There are some stories from my years with Wilderness Medical Staffing that I’ve heard more than once and still never get tired of hearing. Maybe it’s because they remind me why we started doing this in the first place.
Recently, one of our earliest medical providers shared some of his memories from the years he spent working in Alaska. He has allowed me to share these stories.
Greg has practiced medicine in many places since then, but when he talks about Alaska, it’s obvious that part of him never really left. He misses it. And interestingly, when he started telling me about the experiences that have stayed with him all these years, very few of them were actually about… medicine. How funny is that.
I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me. That’s often what happens with remote medicine. You go because you’re a healthcare provider, but you come home carrying something much bigger. That way my story too.
Learning to Respect the Cold
When Greg first went to Alaska’s interior, he was what Alaskans call a “cheechako,” a newcomer. Everything was unfamiliar: the landscape, the culture, the isolation and, of course, the cold.
His family embraced village life pretty quickly, though. During their first year in This site, his wife even entered and won the beginner dogsled race, mushing seven miles by herself down the frozen Yukon River! He learned one of his first lessons about Alaska a little differently.
One night, he was rushing from his house to the clinic to see a patient when he realized he had forgotten his gloves. It was more than 50 below. When he reached the clinic, he grabbed the metal doorknob with his bare hand and immediately froze to it. There was no easy way to pull himself free without leaving skin behind.
It was a painful introduction to just how unforgiving the environment could be. At 50 below, something as ordinary as forgetting your gloves can suddenly become extremely dangerous.
During his time in the Interior, he would see plenty of frostbite and hypothermia from the other side of the exam table as well. He once helped save an Elder who was brought into the clinic so profoundly cold that she was unarousable. Those were certainly memorable medical experiences, but when we talked about what had affected him most deeply, he kept returning to something else: the relationship the Elders had with the land and everything living on it.
When the Wild Roses Bloom
For example, one of the things he learned from the Elders in Yukon country was to watch the wild roses.
They told him that when the wild roses begin to bloom, the fish will begin arriving and spawning in the streams. The timing changes slightly from year to year because nature, of course, does not operate according to the dates we put on a calendar. But I just love that generations of living with the land had taught the Elders which signs to watch out for.
It says something important about what happens when you practice medicine in a place like rural Alaska. We go to school for years to study science, earn degrees, complete clinical training and accumulate all of this knowledge that qualifies us to take care of other people. Then you arrive in a remote community carrying everything you know and discover just how much you still have to learn.
The people around you understand the land, the animals, the seasons and survival in ways that cannot necessarily be learned from a textbook. You may have arrived as the medical provider, but if you’re paying attention, you also become the student.
That willingness to learn from the people you are there to serve is one of the things I believe makes remote medicine so extraordinary.
Six Killer Whales
Before his time in the interior Greg had lived in Southeast Alaska. One day, while on call, he was paged to the home of an Elder who lived only a few houses away.
He had walked past the home many times before and noticed the hand-carved killer whale totem in the front yard. The Elder was a member of the Killer Whale clan, and the totem reflected that connection.
When the provider arrived at the home, CPR was already underway. They continued trying to save the Elder for some time, but eventually there was nothing more they could do. He remained at the home afterward to pay his respects before eventually walking the short distance back to his own house.
The following morning, he looked toward the bay and saw six killer whales splashing and breaching in the water. During all his time in Southeast he had seen plenty of other whales, but he had never once seen orcas there.
Not until that morning.
A Night Beneath the Northern Lights
Another experience came while he was working near the eastern border of Alaska, up against the Yukon Territory border where an Elder—a great-grandmother—had chosen to spend the end of her life at home. Family members were traveling in from different villages to be with her, and the provider had been helping care for her there.
At one point, he needed to return to the clinic for additional medication. He gathered what he needed and began driving back toward the home when the Northern Lights appeared. By then, he had seen the aurora many times, but he described what he saw that night as unlike anything he had witnessed before. The lights were unusually intense, dancing across the sky in extraordinary colors. As he drove beneath them, he slowed the car and had an overwhelming sense that the woman had died.
He never found out for sure, but that moment stayed with him, too.
When he talks about his years practicing in remote Alaska, these are among the experiences he remembers most clearly. They are stories about life and death, certainly, but they are also about his growing understanding of the people he served and their relationship with the natural world around them.
This Is the “Why”
After all these years, I sometimes think stories like these explain Wilderness Medical Staffing better than any mission statement I could write. Yes, we place healthcare providers in rural and remote communities. That is what we do. But it isn’t the whole story of why we do it.
You may arrive in a remote community believing that you are going there to help. You bring your clinical training, your experience and all the skills you’ve spent years developing, and those things are desperately important. But if you stay long enough, remain curious and allow yourself to become part of the community, something begins to happen in the other direction.
The community gives something back to you that will fill your soul entirely.