My weekend in Seattle was great! We had nice warm weather--perfect for a corn maze and it was fun to see everyone. Upon returning to Anchorage, my system was in for a little shock. It finally snowed! So, after I returned to my car I spent the next 10 minutes scraping off all of the snow and ice that had accumulated on the car (the only problem is that with the explorer I can't reach to the center of the car so about a food of the windshield always remains icy.)
Today at work I went on a little field trip, which was pretty interesting. We got to tour the PICU at Providence hospital. It was pretty neat, because all of the walls, including ceilings, were painted with murals of Alaskan scenery. Each wing had a different theme. My favorite was the underwater wing where the ceiling had the bottom of a kayak and a bunch of fish.
We also heard about a number of the patients there. This one infant was in an iron lung. (At an urban hospital they would have simply put him on a ventilator and sent him home until his lungs matured enough to breath on his own, however, because he lives in the bush, where electricity isn't predictable, he was kept in this archaic bubble.) From what I could tell his family has returned home to their village and he has been living in the contraption for the last 6 months of his life. Medicaid has run out so the hospital is keeping him there out-of-pocket. There are so many issues in rural health care that you'd never think about when serving an urban population.
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Every once in a while Paula tells us about babies from Alaska who are flown to Seattle for care because no hospitals in Alaska have a level 4 nursery or the general level of care that babies can get if they make it to Seattle. Poor baby!
Speaking of hospitals, we visited Grampy last night and will go back there this evening (once we eat our pizza). He's in a good mood and seems like he's feeling better, but they've got to figure out how to get the crap out of his lungs.
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