Alaskan Bush Adventure I 11-20-23

Don's Blog   Alaskan Adventure I

This Thanksgiving week we will go back in time to when I was a kid doctor in Anchorage. I hope you will enjoy my memories helped along by images I took at the time. Think of it as my version of a blog stream.

It is the spring of 1968 and I am at work in St Louis in the McMillan Hospital operating room doing a long head and neck case with my mentor Dr Joe Ogura.  I get a phone call from my wife and break scrub to hear, "We're going to Anchorage!" I am about to go on active duty in the Air Force during the Viet Nam War. We are more than relieved as we have been worried about going to war - my previous Chief Resident, Bill Diehl, also in the Air Force, has spent this last year at Cam Ranh Bay, Viet Nam. We are excited and energized to go to Alaska on active duty.

I have been a Berry Plan USAF Lieutenant, then a Captain, and will soon be  a Major. I attended two weeks of Officer's Training at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas which included many hours of lectures and some nighttime adventures.  In one exercise I was carried on a stretcher by other trainees who were ten years younger.  After  the training I return to St Louis. I pack up the Suburban with Jan and our two housebroken kids, and orders in hand, drive west and then north. The trip to Anchorage takes 13 days and the boys are no longer housebroken.

We end up with three  Otolaryngologists at Elmendorf Hospital in Anchorage. This allows me, an opportunity to attend at the ANMC (Alaska Native Medical Center). The Alaska Native population has an extraordinary number of patients with ear disease in need of corrective surgery. Most of these are children. I end up volunteering, with the Elmendorf Commander's blessing, and perform three ear operations every Tuesday morning for two years. Thank you Colonel Vandenbos. Another part of this volunteering adventure includes travel to the back country, the Alaskan Bush, where the patients lived.

   Bush Trip to Nome and Kotzebue 

 

In the spring of 1969 we fly to from Anchorage to Nome and then north to Kotzebue. 

We take off from Anchorage International Airport and head north in a small plane on wheels. I fly with two nurses. One is a nurse anesthetist and the other a surgical nurse. Our plan is to do multiple tonsillectomies on  native children diagnosed with chronic tonsillitis. Leaving Anchorage we fly over the rivers and the tundra.

We fly low and can see the plentiful wildlife including a small group of caribou 

 

and even a large grizzly bear about to cross a stream.

We arrive at Nome where we will change planes to Kotzebue, where the operations will occur. 

Nome is located on the Norton Sound of the Bering Sea. It was incorporated in 1901 and was once the most populous city in Alaska. In pre-history, Nome was home to Inupiat natives. The area came to Western attention in 1898, when three Nordic-Americans discovered gold on the ocean shores of Nome, prompting the Nome gold rush. Within a year the city went from non-existent to a population of some 10,000. Offshore gold mining is still a major economic force in Nome.