Thought on Medevacs – Part I

I have just arranged for my 6^th medevac – and I will clarify that as did Hamlet  - “not where I am medevacked but where I medevac someone else”. 

Needless to say at 6 medevacs, if there were a Boy Scout badge in Medevacking, I think I would have earned it by now.

I have some musings on medevacs but can not dive into them or the most recent story without jumping back to my first med-evacuation in July of 2000, back before any of us had cellphones here and the medical care available was even more basic than it is now.

The 4^th of July turned out to be less of a holiday than usual for us. One of our members here came down with a severe case of cerebral malaria, which can be fatal.  We had to arrange an emergency flight for her and her husband and two small children. They live 16 hours from Bamako by car in a town where there is no health care available.

The Mission Aviation Fellowship plane brought them in at midnight on July 4. I followed the ambulance to the best hospital here in Bamako.  The next 2 days were very frustrating as untrained SIL members sat with her and her husband round the clock to provided basic nursing care. The hospital here is a far cry from the ones back home.

On July 5, we began organizing a med-evacuation to Paris. I was on the phone all day the next day to the US, arranging things with the insurance company and her family. A gulfstream jet came that evening and took our patient and her family to a hospital in Paris, but not before we had a bit of a scare. We were at the hospital, 45 minutes before the plane was to arrive and we discovered that no ambulance had been arranged. After frantic calling, [using the pay phones, no cellphones at that time], we asked the hospital if we could use their ambulance – a beat-up station wagon, with no staff other than our own nurse. They had to call the man who drove it – he was at home. And we had to shell out money for gas. Eventually the ambulance blazed away, with me and the family following behind in a pickup – boldly weaving through oncoming traffic behind an ambulance with no siren or lights – just a horn.  We lost the ambulance at one point and figured that it was ahead of us, until it passed us from behind. We found later that it had stopped for gas!!

At the airport, we drove out onto the runway, but there was no plane! I had them drive the ambulance out to one small plane on the runway and I ran across the tarmac to see if it was the medevac plane. It wasn’t.

I felt that we should get the ambulance out of the sun and off the runway, but it would not start. We had to push-start it!  We waited for the plane which eventually came. Fortunately things went smoother in Paris, where our patient got top-notch care and eventually returned to work in Mali for several more years. 

Tomorrow: Thoughts on Medevacs Part II