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After 24 years as public servant and 40 as practicing physician, Molly O’Dell is fighting the disease of a lifetime.
Portrait by Adam Johnson
The call came on March 15 from a former colleague at the Virginia Department of Health. Could Molly O’Dell come out of retirement?
With a global pandemic nipping at the state’s heels, the request was urgent. We need you, Dr. O’Dell, to coordinate the Roanoke region’s response to the biggest health crisis in a lifetime.
“I know I have the knowledge, the skills, the ability,” O’Dell remembers thinking. “A lot of my relationships in the community are still there. How can I say no?”
So on Tuesday, March 17, O’Dell, who had retired as director of the New River Health District in 2016 and had served as director of Roanoke City and Alleghany Health Districts from 1987 to 2006, and was hired by Dr. Laura Kornegay, acting director of the Roanoke and Alleghany districts, as well as director of Central Shenandoah Health District. Together they hashed out a plan.
O’Dell would serve as Director of Communicable Disease Control for Roanoke and Alleghany. Anything COVID-related would be hers.
Since then, O’Dell, 66, has absorbed massive amounts of information. She’s put new procedures in place in an instant. She’s managed personal protective equipment, consulted with nursing homes and jails, helped institutions ramp up testing capabilities, hired investigators who could trace those who’ve come in contact with the virus.
Early on, she appeared in a first-ever televised public health forum in which area hospital leaders addressed community concerns. Overnight, she became the face of Roanoke’s coronavirus fight.
This was never O’Dell’s plan. Four years into her retirement, she expected to garden and forage this summer, to hike with her two grown children, teach a class at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and prepare for the publication of her second book of poetry.
But after 24 years as a public servant and 40 years as a practicing physician, after surviving divorce and two rounds of breast cancer, O’Dell was not about to sit on the sidelines when her community needed her.
The Roanoke region has been her home for six decades. She considers its people — all of them — to be her friends, her teachers, her responsibility.
“Molly won’t rest until everybody is safe and sound,” says Magda Peck, a colleague who worked with O’Dell in Omaha, Nebraska, to create that state’s first school of public health. “It’s not enough to treat one person. She needs the entire community to be whole.”
Health Care Pioneer
At a time when health care workers, grocery store cashiers, school teachers and local farmers are heralded as heroes, the spotlight is also shining on the behind-the-scenes work of the nation’s public health champions.
Think Anthony Fauci, Ohio Health Department Director Amy Acton, U.S. State Department’s Deborah Birx. Roanoke’s unsung public health leader is Molly O’Dell.
Her life story is one of breaking barriers and rising to challenges.
She’s one of a family of seven, raised in South Roanoke. She enrolled at Longwood University with plans to become a nurse. A college professor inspired her to aim higher.
She became the first woman from Longwood to head directly to medical school when she entered what was then the Medical College of Virginia and is now the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine. As she pondered what kind of doctor to become, she had one overriding goal: “I knew I wanted to come back home.”
O’Dell recalls how tough it was to be a young woman practicing medicine in Southwest Virginia in the 1980s. And also, how beautiful.
“The patients would not even check in,” she says of her doctor’s office on Buchanan’s Main Street. “They knew where my son was and they’d walk to his little nursery in the back and just pick him up.”
On Fridays, O’Dell made house calls. Sometimes she was paid in eggs or baked goods or offers to paint her house.
“I didn’t know it at the time but it was the last vestige of being able to practice like that,” she remembers.
She fell into public health when her medical insurance company stopped covering solo practitioners. She applied to be director of the Alleghany Health District and landed the position.
“I remember going in and telling the staff: ‘I don’t know anything about this. Give me a year to figure out how I can make your life better.’ They taught me everything I needed to know about public health.”
For 19 years, she battled teen pregnancy, a rise in sexually transmitted diseases, the arrival of HIV/AIDS, the obesity epidemic, budget cuts and the beginnings of the opioid crisis.
She was instrumental in the 1988 founding of the Child Health Investment Partnership (CHIP) of the Roanoke Valley. Its work — preparing children for first grade, developmentally, nutritionally, mentally — she saw as essential to improving public health.
“She has that big picture view,” says Robin Haldiman, CHIP’s CEO since 1996. “But she also connects with people. She understands them at a human level.”
Somewhere in the swirl of seeing patients and cooking dinner, of raising her kids and rolling out education campaigns, O’Dell discovered she had a deep desire to tell stories.
So when her husband planned a move to Omaha in 2006, she went too. She earned a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from the University of Nebraska Omaha, even as she helped build a public health curriculum for the university, all while mentoring students and teaching classes there. In addition, she worked on a broad, health care company-led initiative to combat childhood obesity.
In 2010, O’Dell moved back to Buchanan, alone. She stepped into a familiar role as director of the New River Health District, where she tackled Zika virus prevention, the effects of poverty on health, the drug use that was infecting her community.
But her writing joined her now as she walked through her days. In 2015, she published her first book of poetry, a collection centered around her early years as doctor and mother.
By 2016, she was ready to shift the balance: more writing, fewer meetings; more contemplation, fewer conversations about intractable societal problems.
“When I retired, the two things I was most looking forward to were not multi-tasking and not hurrying,” she says.
But then an unknown virus swept the globe, upending everyone’s lives — including O’Dell’s.
Trusted Leader Takes Charge
When O’Dell was named communicable diseases director for Roanoke and Alleghany, residents across the region collectively exhaled. From the out-of-luck mother she’d treated at the health department clinic to the Buchanan town leaders who’ve worked alongside her since the 1980s, the folks O’Dell encountered over her career trust her calm competence and value her persistent problem-solving.
“I was so relieved when she was put in charge,” says author Beth Macy, who consulted O’Dell when researching her latest book, “Dopesick.” Macy has interviewed O’Dell for in-depth reporting projects over three decades.
“She’s not afraid to say the truth and we’re learning now that that’s so important,” Macy says.
O’Dell’s early days on the job felt like trying to stand beneath a raging waterfall. She had technology to master, a far-flung staff to connect with, new guidelines to adopt on everything from restaurant safety to death certificates.
“And then it all changes the next day, right?”
She held her first meetings in parking lots, so she could safely introduce herself to health department employees, explain what her responsibilities would be, answer anxious questions.
Eventually, she wrangled her duties into a manageable routine: daily and weekly conference calls with health directors throughout the state, communicable disease experts, city and county leaders, the media. She oversaw the handling of nursing home protocols and essential store safety plans.
Through it all, she leaned on time-tested techniques of collaboration and seeking input from a variety of community resources.
“With an interdisciplinary approach, you work through the issues together,” O’Dell explains. “It’s so easy when you know what the goal is, which is keeping the most people healthy and safe as you can with what your resources are.”
If there is any upside to the devastation that COVID has wrought, it’s that the role of public health is becoming clearer to everyone, O’Dell says.
“The core of public health is preventing disease and protecting the public,” she says. “And so once you have a communicable disease, it’s case investigation and contact tracing. We’ve been doing that forever. Nobody ever gave a hoot about that. And now it’s so important. For the average guy to understand COVID, they need to know a little bit about immunology and a whole lot about public health.”
No one knows how harshly the coronavirus will shake the Roanoke Valley before it’s through. But O’Dell is not afraid. She believes public health protocols will be a bridge to the other side of this crisis.
“There are systems in place to protect us and help us do the right thing,” she says, speaking from the heart and from decades of on-the-ground experience. “That’s the part that’s comforting.”
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