4-22-2012

Last week Monica burned her hands while she was cooking dinner.  Thankfully, everything turned out ok. I was able to finish the gravy and it turned out just fine.    Oh yeah, even though Monica’s hands hurt badly that night, they turned out to be ok with no blistering.  They’re still bright red and sore, but she’s able to get back into the kitchen perform her magic.  She’s also able to continue cooking.  Which is much better, because I can only witness somebody finding a quarter behind my ear so many times before it gets tedious. 

When Monica burned her hands, it was a cruel reminder of our lack of healthcare in our village.  The first thing we did was get her hands in cold water, which is fine since we have plenty of cold water.  Now what?  We can’t take her to the hospital because we don’t have one here.  Our Internet is not working so we can’t check WebMD or the baseball scores.  Talk about bad luck.  We do have a very rudimentary health clinic in town, but it isn’t open at this time of night.  Besides, they wouldn’t have any baseball updates anyway.  We’re on our own.

If there is a life-threatening emergency, we can call 911 and get help here.  The problem is that the help will have to fly here from Bethel, about 1hr away.  We have no paramedics in the village to assist with medical needs.  So, if we are in need of medical care, it will be over two hours before we can get to a hospital.  That is if the weather is cooperating.  Many times the weather will not allow planes to land here at our small airstrip.  In that case, we would have to travel to Emmonak, 20 miles, to a larger clinic that is usually staffed by a nurse practitioner.  And the travel would have to be by boat if the river isn’t frozen or by snowmachine if it is. 

We are very aware of our situation out here.  Every little pain in my chest causes me anxiety.  The words heart attack immediately form in my head.  Then I panic and wonder if my left arm is tingling.  I can reassure myself that I’m not having a heart attack after I remember heart attacks don’t usually happen while people are sitting still, watching TV and I calm back down.  Then I’ll have a brain tumor, or as most people call them, a headache. Monica can talk me down from that one. 

So we just have to be careful while we are here.  We purposely have dull knives so we don’t cut ourselves.  We’ve discontinued our pogo stick lessons.  And Monica has promised to be more careful while making gravy.  I do understand that less gravy should lead to less heart anxieties for me, so maybe we can both be safer.  Especially since I quit eating gravy while practicing my pogo hopping.