I flew to Aniak on Saturday on a 6 seater airplane. I could barely climb into the plane! No stairs! It was a pretty flight and I was able to take pictures without being sick, and receive texts and play online. Here are pics of the flight! I met my laboratory manager for the first time at the airport. She took me to the store and then to the house in some weird vehiclew with flaps for doors. Like a four wheeler with a tiny truck bed and a top. This is the house I stayed in and it was across the parkinglot from the clinic. I spent the weekend with the house all to myself. I watched the Super Bowl and cried at the end. I played games and enjoyed having a private bathroom and a big bed.
I started m week of training at the clinic Monday. It was a slow week because they had no provider, so no one to order blood tests. However, during my first hours there, we had a huge emergency, a snow machine accident with a teenager, and I got to see how an emergency is treated when you have no doctors or anything, just health aides and teenage first responders. This is the article: Read me! He spent 8 hours in the clinic with no morphine, screaming. The medevac plane came, but they brought no supplies, so hey left and came back. It was madness. As the article says, his dad was withh im on the snow machine, but left as soon as the snow machine hit the SUV because he had been drinking. He left his kid bleeding in the snow and did not even call the ambulance. A health aide was on lunch walking and saw him. The Dragon Slayers are teenager who are first responders and ride with the ambulance when there is an emergency because there are so few trained people. They brought him in, along with the health aide. As far as I know, he lived. Read the article. I learned how to run all the machines and learned the computer program. I left Friday afternoon and made it home without any weather delay. I like Aniak. It is pretty and they have trees and cars. I stayed five nights in this hostel in Bethel, Alaska. It was an interesting experience. I have never seen a place like this before! It is a place where patients in town for tests can stay, or family members visiting. It is right next to the hospital and you have to be doing something in the hospital in order to stay. It is $100 a night, which is better than the typical $200 a night every other hotel charges. Not that I paid for it. This is my room. It really is just a bed and a dresser. There were four community bathrooms with showers down the hall and a community kitchen and living room with a television and VHS tapes. You were not supposed to eat in your room. The walls were paper thin so I could hear phone conversations and such. They did run out of hot water one night when I was showering though, and that sucked. The place was clean though and cleaned by hospital cleaning staff. However they did not do daily cleaning of your room. My time here i just read and had food delivered to me. The bed was okay and the room was warm. I was happy to get to Aniak and have a nice large bed again. This is NOT about me!!! Just something I asked about.
Since there are no doctors or hospitals in the villages, and some do not even have health aides or nurse practitioners, if you are pregnant, you are shipped off to Anchorage or Bethel at 36 weeks. You stay there until the baby is born, away from your home and family. If you qualify for Medicaid, they have a brand new facility you can stay in for those weeks. If not, you have to pay for hotel rooms or find someone to stay with. Alaska natives get free health care anyways and most qualify for Medicaid or know people in town, so they have places to stay while they have babies. This plane was a 6 seater. I was unsure how to even climb into it! However, much to my surprise, I preferred this plane because it is the only plane that does make me sick with those awful motion headaches I get. I could even take pictures out the window and such with no issues! Plus these planes are supposed to be safer in case of an accident. I stayed at this little house the entire time I was in Aniak. I stayed alone for the weekend and then had various roommates throughout the week. I saw the Superbowl and had my heart broken into a million pieces because of the game. I cried that night because of the loss by my beloved Seahawks . I worked in the lab and learned how to run all of the tests, and did finger sticks, venipuncture, drew blood from hands, blood cultures and using syringes. I was told I was the fastest learner ever with the lab machines. I have no previous experience with running tests, but after being shown once, I pretty much got it figured out. I am kind of slow, but can do it.
It was a good trip, but I am glad to be home with my boyfriend. I missed him so much. |
AuthorI am a Colorado native who moved to Alaska for love and adventure. This journal is going to track my journey. Archives
March 2017
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