When I applied for my first job as a new nurse practitioner directly out of a master’s program and green as grass, the Program Director in Tanana, Alaska said, “Nothing much really ever happens out here. We haven’t had a trauma in years.” Hmmm… I can handle that, I thought.
It was good enough for me and I headed for Tanana “Dead Center” Alaska, traveling up the Alcan Highway in a Toyota pick-up that I knew was too old to one day make the trip back.
Though I had thoughts of inadequacy on that 2600-mile trip, I kept thinking I can do this. And besides, I’d had to borrow money to make this trip up here and I was sure too broke to turn around and go home.
After 150 air mile trip to the northwest of Fairbanks and seeing nothing but wilderness, I was shocked at the isolation and the smallness of this Athabascan village on the north bank of the Yukon river.
Upon my arrival, the Athabascan people were engaging and warm, saying “Welcome home,” obviously thinking that I knew what I was doing and that I would stay.
I was sick at what I had done…
Now, it was hitting me…the weight of knowing that people would live or die according to the skills I had… or did not have. I wanted to run so badly. I wanted to escape on the next bush plane leaving town. But I had no money and no way to get back. Panic rushed through my veins. No one was going to save me.
Tanana had not had adequate care there for the previous 6 years and as fate would have it, I was to be the only medical provider there for the next 5 years.
The clinic was a mess… dirty with outdated medications, old outdated supplies and equipment… to say nothing of the bad healthcare the people there had been receiving. Basic care for diabetes, heart disease, and women’s health had gone out the window years ago.
There was work to do and we dug in… me and my amazing sister, Lois Jean, who was an RN and had been hired by the clinic administrator because she had been out there volunteering, helping me clean up this mess.
NONE of this… the clinic in disarray, the severe health needs of the patients, none of that did I see as daunting… well, during the day. We even had fun taking truckloads of old outdated clinic supplies to the dump.
But the nights… by now the nights had gotten longer by 7 minutes a day, going into that tunnel of darkness that ends in winter with a mere 3 hours of light a day. Temperatures fell to minus 50 and even minus 60 degrees (see now what inspired the book title?)
The nights, and we were on call every night, started never ending. Every trauma you can imagine started coming into the clinic in the middle of that never-ending darkness.
Heart attacks, elders with pneumonia, critically ill babies, kids with frostbite so bad their skin came off. Two people froze to death that winter. Murder/attempted suicide who we had to keep alive to get him to surgery.
One trauma, one emergency after another.
One night at 2AM after medevacking out a particularly severe head injury and cleaning blood off the ER floor, I sat in the clinic office with my head in my hands, our administrator with me.
“I don’t think I can do this anymore, I’m not adequate. I don’t know enough,” I said.
She listened, as she always did. She was a wise woman who had been in this village for decades. And thinking back on the past 6 years when she had tried to recruit someone, anyone, to come to this remote corner of the earth, she said, “If not you, who?” Who will do this work? Though I was green. Though I was unsure of myself, though I wanted to run, I stayed. And stayed some more.
As the years went on, and my work continued, I saw dozens upon dozens of remote bush clinics in the same situation as Tanana, with inadequate healthcare or none at all. For years, I witnessed this gaping hole in the healthcare system of the United States. Remote yes, but still, how could this be happening inside the borders of the United States of America?
Jump ahead to 2010.
I had found a solution. I had identified dozens of excellent medical professionals who wanted to work in Alaska, rotate month in and month out. Perfect coverage for these outlying clinics. At the same time, I had identified dozens of clinics who needed these practitioners and they needed them NOW.
I knew lives were being lost because of lack of healthcare in these remote regions.
I knew people were suffering in the middle of the night with no one to care for them.
And I knew I had the ability to do something about it.
And now my resistance kicked in hard.
I wish I could tell you that I answered God’s call, saying, “If not me, who?” I wish I could say, “It’s me, Lord. Pick me!”
Instead, I found myself saying, “Why me? Why do I have to do this just because I’ve figured out a system to get it done and I know what to do. Why me?”
My excuses went something like this:
“In case you haven’t noticed, Mary Ellen, you are not young. The rest of your friends are retiring and buying snow bird homes in Arizona… and I am starting a brand new baby business. I am sure I look ridiculous to my friends… if they ever saw me… which they don’t, because they all think I am living in an igloo somewhere.
And speaking of business, what do I know? I have never taken a business course in my life! Plus, you know women are not good at business.” (Sadly, I’m not kidding, I told this to myself. Thankfully, I now have blown that internal myth to pieces.)
I went on…
“I have no money for a start-up. I have the money from my day job, but do I really have to use that?”
I have been working 18 hours a day and I hate it. My family hates it. They never see me and when they do, I have a work phone hanging out of my ear.”
I remember clearly just ignoring the calls from clinics, desperate for help and needing help even for one day or a weekend, they would say.
I remember not calling my professional medical friends who I knew would go to a desperate clinic to work… but I would procrastinate in calling them.
Going unconscious is what I call it. Blanking out. Ignoring the call. Just wanting to run away.
That works pretty well during the day, but at night…
One night, a Dream came to me. I dreamed a baby, my baby, was dying because of severe neglect, failure to thrive, they call it. In the dream I was in an emergency room, but not working, just watching as the staff did CPR on my tiny skinny infant that I had neglected and starved half to death.
Horrifying. Nauseating. I woke covered with sweat and not knowing where I was, so grateful that it was “just a dream.”
God had struck me awake with a dream so poignant, so terrifying, that I could not forget it. This dream followed me around for several days, popping into my consciousness and haunting me, but me still pushing it away.
“Why me?”
Back in my day job in Alaska, covering emergencies in a remote clinic, I had an experience that would change my life.
I was orienting a middle-aged PA who had been in Western Alaska covering a clinic by himself. He had been sent there by a company that didn’t care, they had never been to Alaska and was simply filling a contract. This man confessed that he had had no emergency training and while on his prior assignment, just before coming here, he had had a baby brought to him who had been smothered by a father rolling on him in the night.
This guy did not know what to do and did… nothing. The baby died… because of inadequate care. Now remember, I knew how to fix this. I knew how to supply care to these remote locations that would save lives, many lives, and I had said, “No, not me. Why me?”
Now I knew why God had sent that horrifying dream. A little Native baby whose name I will never know had died because of poor care in bush Alaska.
That was the day I said “yes” to a call that God had set before me.
Has it been easy? No.
Has it had challenges? Of course.
Have I done it perfectly? What a learning curve this has been.
Now 15 years later, we are bringing excellent medical care to over 150 clinics in rural and remote locations. In each one of these locations, there is medical care to take care of that sick baby and his frantic parents. There is treatment for a heart attack until the medivac plane arrives. There is someone to handle the tuberculosis that is spreading through Alaska.
I believe we all have an Inner Purpose, a calling to meaning in our lives. Medicine has been that call for me since I was 12 years old… but God had created a willful one in me. It took a long, winding journey with a lot of detours in order for God to get a “yes” out of me. (Sorry, God.)
The challenge I leave you with is this…
In your own journey, in this present time, do you hear a call? Do you hear God asking you to do something that really no one can do better than you? And if you do…
If not you, who?