Family Doctor

One "cool" thing about living on a very small Base without a hospital ... JB can truly be a family doctor. They do a lot of small procedures at the Clinic during regular hours (vasectomies, stitches, circumcissions, etc.)

In addition, one of the docs on Base is on-call during all times. If you are at home and have an emergency, you call the paramedics on Base who either dispatch immediately or transfer you to the doctor on call. The doc on call can then decide to go up to the Clinic to see the patient, send them to the ER, or tell them to wait until the Clinic reopens again the nest morning.

And sometimes, emergencies come to your house.

We get knocks on the door quite frequently. These are usually from our good friends or from people who live near us.
 
Case in point. Our backyard neighbor was outside with his four year old daughter; she fell off her bike and cut open her chin. We saw it happen. Father runs her over to JB. Since it is after hours, there is nowhere to take her except the Turkish hospital.

There are two Turkish hospitals off-Base, and while care received there is fine, travelling into downtown Adana and dealing with people who speak a different language, is something none of us Americans enjoy.

John keeps a lot of "doctor stuff" at the house for just such an emergency. (If you remember, he stitched up a neighbor boy's finger and our own Isaac a few months back.) He told our neighbor that being as it is on her face and she is a girl, he probably wanted to take her to the Turkish ER and get a plastic surgeon to do the stitches. However, since it was under her chin and they had a house full of guests over for a BBQ, our neighbor decided to go ahead and let JB do it.

So JB tried. But this little lass was having nothing of it. He couldn't even get the numbing agent into her. Because it was on her chin, her screaming stopped him from being able to do any work on her, despite three adults holding her down. (Dr. Linda, the pediatrician, just happened to wander by while all of this was happening and helped.) At one point the little gal even yelled, "You are trying to kill me!" cracking everyone up. JB told her parents that she'd need to be knocked out for the procedure so off to Achibadem they went.

Achibadem tried to stitch her up too without knocking her out. But she was having nothing of them coming near her either. Achibadem didn't have the ability to knock her out and so she had to return the next morning. (Not sure how an ER didn't have anesthesia, but hey, this is Turkey -- thus the reason her parents wanted JB to do it on the kitchen counter.) I ran into the little girl after her morning adventure at the Turkish ER. She said, "I let them do it!" Her Dad laughed because she was unconscious! Of course she let them.

Some doctors mind being bothered at home. And while sometimes these events occur at innoportune times, it is wonderful to live in a community where we are all working together to live isolated and very far away from the life we all know.