 |
Laura McGladrey
WMI Instructor, Nurse Practitioner |
Laura McGladrey was
working alone in a Dominican Republic medical clinic
when she really began to see the need for international
wilderness medical training. The nurse was treating
people who walked in with severe diabetes, chest pains
and injuries from car accidents. “I’d think,
what am I supposed to do out here without any help?” she
recalls.
An instructor for the Wilderness Medicine
Institute of NOLS (WMI) and a certified nurse practitioner,
McGladrey got used to being the only ambulance in
town. “At
NOLS, our point of reference is the wilderness,” says
the nurse. “But for [many countries] everywhere
they are is wilderness medicine.” It’s
all about improvising, says McGladrey, who even had
to use a surfboard, towels and duct tape to transport
someone to the hospital during her recent five-month
stint in the Dominican Republic. “We called for
an ambulance,” she says of the incident, “but
they said the ambulance was gone. Nobody knew where
it was.”
In the U.S., emergency medical response
means taking care of someone until the EMT crew arrives.
This isn’t the case everywhere in the world.
Many developing countries, says McGladrey, don’t
even have an ambulance system. And once patients do
arrive at the hospital, things are different there,
too. Food isn’t provided at most hospitals in
the Dominican Republic, and patients also have to buy
their own medical supplies, including sutures, antibiotics
and lab work. The reality, says the nurse, is often
that if you can’t afford these services, you
can’t have medicine. “We saw fungal infections,
lice, tooth abscesses,” she says. “If you
get a tumor and can’t afford to have it out,
you just leave it.”
McGladrey, 30, has been an
instructor for WMI since 1999 and has combined her
nursing practice with teaching wilderness medicine
abroad. She has taught for WMI in Patagonia, training
local guides and outfitters, and also organized a
Wilderness First Aid course in Spanish for Dominican
guides. This training, she says, isn’t just for the mountains.
In Patagonia, the army often performs rescues, but
they’re not trained in medicine. The challenge
isn’t just getting patients out of the wilderness,
but getting them all the way to the hospital.
The nurse
believes these training programs are making a difference. “The
guides in Chile are becoming the people in that community
who know about health care. They become the specialists.” Meanwhile,
in the Dominican Republic, the nurse says the guides
she helped train are now the most concentrated group
of medical professionals in their town.
McGladrey,
whose mother is a nurse, says she grew up “pushing
wheelchairs.” But she hesitates to tout the difference
she’s made for patients, even though she no doubt
has made an impact in her years in the medical profession.
McGladrey, however, will admit to teaching other people
how to save lives. “I think we WMI instructors
don’t always get to be out saving lives, but
when I look back at students I’ve trained and
hear their stories, I have a sense that there’s
this whole army of people who are out saving lives.”
In
her medical work, the international traveler has
to reconcile with the emotional aspects of remote medicine. “I
really came to appreciate that there was more [to my
work] than people hurting,” she says. “I
struggled to think that when I left, I don’t
know who’s manning the clinic — there’s
still people sick, there’s still people dying.
But in the midst of meeting people, you’re in
relationships with people and loving them.”
McGladrey
has memorized a quote from Helen Keller that keeps
her going through the tough times: “I’m
only one, but I am one, and just because I can’t
do everything doesn’t mean I won’t do the
little part that I can do.”
And in the end, says
the nurse, “the fact that I’m here is better
than no one being here.”
-Kerry Brophy
|
