Dr. John Pymm is now seeing patients at the UnityPoint Clinic Family Medicine Buena Vista, located on the BVRMC campus. As a family medicine provider he will see patients for all their general needs, including obstetrics.
Dr. Pymm’s full name is John Howard Pymm III. He was raised in the small farming community of Ashton, Idaho. The second oldest of 9 children. His father was a high school principal and mother was a school teacher.
After high school, Dr. Pymm served as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Argentina and saw a huge need for health care providers.
“The area in which I served was very poor and I immediately noticed the health care needs of the community. I desired to have more knowledge and skills that would allow me to help these people,” he says.
Returning back to the USA, he enrolled at Brigham Young University-Idaho and started working as a certified nurses assistant.
“My love for medicine only grew as I studied and worked. I came to Iowa to attend medical school at Des Moines University. Wanting more experience in ultra sound and obstetrics, I did a one year fellowship in Memphis, Tennessee, and then stayed on as a faculty member for one year,” Dr. Pymm explains.
Dr. Pymm and his wife, Renee Anne Lemire Pymm, met at Brigham Young University Idaho. She is from northern Ontario, Canada, and is fluent in French, being raised French Canadian.
They currently have four children; Isabelle 8, Zackarie 7, Amélie 5, and Howard 3. They also have a 8 year old dog named Lewanda.
In their free time, the Pymm family loves sports. ”Currently my favorite thing to do is play a game of volleyball with my wife,” says Dr. Pymm. “She is very competitive so I always hope she is on my team.”
The family loves to be outside camping, hiking, riding bikes, jumping on our trampoline, and water activities. We also enjoy going out to the movies or creating our own movies.
The Pymm family recently traveled to Africa. He explains, “A capstone project for my fellowship was to work abroad. Through a mutual friend I met a doctor in Ghana named Dickson Kissi. His father and he run a small private hospital in Accra Ghana (the capital city). The hospital has a clinic that sees roughly 150-200 patients daily, an inpatient ward that accepts both adults and children, and an obstetric ward that does 15-25 deliveries monthly. Aside from doing deliveries I also had to dust off my tropical medicine books as malaria and typhoid were the most common cause for admission to the hospital. The hospital also recently purchased an ultrasound machine, and I stayed busy performing ultrasounds and training local sonographers.”
While in Africa, the Pymm children enrolled at a local private school and Renee volunteered at the school helping with French classes.
“I hoped to find a rural community that carried that diversity of an urban area with a large Latino population so that I could continue to use my Spanish in my practice. Storm Lake meets all those criteria and we were surprised and pleased to find this community in Iowa,” says Dr. Pymm.
“The most exciting thing about being in Storm Lake is finally having a place where my family and I can plant roots and call home. We found a lovely home, have been greeted by wonderful neighbors, and just could not be more thrilled to settle here,” says Dr. Pymm.