Tricia Cushman

Elizabeth: So, you trained as a physician assistant, and that included some travel. Tell me about that.  
Tricia: That first rotation that I had that involved travel was in Nome, Alaska, and it was during February and so it was very, very cold, dark and windy. I got to work in the main hospital, which in the town of Nome is, I guess, about 3,000 people, not very large at all, and it may even be smaller than that. But I worked in the emergency room, in urgent care there. And at times, I got to go out on medevac flights to surrounding villages. I flew to a village called Shaktoolik and I remember that was my very first dealing with an individual who had a gunshot wound, and we flew that patient to Anchorage on a medevac flight. The flight took about two hours or so, because it was a small plane. It was me and a couple of nurses just keeping the patient stable until we could get them to the hospital. Another village I flew to was a village called Wales. And this is the famous village where you can actually see Russia from the United States. And really one of the only places – you could actually see Russia from Wales. And that was a really, I remember a very, very windy, snowy, cold medevac. I was impressed with that pilot who was able to land. He wasn’t flying with visual. He was flying with instruments to go pick up this individual who needed attention from a very small island called Diomede off the coast of Wales. Diomede is a village in a small native community. And so this person was being helicoptered from Diomede to Wales and then for a medevac to Nome. And then ultimately, I think he was medevac-ed to Anchorage. The lengths that need to be taken to get people to more advanced medical care in these small communities, that made quite an impression.
Elizabeth: Were you alone on the plane with the pilot or did you have an instructor there?
Tricia: It was the pilot and me and a physician and some nurses. So, yeah, I was part of the group. And then I also did fly to White Mountain, which is another stop on the actual Iditarod dog mushing trail. Last main stop before Nome, so that was fun.
Elizabeth: That is so cool.  
Tricia:     We landed the plane on the airstrip, which is quite a ways out from the village itself and snow machines came and picked us up, and I rode on like what seemed like a kiddie plastic sled attached to the snow machine to get into the village for medical care. So, that was fun. Adventures for sure.