By William Smith
Emergency room doctor Jeremy Owens, 43, isn’t a Burlington native. He’s from Cedar Rapids.
But he considers Burlington his adopted hometown and doesn’t plan on leaving anytime soon. When Owens became a Burlington firefighter in 2008, he fell in love with the town – and the people.
“I have a lot of friends in the fire department. It’s like a brotherhood. There’s a lot of new faces in the department too, but I still know a lot of people,” he said.
To be of more service to them, Owens left his adopted hometown of Burlington for a few years to become a full-fledged physician.
“It was tough. There were only a handful of non-traditional students like me in my class,” Owens said of attending medical school. “But hospitals want some of that. They want doctors who have some life experience.”
After 12 years of EMT experience, Owens started his job as a doctor in the Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center emergency room. He’s been there since June, working 12-hour shifts that often flip between graveyard hours and daytime work.
Owens loves every minute of it.
“There is no typical day. And that’s why I like it. You never know what you’re going to get when you walk through that door,” he said. “And I like the aspect of being out in the community.”
Growing up in Cedar Rapids, Owens wasn’t one of those kids who planned out their entire life trajectory. He didn’t know what he wanted to do when he grew up, and he didn’t care.
“I hated school, honestly. And when I graduated high school, I went to Kirkwood (Community College), and I was working at a bookstore,” he said.
Owens caught a glimpse of a possible future career one afternoon at the bookstore — and it wasn’t in any of the books.
“I remember seeing some firefighters respond to a fire alarm at the store next to us. And I was like, ‘Well, that seems like it’d be cool.’ And I started looking into that,” he said. “I was just taking some general classes at Kirkwood, and they had a fire science program there. So I started that.”
Owens came out of Kirkwood as a certified EMT, which is standard for a firefighter these days. Then he put that training to use.
“I started volunteering for the Hiawatha Fire Department up near Cedar Rapids. And they had just started an ambulance service up there. I liked that. I remember watching the paramedics there, and I always admired them. I wanted to be able to do what they could do,” Owens said.
Owens started at the Burlington Fire Department shortly after that, putting in eight years between 2008 and 2016. He loved the job but wanted more. The first step was to get his bachelor’s degree.
“So I started taking classes at the University of Iowa again, and I was driving back and forth for a while. I would get off work and drive up to Iowa City, do my classes, and come back down and work. And for about three years, that’s all I did was work and school,” he said.
Then Owens got into medical school and moved to Des Moines in 2016. It was all school after that, including residency work.
“I missed Burlington when I moved away,” he said.
Owens finished medical school in 2020 and started his residency in Peoria, Ill., just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world. He treated a lot of COVID-19 patients but never contracted it himself — as far as he knows.
By 2021, that had slowed down.
“My second year (in residency), it was September of 2021, and we didn’t have hardly any COVID patients. It seemed like it had burned itself out in that population,” he said.
Owens doesn’t take much downtime. He finished his residency in June — the same month he started his new job at the Burlington ER. He unwinds in outdoor ways — hiking, running, and lately, archery.
“I like snowboarding too,” he said.
Owens views his downtime more as a vacation than a release from the daily stress of being an ER medic. Though he can’t get into any specifics, Owens has treated everything an ER has to offer, from auto accidents and gunshot wounds to heart attacks.
None of it rattles him — not after a decade-plus of working traumatic scenes. Maintaining a calming presence via a soft but confident voice, Owens often delivers bad news to local people on one of the worst days of their lives.
Empathy is what keeps Owens in balance — and makes him that much more of a doctor.
“I have to remind myself that you’re dealing with people who are very stressed out, and you’ve got to take a step back and say, ‘Well, how would I feel in this situation?’” Owens said. “That’s one of the things I like about emergency medicine. It’s not only the patient, but their family you can help. Explain to them what’s going on, and what the next steps are, and relax the situation.”