Chemo back at hospital come July

Dr. Robert Reynolds will be resuming regular chemotherapy treatments at the AllianceHealth Clinton hospital effective July 1.
City Manager Mark Skiles made the announcement as the concluding item at Tuesday night’s City Council meeting. Since July 1 is a Sunday, it’s assumed Dr. Reynolds will be starting treatments here the following Tuesday, July 3. Before discontinuing his Clinton practice last December, he had come weekly to the local hospital on Tuesdays for 13½ years.
In a telephone conversation with the Clinton Daily News in April, Dr. Reynolds implied that the decision to discontinue his service here was not his.
“I enjoyed coming to Clinton,” he said at that time. “I was planning on continuing to come when it was closed. Then I worked to get it reopened.”
It was discontinued apparently because of rents charged the current hospital operator, AllianceHealth Oklahoma. At a special meeting held April 3, the Clinton City Council unanimously approved a new lease agreement lowering the rent charged Alliance by $60,000 a year, from $118,375.04 to $58,375.04.
Indications at that time were that the lower rent was an inducement to get chemotherapy treatments by Dr. Reynolds resumed at the city-owned hospital. City Manager Skiles said then that Alliance had asked for the rent reduction to offset the cost of chemotherapy drugs.
No council action was needed at Tuesday’s meeting. In his announcement, Skiles said Dr. Reynolds had indicated that Clinton had been good to him for 13 years and he wanted to return the favor.
“He had another place he could have gone,” said the manager, without naming it.
In his April conversation with the Daily News, Reynolds indicated Clinton was the only place he was providing treatments other than Oklahoma City where his permanent office is located.
Mayor David Berrong said at that time he and other city leaders had started work in early December, as soon as they heard the doctor’s services here would be discontinued, to get them reinstated.
Skiles said the same thing. “The City expressed an interest before the Cancer Center was closed,” he said. “We kept ourselves in the game. There wasn’t a week went by that I didn’t contact somebody with Alliance.”
Berrong said the service was vital, not only for Clinton residents but also those living in other communities in this part of the state as well as the surrounding countryside.
Dr. Reynolds said in April he was providing about 90 treatments a month here when the service was discontinued. “That’s not 90 patients; that’s 90 treatments,” he clarified.
Attempts to confirm Tuesdays as the day he will be coming here were unsuccessful Wednesday. Neither he nor Jay Johnson, chief financial officer for the Clinton hospital who is currently its acting administrator, could be reached by telephone.