No provider

Getting specialized medical care can sometimes be a challenge when you live on a small island. Certainly, visits to specialists or any sort of surgical prodedure or equipment-centric testing (xray, MRI, etc.) involve a long drive, since none of those things is an option right here at home. Standard, more typical care, however, usually is not a problem. Until this week.

The Health Center was - until recently - staffed by two people who can diagnose conditions, order lab/bloodwork type testing, and prescribe medication: Dr. Moore, and Gail Covington (I think she's a PA, or LNP...something along those lines). They worked on a rotating schedule - Dr. Moore for a week, then Gail for the next, etc. Unfortunately, Dr. Moore recently decided to move on to a practice in the Triad area. He will be greatly missed here!

What that meant, this week, was that there was no provider on the island. (For emergencies, our wonderful paramedics and EMTs were - and are - of course still available and able to take excellent care of any urgent situation.)

What that meant for me today was about half of the day spent going to Hatteras and back for a Dr. visit for the entire family, since we all now have the awful upper respiratory issue that I started with last weekend (and we discovered Connor has an ear infection as well, which explained the high fever he had on Wednesday which led me to call one of our aforementioned wonderful paramedics for advice in the middle of the night). So I'm just plain tired this week...from being sick myself, from not sleeping well because of needing to check Connor's temperature occasionally during the night, and from spending a chunk of Thursday going to another island for medical care.

Would all of this make me even consider going to live somewhere else? Not for a minute. Like many of the challenges associated with living here, it's all worth it in the long run. It's not like we're sick every day, so the good days more than make up for the inconveniences!

Hope you have access to all the care (medical and otherwise) you need, wherever you are...