4 Years In The Making

(This post explains how I became obsessed with the idea of practicing medicine in Alaska.)

A few years ago I spent a month working as a medical student at an small Indian Health Service clinic in Northwest New Mexico. If you have never been to the Southwest you have probably by now seen some of it on the TV series Breaking Bad. The views are devastatingly beautiful. The remoteness and open spaces are awesome and kind of scary. Now imagine being the only doctor working in a 7-bed emergency room for a catch area of 20,000 people in the middle of the desert. You have an x-ray machine but no CT or MRI or echo. If someone decides to deliver you will be the one to do that. You manage alcohol intoxication all the time. If someone comes in with a heart attack or a similar emergency your job is to find out what is wrong really fast with minimal technology and request for a medical jet to transport them to a tertiary center. As a medical student I was working shoulder to shoulder with doctors making calls like that. I even worked with the doctor who found the index case of Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome in 1993 in a young and otherwise healthy Navajo marathon runner. These doctors might as well have been the gods of medicine to me. So when I found out some had practiced in this even more remote and crazy place called Alaska they had my attention. One of the physicians told me about what it was like to work in Barrow (the northernmost US city where temperatures remain below freezing from October to late May) and another one told me about the really long Alaskan winter nights and close knit communities. It was like they were telling stories from a different world but it was all real! I think that was the moment I realized I was going to be a rural medicine family doctor. 

After that I started looking into this place called Alaska and somehow, miraculously, convinced my wife that moving there after residency would be a good idea. We spent a month in Anchorage and a month in Juneau during my residency and I accepted an offer to practice full-spectrum family medicine (that means working in the clinic, hospital, and delivering babies) in Southeast Alaska. We arrived here on September 30, 2013 and today was my first day of orientation. If all goes well I will be blogging about my first few months as a newly minted family doctor in Southeast Alaska. Maybe my wife will lend me some of her photos to add some color to this otherwise drab blog.