Medicine Men: Extreme Appalachian Doctoring by Jourdan Carolyn

Author:Jourdan, Carolyn [Jourdan, Carolyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

Daddy was amazed at how quickly a patient mastered the difficult process of learning to speak again after having his larynx removed in cancer surgery. It usually took months, but this fellow did it in a matter of weeks.

When Daddy asked him how he did it so fast, the man replied,

“I got 10 kids and I cain’t write!”

Groundhog Day

I’ve never seen any merit in the supposedly deep philosophical quandary that asks, “If a tree falls in a forest and there’s nobody around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Of course it does. How self-centered can you get? What kind of people think nothing could possibly happen in a place unless a human happens to be there?

Whoever these philosophers are, they should move here and maybe they’d get some real insight. In the Smokies it rains a lot, which makes for profuse vegetation. And we have hundreds of square miles of trees growing on steep hillsides. When these trees get tall enough to put a strain on their roots and it rains some more and maybe the wind blows at sixty miles an hour as it often does, they fall. Whole sections of forest will topple and a tangled wall of full grown trees will go roaring downhill in a landslide.

I feel sure it makes a mighty racket every time, regardless of whether any philosophers are there to hear it or not. Anybody who’s ever hiked in the mountains can ponder this issue when they’re confronted by a twenty foot tall jumble of debris strewn across the trail they’re trying to walk.

This constant downhill migration of water and dirt and trees can make it hard to keep your yard looking nice. And sometimes the mess gets even closer to home than your yard.

The hardships faced by doctors working alone in isolated areas can be compounded by unexpected factors that no one in their right mind could ever anticipate. Difficult travel, serious medical emergencies, no backup, or only rudimentary supplies and equipment aren’t all they have to deal with. In the southern Appalachian mountains, complications can come from startling angles.

There’s a need for the physician to have a total acceptance of humanity – an in your face commitment to help, no matter what they find. This requires a tolerance for standing point blank with dire poverty, blood, body fluids, and no telling what else, as I learned from Dr. Evans in this worst case scenario.

“I spent my first years as a doctor in Harlan, Kentucky. It’s hard to believe the things you used to see there, the way people used to live, especially in the coal mining areas.

“Once I was called out to attend to a woman who was having a baby. She lived in a one-room house with a dirt floor. Actually, it wasn’t dirt, it was mud. It was spring and had been raining a lot and mud from outside had run in under the walls right into the living area.

“Can you imagine walking around in mud inside your own home? I was shocked.

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