Martina Lauterbach, Transcript Section 3

Community Health Aide Program Project Jukebox

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KAREN: Back to the radio traffic, what did you do if you couldn't reach the doctor?

MARTINA: I guess waited until, you know -- we had some standing orders, you know, for emergencies. You know. Then. And so you know we would use our judgment, you know, what to do, you know, with the patient.

And you know, after working and seeing a lot of diseases and stuff, you know, you kind of, you know, learned how to recognize, you know, what could be wrong with the patient. And we had a lot of respiratory. And ear infections and, you know, if you saw maybe a sore throat, you know, you would kind of figure out, you know, what you could do. Because we didn't do throat cultures at the time, too.

KAREN: Oh.

MARTINA: Yeah. I mean, you know, it was like if you had pusy tonsils, then, you know, you would automatically give penicillin.

KAREN: That was one of my questions is what kind of equipment and medicines and things, what did you have available to you to treat people?

MARTINA: Well, we had, you know, the basic. We had a stethoscope. We had an otoscope to look in the ear. Stethoscope was, you know, for listening to the heart and lungs. We had a hemoglobometer, which was, you know, you stick a finger and then, you know, check their hemoglobins that way. You know, it was battery operated.

KAREN: Like it pricks the finger?

MARTINA: Yeah, prick the finger and get -- you had a little slide that, you know, you had to mix before you put in the meter, and we got hemoglobin that way. And then we had dipsticks for urine.

KAREN: Uh-hum.

MARTINA: And then, you know, we had only a couple of types of antibiotics at the time. You know, there wasn't much. We had triple sulfa, penicillin, maybe ampicillin, erythromycin, and then we had a lot of ear drops, you know. Cortisporin for, you know, ear infections. What else did we have.
You know, it was, you know, limited. You know, medication.

And then if the patients got prescribed medications from Bethel, then we would -- if before they run out and stuff we would make sure that, you know, they didn't run out and order, you know, the medications from Bethel. And they would, you know, come into the -- or they were addressed to the clinic and we would keep them in the clinic until the patient needed more of their medicine. This would be for, like, blood pressure, or a lot of it was I think mostly blood pressure because we didn't have diabetes then. You know.

KAREN: Yeah. So what, that makes me think about nowadays diabetes and cancer are very prevalent.

MARTINA: Uh-hum (affirmative).

KAREN: And what was it like back then? What sort of things were you dealing with mostly?

MARTINA: Like I said earlier, there's a lot of respiratory, ear infections, fevers, you know, children with seizures, you know, from -- I guess most of it was from febrile or fever.

And you know, emergency-type things, if we had emergencies, then we took care of that.

And just one, you know, example was like in the fall time, there was, you know, people, men that went out hunting, moose hunting. And this one person, you know, got accidentally shot in the groin, or in the groin, and the day was, you know, pretty blistery.

And they had a dog team, they didn't have a snow machine. And they were using dog teams. And it took them hours from where they were hunting and the closest village was Emmonak, so they, you know, of course, then they came there.

And by the time the person got there, you know, with the other people that went out hunting with him, you know, when he got there, he was pretty shocky and didn't have a blood pressure, or if he did, it was very, very, very low.

And they did a tourniquet but it wasn't, you know, like a real tourniquet, you know, type thing to stop the bleeding. And of course, you know, he did not make it, unfortunately.

And you know, had -- we were going to get a plane, you know, to take him after talking to the doctors in Bethel. And we did CPR on this guy for about an hour and, you know, he didn't, you know, make it.

And those were the type of emergencies, you know, that I dealt with. I mean, there wasn't many, but that was one of the ones that I can really remember.

KAREN: Sticks in your mind.

MARTINA: Sticks in my mind.

And then there was another, you know, pediatric patient that I had that had pneumonia. And he was, you know, getting the antibiotics two times a day but -- you know, the IM penicillin, and his hemoglobin was very, very low.

And the weather was bad and couldn't get out, and so, you know, he didn't make it either. That was -- those are kind of hard on me because I was still young at the time. You know, when I was a health aide.

KAREN: So how do you deal with those kinds of things, or how did you deal with those kinds of things?

MARTINA: I guess, you know, I had some pretty good people, you know, in the village that, you know, supported and, you know, the families that didn't blame me for, you know, having, you know, their -- one of their family members die. And so that -- I think that helped. And it was hard, but I honestly can't remember how I dealt with it. And...