Susan La Flesche Picotte by Diane Bailey

Author:Diane Bailey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aladdin
Published: 2021-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

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Susan had her hands full during the winter of 1891–1892. A flu epidemic on the reservation kept her away from home all day, making house calls to people who were too sick to come to her office. She left before the sun came up and did not return home until late at night. Then she fell into bed to get some sleep before getting up the next morning to do it all over again. From the fall of 1891 through the spring of 1892, she traveled hundreds of miles across the reservation, seeing more than 640 patients.

One evening a young man appeared at Susan’s office door, desperate for help. He explained that his wife was gravely ill, and Susan promised to come the next day. When she arrived in the morning, Susan saw that the whole family was stuffed into a tiny one-room house. Her patient was lying on a pallet in the corner, sick with both flu and tuberculosis.

Although the house was neat and clean, Susan could see that the family was suffering. They were so poor, they did not have enough money to buy food. The sick woman had not eaten anything for four days. She did not even have enough strength to speak. “When I saw her I did not think she could live through the day,” Susan recalled later.30

After making her patient as comfortable as possible, Susan went home. There she packed a bag with milk, eggs, and beef. Then she turned around and rode the six miles back to the sick woman’s house, where she made dinner for the family. Susan knew the woman was too sick to recover and would soon die. But Susan didn’t abandon her. For two weeks Susan traveled every single day to visit her—twice a day if she could. Some days she even stayed overnight. For the last two weeks of her life, the woman had a constant friend in Susan.

Another time, Susan paid a call to an elderly man who was also sick with flu. When she arrived at his home, she found him lying on the floor—sick, hungry, and completely alone. “No one was there to speak a word of sympathy even, to cheer him in his pain and loneliness,” she remembered.31 Susan started to cry when she saw how he was living—but her tears didn’t last long. She had work to do. Under her care the man recovered.

Unfortunately, there just wasn’t enough of her to go around. Susan was on the go more than seventy hours a week, and it was hard work. She had to travel miles through the bitterly cold weather, caring for desperately sick people. Her mind was always on getting to the next house, and the next house after that. There was always a next house.

Sometimes Susan could visit her sickest patients only once every few days, even though she wished she could check on them three times every day. One man told Susan that he was grateful for her attention but worried about her going out in terrible storms.

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