Day 30 - Sitka, AK Day 2

After yesterday’s travels and the stressful housing predicament I decided to sleep in late today. I woke up and went for a run around the hospital complex. The diet office has free coffee and tea all morning so I took advantage of that to go along with my free breakfast. I showered and watched a little bit of the World Cup and then headed to the hospital to meet with the OB nurse.

The OB nurse in Sitka is named Valerie and she was incredibly nice and accommodating. She showed me around the clinic and agreed to send patients my way after they checked in at the nurse’s station. I was a bit disappointed to learn that today was going to be a slow day in the OB clinic with only 8-10 patients. On a normal Tuesday there are anywhere from 20-25 patients seen, so I got a bit unlucky in this regard. I spoke with Valerie and she agreed to distribute the survey to patients next week when the schedule is back to normal. This will be extremely helpful as it will allow me to increase the number of people who get to add their input. This was very nice of Valerie and I am extremely appreciative that she has agreed to do this. I’ll pick up the completed surveys when I return to Sitka in two weeks.

After meeting with Valerie I headed back down to the diet office to get my lunch. The food actually isn’t terrible and I feel like an elementary school student again – walking around with my carton of orange juice and cookie covered in saran wrap. Each meal has vegetables, fruit, an entrée, and dessert. Plus, I get unlimited juice, coffee, milk, and tea. There is a TV in the doctor’s lounge on the third floor of the hospital so I went up there and watched TV while I ate.

Following lunch I went down to the OB clinic and set up my table with brochures and my giveaways. Since there were so few patients today I got a chance to do a lot of reading on my Kindle. Even though it was a slow day, the information that I got from the patients is always meaningful. The age range of women seen in the OB clinic is very large in Sitka as well. I saw a girl younger than me all the way up to a women in her 40’s about to deliver her ninth baby. Large families for the Tlingit natives are normal as most begin having children in their teens and continue on through marriage. There is also not a large emphasis on any form of birth control and the idea of abortion is looked upon in a very negative light throughout the state. Plus, when it gets dark, cold, and rainy at 2 PM in the winter months, what else are you going to do?

I met with Martha Pearson and Litia Garrison in the afternoon for what turned out to be an extremely productive and helpful meeting. We discussed ways in which their organization, Wisewomen, has distributed patient education materials in the past few years. Essentially my project with OB patients is reaching the same demographic as Wisewomen so what they have found to be successful or unsuccessful should hold true for me as well. We talked about the need for strong local presence in our materials and how it is particularly important to not be at all condescending towards the Native Alaskans. It was also interesting to hear how their incentive based mailings only produced marginal results. Even with the incentive of a $25 gift certificate only about 30% of the patients responded to the Wisewomen surveys. They also showed me a series of postcard mailings that they are implementing in a few months that they hope will be more successful. The meeting gave me many great ideas for how to reach our patients in new, creative ways. I’m excited to share my new ideas with Dr. Hort to see what she thinks.

I went to grab dinner at the diet office. I have become friendly with the man who hands out the trays so he likes to throw extra dessert on my tray. I decided not to take the bike back into town today because it’s a bit cold and windy. I have never really been much of a bike rider, but riding a bike over a bridge could be the scariest thing I’ve ever done. As a result, I am going to take advantage of the internet and digital cable and just relax. It’s been a fun few days in Sitka and I’m excited to come back here in a few weeks. I now know my way around the town so I will be sure to explore the trail systems and fun, tourist areas next time I’m in town. If it’s nice tomorrow I would like to head to the Alaska Raptor Center where they rehabilitate birds and then set them off into the wild. There is also a bear fortress where you can see brown bears in a natural, but controlled, setting. If the weather is cold and rainy again I will head back to the dental clinic to check out some more bulk denture making.

That’s all for today…