A game of racquetball between Drs. Don Chisholm and Timothy Burns that decided who would have to work a long Thanksgiving weekend has also served as a fond memory between the two colleagues.

Burns was in his early years with Ironwood Family Practice when the weekend schedule had been overlooked. It was down to him and Chisholm, as the two didn't have big plans for the holiday.

Already racquetball pals, they decided to play two out of three, and whoever lost would have to work that weekend.

"To this day I remember our banter during these games," Burns said in a phone interview Wednesday.

His plan was to stay in the middle, but with Chisholm behind him he became a moving target.

"I think I still have welts on my backside from 25 years ago," Burns said with a laugh. "I’m pretty sure he took it to me and won the first two games. It was me crying as we went back to the office and him laughing as we told the rest of the staff who it was who was going to be covering for the weekend."

Chisholm, in a later interview, gleefully said not to believe anything Burns says. Not ever.

Obviously, these two doctors are brothers in arms, having spent three decades working alongside each other at Ironwood Family Practice, which Chisholm co-founded in 1982.

After nearly 30 years caring for patients, building bonds with colleagues and practicing family medicine, Chisholm is hanging up his stethoscope. The good doctor made the announcement last year and retired from a long, rewarding career on New Year's Eve.

“It was brilliant planning to retire during a pandemic when you’re not able to travel very freely, and if you’re from the United States you may not be allowed entrance to another country to begin with, and you’re supposed to isolate at home, and you just cut off most of your connectivity which is working with those patient relationships,” Chisholm said with a tinge of sarcasm. "It wasn’t sheer brilliance to pick the timing, but you know, you announce it a year ahead of time, and then COVID comes along afterward, it kind of works out the way it does."

Chisholm, seated at a table in a conference room in Ironwood Family Practice, recalled a few memorable moments from his doctor life. The practice has been in its present location at 920 Ironwood Drive since 1984.

“This building was the birthplace of about half of the doctors in this town,” Chisholm said. “When I came to town, probably half of the then-physicians had at one point or another been in this building doing some kind of practice."

After finishing his residency in Spokane, he opened Ironwood Family Practice with Dr. Tom Nesbitt, who was soon replaced by Dr. Dave Chambers.

Those early years weren't the easiest.

“We had two doctors sharing one other office employee, who was the nurse, and the phone-answerer, and the receptionist and everything else," Chisholm said. "We took turns driving to Spokane to work in the emergency room to have a paycheck to fund the office."

Chisholm and Chambers then joined forces with Drs. Jerry Fitz and Harold Thysell, but the welcome wasn't so warm from doctors who had already established themselves in the then-small town of Coeur d'Alene.

“When we had announced our intention to come to this town, we received a letter signed by about half of the then-physicians in town, saying, ‘If you do, you will starve to death. You will not make a living. We already have more doctors than Coeur d’Alene could ever need,'" Chisholm said.

Chisholm wasn't always going to be a doctor. After being raised in the Northwest and spending time in a few different areas, he originally went to school to be a computer science major.

But, fate disagreed.

“That was back in the era of Fortran programming cards,” he said. “I had a footlong box of sequential cards that you’d run in a computer that you could probably run in your iPhone right now. I dropped my project heading to the lab, they all basically got stuck in the mud, and I changed majors to pre-med.

"I knew I liked science and some of those more precise backgrounds, but I wanted to blend it with much more personal human contact that some of the sciences by themselves don’t have," he said. "That seemed like a good combination for that."

Chisholm completed his undergraduate program at Washington State University, where he played football for a year. He then "swallowed his pride and became a Husky" when he finished medical school at the University of Washington and found his way to Spokane.

"You have to kind of enjoy academics, or you probably wouldn’t slug that out,” he said when asked about the amount of schooling to become a physician.

It was all worth it, Chisholm said. All four of his children have followed in their father's footsteps to become doctors.

“I accuse my kids of having poor imaginations,” he said, his eyes smiling. "When you think you look at kids, they look at their parents’ occupations and say, ‘There’s no way in the world I’d ever do that and here’s why,’ and they have a million reasons.

"I must not have whined as much about medicine as I do now."

Chisholm has experienced it all in his years as a physician. He shared a wild story of when a patient in for a pre-vasectomy screening passed out over his shoulder as he dropped his pants, at the same time another patient was having a heart attack and the ambulance to help the heart attack patient caught fire in the parking lot.

“There are some days that have too many crises to be believable or manageable,” he said, chuckling. "There are strange moments."

He also cheekily called out an "anonymous OB gynecologist" colleague who was absent when a patient was due to be artificially impregnated.

"This physician was supposed to be the person delivering it but was out of town at the critical fertile moment, so the spouse of the mom in the making brought me the specimen and we inoculated that into the cervix and one effort, one pregnancy, 100% success rate with artificial insemination, and I know that he did not have anywhere near that same degree of effectiveness," Chisholm said. "I just have to point that out."

Burns said he's going to miss working alongside such a bright guy. The whole office will miss his "Chisholm-isms," he said, when Chisholm would inject his sharp vocabulary and quick-thinking into discussions.

"Don has always been a very, very wise man," Burns said. "He would be the guy I would go to to ask for advice, whether about family things or business things or general life things.

"I will always remember his ability to put into words the things that the rest of us might be thinking but didn’t know how to say,” Burns added.

He said he really wants Chisholm to know "how much of a positive impact he had on my life, and that I would want to say thank you."

Chisholm said he has hopes for the future of medicine, that it won't lose its humanity in an electronic era. He will still be around the area and has a honey-do list to tend to at home, and he may contribute his medical talents where he can in the future.

“My father retired three times before he could stay retired, so we’ll have to see if I have the same itch that needs to be filled some other way," Chisholm said.

And he plans to visit the old office, just to keep everyone on their toes.

“I’ll have to drop in on them and make sure they’re not messing up too much,” he said, a twinkle in his eye.