WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 1, 2020
Serving Polk County’s St. t Croix C i Valley V ll since i 1897
VOL. 122 NO. 22 www.osceolasun.com $1.00
SPORTS: Osceola Wrestling Duals. PAGE 10
The Sun 2019 Year in Review BY MATT ANDERSON EDITOR@OSCEOLASUN.COM
January
SUBMITTED
Donations to Jordan Braund
Jayme Closs escapes After being kidnapped in October of 2018 by Jake Patterson, Jayme Closs of Barron escaped her captor and was found January 10. Patterson has since been sentenced to life imprisonment after murdering Closs’ parents and keeping her hostage for three months. Also in January • ATV routes OK’d for downtown Osceola by Village Board • Osceola Firefighters Ball sixth year
THE SUN
Cascade Falls in Osceola flowed under a thick layer of ice during the polar vortex that swept through the upper midwest. Temperatures 30 degrees below zero were recorded.
February
July 22, 2019, Jordan Braund of St. Croix Falls was in a serious car accident that resulted in amputation of both of her legs. In her recovery, Jordan continues to show amazing strength, bravery, huge heart, and a spirit that shines around her. Braund has many new challenges to overcome during her senior year in high school as well as her future. The Osceola Valley Sno-Goers has donated $1,000, along with the Southern Polk County ATV UTV Club who donated an additional $500 to help Jordan and her family with medical expenses and rehabilitation. Presenting the checks are Rick and Julie McGuiggan, who are members of both of these clubs.
Frigid Polar Vortex 30-below-zero temperatures ripped through Wisconsin, Minnesota and Illinois cancelling school days, closing SEE REVIEW, PAGE 2
THE SUN
It was announced in May that the Department of Transportation in Minnesota and Wisconsin set their sights on replacing the Osceola bridge in 2025.
Inside a rural Wisconsin doctor’s fight to manage opioid use ‘Sometimes it’s just pain, pain, pain’ BY BRAM SABLE-SMITH WISCONSIN PUBLIC RADIO/WISCONSIN WATCH
Dr. Angela Gatzke-Plamann didn’t grasp the full extent of her community’s opioid crisis until one desperate patient called on a Friday afternoon in 2016. “He was in complete crisis because he was admitting to me that he had lost control of his use of opioids,” recalls Gatzke-Plamann, 40, the only full-time family physician in the central Wisconsin village of Necedah, population 916, nestled among bluffs and
pines. The patient had used opioids for several years for what Gatzke-Plamann calls “a very painful condition.” But a urine screening one week earlier had revealed heroin and morphine in his system as well. He denied any misuse that day. Now he was not only admitting it, but asking for help. But Gatzke-Plamann had no resources to offer. Both she and the patient started searching the internet while still on the phone, trying to find somewhere nearby that could help. No luck. Here was a patient with a family and job who spiraled into addiction due to doctor-prescribed pain pills, yet
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the community’s barebones health system left him on his own to find treatment — which he later did, 65 miles away. If that situation was going to change in Necedah, it was up to Gatzke-Plamann to change it. “That weekend I went home and I said, ‘I’ve got to do something different,’ ” Gatzke-Plamann recalls. In many ways, rural communities like Necedah have become the face of the nation’s opioid epidemic. Drug overdose deaths are more common in rural areas than in urban ones. And rural doctors prescribe opioids more often by far, despite a nationwide decline in prescribing rates since
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2012. Meanwhile, rural Americans have fewer alternatives to treat their very real pain, and they disproportionately lack access to effective addiction treatment like the medication buprenorphine. For rural physicians like Gatzke-Plamann, the burden of responding to the opioid epidemic falls on their already-loaded shoulders. Rural residents report more pain One reason there are more opioid prescriptions in the rural United States: Those residents report more chronic pain. For one, rural communities skew older, meaning they disproportionately deal with painful conditions related to aging, such as arthritis.
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Injuries also appear to be more common among communities more dependent on jobs that call for physical labor, such as mining and logging. For 62-year-old Necedah resident Michael Kruchten, the chronic pain stems from chemotherapy and radiation therapy treatments he received for lung cancer back in 2011. Kruchten is cancer free now, but the treatments left him with neuropathy — permanent and severe nerve damage — in his hands and feet. “It’s very hard to explain,” Kruchten says of the pain caused by his neuropathy. “Sometimes it’s a burning — a SEE OPIOIDS, PAGE 9
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