and came back with bad news: Bone was rubbing on bone, and the only solution was a double knee replacement, starting with his right knee. “In the back of my mind, I thought, eventually, I’m going to have to have surgery on my knees,” Tim says. “I can’t fool anybody. So when I saw Dr. Larson, he seemed like he had a really good plan.”
Tim was confident about Dr. Larson’s plans for the surgery. His biggest concern was actually about traveling to Green Bay – he’d been making the drive there regularly, but as the area grew and Tim grew older, he was finding it harder and harder to navigate. He told Dr. Larson he was going to have to look around for options closer to home for care after his surgery. But Dr. Larson was able to set him at ease on that count as well: The surgery and physical therapy would be done by the familiar, trusted team at Bellin’s facility right there in Oconto.
Tim went into surgery with very basic expectations – do the surgery, and make him feel comfortable. Dr. Larson and the care team “surely delivered on that,” Tim says. When he arrived at the hospital, he was placed in the care of three nurses who worked together smoothly to get him ready for surgery. “That really put me at ease,” he says. He went into surgery at 12:30, and by 4:30, he was on his way to pick up his prescription pain medication before the pharmacy closed.
The experience was surprisingly comfortable and comforting. Having his healthcare provider just eight miles from his house decreased the time he spent in a car with his aching joints. It decreased his worries about getting into an accident on a long drive.
And it definitely decreased the pain in his right knee. Tim says it’s easy to appreciate the pain relief and mobility of his new right knee because of the pain he’s still experiencing in the left one. He’s already able to go down his basement steps, which hadn’t been an option before. And with everything he’s experienced, and the results he’s seen, he’s excited about the thought of his next surgery.
“I went to my doctor’s appointment last week, and he said, ‘Anything else?’” Tim says. “I said, ‘Yeah, I’m not leaving this room until I have a date for the second one.’”
![Bellin Health patient, Emily](/sites/bellin/files/styles/responsive_3_2_300w/public/acquiadam/2024-03/Emily-Hendricks-bio-hometeam-story-08.1.png?h=9a94a08d&itok=BWQsXIVr)
Local care for a local caregiver.
Emily Hendricks - Iron Mountain
Even caregivers need care from time to time. Sometimes, they need it the most. When you run a licensed day care out of your home, as Emily Hendricks does, you have a lot of people depending on you, and taking time off for medical mysteries and hours-long doctor visits can be bad for your business.
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Ever since she was a kid herself, Emily has had a way with little children. Early in life, she worked for a corporate day care and then as a preschool teacher, before returning to her hometown of Crystal Falls, Michigan, to have her son, who’s now 10. He had medical issues that required her to stay home, and “I had a way of making an income and being able to take care of my kid, too,” she says. “It worked out really well.”
But Emily’s son wasn’t the only one with medical issues. Emily found herself feeling exhausted and cold all the time. “I was freezing cold all the time, and nobody could figure out what was going on,” she says.
Emily came to Bellin Health in Iron Mountain for “a different set of eyes.” That’s where she met Dr. Lynn Johnson Greene who not only had a fresh perspective, but also a compassionate heart. “She listened and asked a million questions, but I didn’t feel like I was on trial or anything,” Emily says. “She asked all the right questions, and she ran a bunch of tests and figured it out.”
The diagnosis: Emily’s body couldn’t retain vitamin B12, even though she took a chewable vitamin every day. “I think normal is supposed to be around 800, and mine was 140,” Emily says. Dr. Johnson Greene put her on biweekly injections of B12, along with her daily chewable vitamin.
The difference “is huge,” Emily says. “I don't have to sit down and curl up in a blanket all the time. I mean, I literally had heated blankets all over my house because I was freezing. And now I feel like I can go and do the things that I want to do and not have to worry about it. I might bring an extra sweatshirt or something,” she adds, “but I'm definitely not as bone-chilling cold as I was.”
Also huge was the dedicated attention she received from Dr. Johnson Greene. “It was a really big deal because I felt like I was heard,” Emily says. “And I felt like she knew something was wrong, and we were going to figure it out together.”
Having a doctor so close to home is exceptionally convenient in a life that runs on convenience. In addition to her day care responsibilities, Emily also manages care for her son — she sometimes has to take a week off work and travel seven hours for his appointments and testing. For her own appointments, she can just jump in the car or even meet virtually with her doctor and track her care on the MyBellinHealth app.
Emily knows when she needs access to dedicated, responsive care for her health needs, Bellin is right there. “This facility is a blessing.”
![Bellin Health patient, June](/sites/bellin/files/styles/responsive_3_2_300w/public/acquiadam/2024-03/June-Bumstead-bio-hometeam-story-09.1.png?h=cf2d2d2d&itok=XwaYxNSo)
Life-saving care close to home and her heart.
June Bumstead - Escanaba
June Bumstead of Gladstone, Michigan, is the mother of four children and grandmother of two — a 2-year-old and a 6-month-old — although she still hasn’t quite adapted to the idea of being a grandparent. “I won't let my husband call me grandma,” she says. Settling into the role of grandparent sometimes takes time, but in 2021, that time was almost taken away from her. Luckily, Bellin Health was there to help.
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June’s first encounter with Bellin was actually when her father became sick in 2018. “He wasn’t getting the proper care, and I was pretty insistent on that,” June says. “I wanted him to go to a better hospital with better medicine, so we got him well at Bellin.” When she began having health issues of her own and testing revealed her heart problems, “I chose Bellin for my doctoring,” she says.
June’s consultation in Green Bay with Bellin’s Dr. Tim Tanke took place on a Friday, and heart surgery was scheduled for the following Wednesday. But her heart wasn’t willing to wait. She started feeling unwell, so a friend took her to the emergency room, where she was told she wasn’t going to make it to Wednesday.
“I had the surgery the very next morning, and it was very successful, and I was really pleased,” June says. “All the people there were wonderful, and all the nurses were so great. They really explain everything in detail, more than once to you, after you get out, just in case you're on medication and you don't remember. They explain it to you again and again, so that you know exactly what happened to you and what the prognosis is for later on.”
What had happened to June’s heart was a double bypass for two blood vessels that were 99-percent blocked. The surgery saved her life, but she still needed to make major lifestyle changes to avoid heart problems in the future.
She wasn’t on her own for those changes. “It's one thing to go to a hospital, have surgery to correct a problem and then just leave with no support, no real change in your life,” June says. “With Bellin, they fix the problem and then they do everything they can to empower you to make sure the problem doesn't happen again.”
“I got a second chance,” she says. June is making the most of it: She stopped smoking, she follows her diet and she bought workout equipment that she actually uses. “At 60 years old, I’ve got a clean bill of health to go on from here,” she says. “That’s why I choose to do the right things.”
June also has more personal motivations for staying healthy. Her mother passed away at age 61, and her son died at the age of 21 from a hereditary heart problem they didn’t know he had. “And I have two grandbabies, and I really wanted to live for them,” she says.
June says she’s grateful to the team at Bellin for making her goal possible. “I've talked to them time and time again at my follow-up appointments and told them thank you many times for saving me.”
We are proud to provide our second-to-none specialty care throughout our region's communities, including in Escanaba, Iron Mountain, Oconto, Peshtigo and more, saving you the drive to Green Bay. At Bellin Health, we have entire teams ready to take care of your every need, right in your hometown, allowing you to spend less time traveling for care and more time with what matters.
![Bellin Health Escanaba](/sites/bellin/files/styles/responsive_3_2_300w/public/acquiadam/2023-11/Bellin-Health-Escanaba-3233-2023.png?h=626d730b&itok=sqB3rxW4)