Written by Steve Hull

During the last decade BJ and I have made numerous trips to Haiti with medical and dental teams setting up clinics in remote villages. In February 2001 fellow classmate Gay (Lange Scott) served with us as nurse provider treating patients and with the help of a translator diagnosing all kinds of illnesses she would not normally see. While she is a crack infection control nurse at Memorial Hospital, leprosy, malaria, intestinal parasites, and scabies are probably not part of her daily routine.

You would have been proud of her, watching her work alongside the doctors, doing minor surgery, delivering babies, or asking old men about their bowel movements, and I’ll bet if prodded she would show you her leprosy pictures. Nurse Gay diagnosed an outbreak of giardia and she thought that given more time she could have, by asking people where they were from, traced the disease up the local stream to its source. I never considered for a moment that she might be high-maintenance, and she proved her adaptability by sleeping on the floor in tents, taking showers under a cold trickle, and riding the brutal dusty roads of this 3^rd world country in the back of a truck. She spied the glowing eyes of a large tarantula on the wall of her room and didn’t even scream.

Non-medical people like me work in the pharmacy or assist the doctors and dentists with their patients. One day I got to assist nurse Gay with her work.

“Farm boy,” she would call, “Fetch me four chloroquine tablets for this sick lady.”

            “As you wish,” I would quickly reply.