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Decades of practicing as a family medicine physician at Vashon’s largest medical clinic have allowed Michael Kappelman the chance to do a little bit of everything, from delivering babies to treating traumatic injuries and dealing with the ailments that come with old-age.

Beloved by his patients, Kappelman’s last day as a doctor on Vashon was Monday, Jan. 4.

“He’s definitely just a good guy. He’s a hard worker,” Bob Youmans, who has been a patient of Kappelman’s since the beginning, said. “He took (his work) very seriously, and he was always such a joy for us. It’s hard to see him go.”

Islander and Columbia University Professor Emeritus of Clinical Medicine Yale Enson said that he has been seeing Kappelman for six years and has always been impressed with how the doctor handles his patient load.

“I wish I would have trained him because I would be so proud,” Enson said. “He’s so empathetic, and he’s a healer. “

Longtime colleague and fellow clinic doctor Gary Koch hired Kappelman in 1983 and then worked with him for Kappelman’s nearly 33 years at the clinic. He said that Kappelman was fastidious and set the bar high.

“He set the standard to which all physicians should be measured,” Koch said. “I’m not just talking about on the island. I’m talking about everywhere. He’s that good. There is nobody more dedicated or thorough, and we all attempted to meet that standard.”

Koch said he and Kappelman went to the same medical school at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, but didn’t know each other before working together on Vashon.

“He lived here (at the clinic) because he was so dedicated and wanted to get everything done,” Koch said. “He would be here all hours, and if I’d be here, I’d walk down the hall and ask him a question. We kind of thought alike. We’re going to miss him, no question.”

The doctor who has become so loved in the community says he will definitely miss the clinic, but will stay on the island and may even take on some part-time fill-ins at the clinic. But, Kappelman says he has no shortage of hobbies to occupy his time.

Arriving for a Friday interview at The Beachcomber, Kappelman showed up with a puppy he is training to become a seeing eye dog through Vashon High School’s Eyes of the Future program. He said he also wants to sleep, exercise, read, travel and get back to practicing music during his retirement.

“I had studied to be a musical composer in college and played piano seriously,” Kappelman said. “I finished my undergrad work at Carleton (College in Minnesota) and went to Texas (The University of Texas at Austin) and started music,” Kappelman said. “After two years in Texas, I went to medical school at Washington University.”

Kappelman said that while in medical school, he had incredible experiences and got the chance to travel to Guatemala and care for patients and then spend a summer in Alaska.

“All of those experiences consolidated and cemented my interest in family practice medicine,” Kappelman said.

With his mind made up, he came to Providence Hospital in Seattle in the early 1980s and did a three-year residency before finding Vashon in 1983.

“Vashon was an under-served area, and Granny’s (Attic) was integral to the clinic’s survival. I came in July 1983 thinking it would be temporary,” Kappelman said. “I came over here to fill in for doctors on their days off, and I had no specific plan to stay.”

Then one of the clinic’s doctors became sick and Kappelman found himself in the former doctor’s position.

“I took over, and it never ended,” Kappelman said.

At the time, he was living in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood and commuting to the island. He commuted for 14 years, but said he never missed a day at the clinic.

“I’ve always been very proud of that. The roads would be icy, and I had my car with weights in the back to keep from sliding around, and the power would go out, and we’d work in the cold and make house calls,” Kappelman said.

While on duty, he stayed in a little cottage at Klahanie Beach, just north of KVI beach, and said he had to take a rickity little tram down the bluffs each night.

“It was cold, cold, cold,” he said. “I eventually had a bedroom made for me at the clinic for when I had to be there after-hours, and a piano was donated so I could play when no one was there.”

He recalled that on his first Christmas on Vashon, all the pipes at the clinic burst, and his instruments and equipment were floating in the drawers.

“I thought, ‘What did I get myself into?” he said.

He stitched up K2 employees who would get injured at work in the middle of the night, and would go with the fire department and treat the trauma patients the firefighters responded to.

The island’s rural nature grew on him, and he began to love the range of medicine he practiced here. He moved to the island in 1997 and began work on the rammed earth house on 204th Street, where he and his wife raised their two daughters.

While his work both in and out of the clinic was varied, he said his favorite memories are from his days delivering babies, which he and Koch did until around 2003.

“It’s been a change letting that go,” he said. “I loved that part of (the job). It was a great thing and a lot of fun.”

He said his most memorable delivery was when he followed the parents’ car onto the ferry to get to Seattle and was sure that the mother would make it to Swedish.

“We got off the ferry, and I told the father to wave his arm out the window if anything progressed,” he said as he recalled the day in the 1980s. “We were going over the West Seattle Bridge, and the husband puts his hand out the window. We pull into this gas station, and she’s in a Volkswagen van. I leaped into the van and caught the baby before it hit the ground.”

When babies weren’t being born at gas stations, Kappelman and Koch took on the clinic and the changing medical landscape. Both doctors said that many things have changed in the last three decades as corporations and insurance providers merge and switch, but the changes have never affected their way of working.

“It’s been a huge change in the industry and . . . the political environment is difficult,” Kappelman said. “A lot of doctors get burned out, but the thing that feeds us is patients and keeping them first.”

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