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 KOTZEBUE--The phone rang at about 9:30 on a Thursday evening in mid-September.
It was a nurse, calling from Mt. Edgecumbe High School in Sitka.
Our son Trevor had been throwing up all day in sick bay.
“We’ll be bringing Trevor over to the emergency room shortly,” the nurse explained. “We’re concerned he’ll get dehydrated.”
Less than three weeks before, Trevor and his twin sister Deirdre had stepped on the afternoon jet in Kotzebue—their windswept, treeless hometown in Northwest Arctic Alaska—heading for their freshman year at Mt. Edgecumbe, a state-run boarding high school in Sitka nearly a thousand miles across the state in Southeast Alaska.
As we did with their older brother and sister before them, we sent our 14-year-old twins to Mt. Edgecumbe to broaden their educational horizons.
The school nurse characterized the transfer as a routine precaution. Indeed, Trevor might even get sprung soon enough for school in the morning and cross-country running practice with his teammates the next afternoon.
But a physician at Sitka’s tribal hospital, Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium, called us at midnight, dashing those hopes.
“We’re going to keep Trevor overnight and run a CAT Scan in the morning,” she said, as we both listened on speaker phone.
Our daughter Tiffany, who would soon be returning to college, flung open her bedroom door as soon as the doctor started describing Trevor’s condition.
“You’re going to be alright, Trev,” we assured our son.
By the time we hung up, Tiffany was sobbing.
The next morning, we emailed Tom Pennington, a former colleague in Kotzebue and now an education professor at University of Alaska Southeast in Sitka. We recounted the doctor’s prognosis—Trevor’s condition was not likely a typical school-related bug.
Just before noon the following morning, a surgeon called to say the hospital was preparing Trevor, with our permission, to remove his appendix immediately, before it burst.
We cannot describe the frustration that even if we had tried, we could not have traveled to Trevor soon enough.
Meanwhile, when the admissions director from Mt. Edgecumbe heard about Trevor’s plight, she had rushed to his side, where she would stay before and after surgery, later bringing him books, balloons and a milkshake.
She would tell us later by phone: “Trevor looked up at the doctor with those beautiful blue eyes just before surgery and asked, ‘When am I going to be able to run again?’”
That evening Tom Pennington emailed us an update: “Just got back from the hospital. Ol' Trev is looking SO MUCH BETTER than earlier today. He's lost that green color and now looks like a pretty healthy guy. He's smiling, talking, and seems pretty darn good.”
Tom also emailed a photo of Trevor in his hospital bed, taken while talking to us on his cell phone after the surgery.
“Worry not, he's doing well,” Tom reassured us. “I'm proud of him. No whining, no complaining, and polite to a fault.”
The following week in Kotzebue, we recounted Trevor's ordeal around town.
“It’s lucky it happened in Sitka and not Kotzebue,” one local resident told us. ”He may not have made it otherwise.”
Maniilaq Health Center in Kotzebue can perform neither surgery nor CAT Scans.
Even a medevac flight to Anchorage might not have saved our son’s life.
We share this story not as a personal saga but because Alaska voters face perhaps their most important U.S. Senate election in history this Nov. 2, after which we will send Joe Miller, Scott McAdams or Lisa Murkowski to Washington to represent us.
The late Sen. Ted Stevens understood Alaskans getting their fair share from Washington to develop basic infrastructure in our young state, including in rural Alaska where a routine medical operation still can make the difference between life and death.
Some Alaskans might be wondering why rural Alaskans feel “entitled” to improved services. Let us remind our urban Alaska friends, who just received their Permanent Fund Dividend, that rural Alaska has been creating wealth and bankrolling Alaska’s wants and needs, rural and urban, for decades. Rural Alaska generously shares its resource wealth—from Prudhoe Bay to the Red Dog Mine to tourism, commercial fishing and more—with urban Alaska and the nation.
Let’s choose the right senator to send back to Washington who will make sure our children, elders, and others throughout Alaska can depend, for example, on reasonably equal access to health care.
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