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“Is that a DC-3?” I asked a lady during a meeting a few days before my first day in medical school in 2003. I’d been looking through some pictures of the rural medicine activities done through the school, and this picture stopped me.
“Yes, it sure is! Have you ever heard of Remote Area Medical?”
I hadn’t.
“You should call them,” she continued. “They have a big event coming up this weekend just up the road!” She went on to tell me about how the organization, based in Knoxville, TN, coordinated events in our region, connecting volunteer doctors, dentists, eye doctors, nurses, and others with patients needing their services, during 1-3 day weekend events. She also mentioned that the founder, Stan Brock, known by many from the TV show Wild Kingdom, was a pilot, and used airplanes such as the DC-3 in support of RAM’s activities.
To say I was intrigued was an understatement. I was beginning a completely new chapter of my life by moving to Johnson City, TN, for medical school. I’d gotten rid of most of my possessions, left work and family behind, and was looking for something to do. I expected that I could use my nursing experience to volunteer.
So I called the number that she had given me.
Stan Brock answered, in his measured British brogue. I was a little surprised and more than a little intimidated that I was speaking with Mr. Brock himself. After I introduced myself and offered to volunteer as a nurse, he kindly let me know that the deadline was past for volunteering in a Virginia expedition with an out-of-state nursing license. “But,” he offered, “we do need volunteers for other work that doesn’t require a license.” I asked him what sort of work was needed, and he listed off several jobs, one of which was working in the “eye trailer.”
My first real job, when I was 15, had been in an eye lab, making eyeglasses. So when I told him I’d be happy to do that instead, he said “Super! Come on up to Wise, and we’ll put you to work!”
I asked about the aviation work with RAM, mentioning that I was an active pilot, and he really started warming up to the conversation. He told me about the DC-3, and then mentioned that RAM operated a Cessna 206 in the country of Guyana.
Now, to understand how this might have felt to me, I must explain that, after nursing school, I had spent two years in university studying aviation maintenance and flight for the purpose of becoming a mission pilot in Guyana, a country on the north coast of South America that most people couldn’t pick out on a map. For several reasons, my life trajectory had changed and, instead, I had ended up going back to nursing, and, ultimately, to medical school, but the desire to help people had not abated, and my attraction to using airplanes in that pursuit was still very much intact. By the end of that conversation, the hook was firmly set and I was sold on the vision of Remote Area Medical.
The Wise expedition was everything I’d hoped. The tricks of the eyeglass-making trade returned easily, and I made probably as many glasses in 3 days as I’d made in the entire time (one summer) that I had worked in my first job. I was tired and my fingers were sore, but I had found my place. Each of us in the eye trailer worked a position, pulling lenses, marking, blocking, scanning, edging, beveling, or final assembly. At the end of the expedition, I had worked every position.
That was the first of many local expeditions I participated in over the next two years. Nearly one weekend each month was dedicated to volunteering with RAM, and I actively recruited other medical students to go along. We formed a core of volunteers who would work together in the eye lab, and I developed warm friendships with many other volunteers and HQ staff, as we would see each other most months.
One evening in early August of 2005, in the first days of my 2-month surgery rotation of third year, I got an unexpected call from Stan. “Wayne, I don’t know if you’ve been watching the news, but this big storm is hitting New Orleans and I need you to help us out if you can.”
“I don’t know if I can, Stan, but I’ll check and get back with you,” I responded. The next day, I explained to school administration the opportunity Stan had presented, and asked if I could make it work out. They assured me that they would work with me, and that I should just go.
So I did. It was an odyssey that I never saw coming. After we had manned the phones and lined up a large contingent of volunteers from around Knoxville, we got them on their way on private aircraft to Baton Rouge, and then, after sleeping at RAM HQ (an old school building that RAM was leasing for a dollar a year from the City) and taking a Stan Brock shower (a water hose in the courtyard of the school), I loaded the RAM Cessna 206 with two volunteer doctors, their bags, and as much cargo as we could fit, and we launched for the disaster zone to catch up with our volunteers there.
The next four weeks provided an inflection point in my life that I never could have imagined. On my arrival, I was tasked with organizing teams of doctors and nurses and getting them into the field to provide care for Hurricane Katrina victims. It was an extreme stretch for me, as I had no real skill in this area, but somehow things worked. Each week saw a different group of volunteers coming down, and different needs. For the first two weeks, we based out of Walker, LA, and then moved our operation to Mississippi for a week while Hurricane Rita barreled toward Louisiana. As the storm made landfall in western Louisiana, we queued up another group of volunteers and convoyed west out of Baton Rouge in two RVs and a van, under police escort. We arrived in Cameron Parish near Lake Charles so soon after the storm had cleared that we were still contending with downed power lines.
During the first and the last of those weeks, an anesthesiologist named Dr. Warren Bagley joined us. I didn’t know much, but I was certain that we weren’t going to be doing any surgeries, so I asked him “Where would you like to be assigned?”
“You can put me anywhere,” he responded. And so it was. One of my favorite memories from the Katrina/Rita response was of Dr. Bagley on a curb by a telephone office in Sulfur Springs, LA, operating a drive-up clinic, while open-carrying a .38 spl revolver on his hip. He was a gentle giant, and I gained a lot of respect for him while watching his care for patients.
Before that experience, I had a fairly dim view of anesthesia. Most of the guys in my nursing class were there only because they wanted to be nurse anesthetists, and that had turned me off, because they seemed only driven by the money available. But Dr. Bagley helped me see the field as something different, something that would give me a strong background in medicine while using manual skills to make immediate impacts for patients. What I’d seen before as a limited profession that people just go into for money now appealed to me as an extension of everything I’d already learned as a nurse.
And so it was that because of Stan Brock, because of a storm, and because I said yes, that I started down a road that led to my spending a month in 4th year with Dr. Bagley’s residency program, where I ultimately ended up for residency.
During my first several years of volunteering, I also invited other friends to volunteer on expeditions. One of them was Kristy, a girl I had gotten to know when I was a clinical nursing instructor. We had become friends in the interim, and later, while I was on a RAM trip to Guyana, out of pocket and far away, she realized that my offers of a non-professional relationship might be worth considering. We were married a few months later and returned to Guyana on our honeymoon to do a PAP smear clinic in Lethem. It was not your typical honeymoon, for certain!
When graduation came, I was still a couple of weeks short on credits, even with credit for the Guyana honeymoon, so my last class of medical school was a 2-week RAM trip to Tanzania. Kristy and I both saw patients there, and we returned with the team to Arusha by way of an epic safari in the Serengeti and the Ngorngoro Crater.
Our last big adventure as RAM volunteers was a trip to Haiti in response to the cholera outbreak in December of 2010. By this point, Kristy and I had bought a small airplane, and when Stan invited us to be part of the expedition, we decided to fly it down. It was a quintessential Stan Brock trip. The DC-3 was already in Port au Prince when we landed, and part of the team was lucky enough to bypass the road trip and hike to the remote village where our clinic was to be held by skydiving in the next day. The team that jumped in spent the next few days building a bush airstrip for future air evacuation use, while others provided medical, vision, and dental services to hundreds of villagers. An added twist to this trip was that we were accompanied by Ann Curry and a production team from Dateline NBC, who documented the expedition. Elections were held while we worked, and in the predictable violence that followed, Ms. Curry and some of her team were stopped by road blocks as they were leaving ahead of the rest of us. Because of concern for our own safety on the trip back to the airport, we were extracted by helicopter straight to the ramp where our little plane awaited. We overnighted in Exuma, where I had the most glorious shower of my life. A week in the Haitian bush will leave you feeling pretty nasty!
It is said that soldiers don’t fight for their country, but for their brothers in arms. In all of the stories above, and in all of the stories I have left untold, the truth is that while I started with RAM because of the idea of helping others, I stayed with RAM because of the people I worked with. We became a family, with Stan Brock as the figurative father. We loved him for the inspiration his story gave and for the opportunities his organization created for us to improve the lives of people. We loved him for the people he attracted: people with hearts of gold and a desire for service.
The last thing I did as part of RAM was to work toward making changes to ensure that the organization would live on after Stan. I’m pleased to know that these efforts appear to have paid off, and I hope that RAM continues to make a difference in lives, both of patients and of volunteers, for many years.
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Previously published on Facebook.
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