Flood Pain
IAM staff report on a historic week that saw the worst of nature demand the best of humanity.

Medical Miracles on the Trail
Along the trail, Lewis and Clark perservered over many diseases.

On the Trail of Lewis & Clark
While the country celebrates the Voyage of Discovery launched by President Thomas Jefferson and led by Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, western Iowa tells its own part in the adventure.

It was a usual Iowa winter—snowing whenever you thought it shouldn’t and deeper than you thought it could—but I remember it well because World War II was just over and I’d begun my first medical practice in rural Iowa.

I was a city boy, the kind who knew addresses by streets and numbers, not by north, south, east, and west. In Iowa, the compass directed people, as well as references to corncribs, trees, barns, and chicken houses. Lit brightly at night to fool the chickens into staying awake so they’d lay more eggs, those little wooden huts also fooled this doctor. “Go two miles north on the gravel road and turn east at the big red barn on the first mud road. I live one mile down, and I’ll have the yard lights on,” a patient would say. To a native Iowan, those directions were as precise and accurate as today’s global satellite positioning systems. Not to me. I made more than one false house call on healthy chickens after discovering that what I thought was a yard light was, in fact, a chicken house.

One memorable day started out just like any other—snow falling, a northwest wind blowing, and snow drifts piling high. I received a call from a patient who was pregnant and waging a terrible battle with nausea and vomiting. She lived about 15 miles outside town on a farm that was unusual by Iowa standards. Neighbors used to say that the barn was getting shorter every year. The farmer had a fondness for alcohol, so he just let one end of the barn fall in while he used the rest for storage and hay. The house had no heat or running water and only two smoky kerosene lamps for light. But the mother-to-be and her unborn baby appeared well, so I gave her an injection and left some medication with instructions to call me if she wasn’t feeling better.

I made it back to my office just before the snow blocked all travel, but another call came in from the hospital 26 miles away, so I hurried along the snowy highway to deliver another baby. Exhausted by the time I got home, I flopped into bed and an immediate, deep sleep. It seemed only a few minutes later that the phone rang. It was the husband of the patient I’d seen earlier. “My wife is still sick, and I’m feeling sick myself,” he slurred. I thought he’d been drinking again, so I said, “Give your wife some of the medicine I left, and call me back if she isn’t getting better.” “I will if I can,” he replied. “Even the wife’s mother and the kids are sick.” Then he hung up.

Wearily, I lay down again. Then I sat bolt upright: “My God, those people are being gassed! They’re all going to die, and I can’t possibly get there in time to save them!”

This was in the days of party lines, when switchboard operators knew everyone’s business. So I picked up the phone and cranked until I got “central” on the line. “Do you know who lives across the road from the Jones’s farm?” I asked. She did. “Then call them and have the husband get over there, throw open all the doors and windows, and get the family out,” I said. “Quick! They’re being poisoned by carbon monoxide gas!”

It’s too bad we no longer have a “central” in today’s telecommunications system, because the switchboard operator did a wonderful job. She woke the neighbor and called the ambulance and a doctor who lived nearby. By the time medical help arrived, the family was lying on the snowy ground, covered in blankets. The neighbor had gotten there just in time, as he’d found them unconscious on the floor.

I often wonder what stopped me from falling back asleep that night. Perhaps a guardian angel—theirs or mine. What I know is that just as I put my head back on the pillow, the farmer’s words, “Everyone’s sick,” conjured an image of an oil-fired space heater in my patient’s bedroom. As well as letting his barn fall down by the inch, the farmer had also failed to clean the stovepipe before winter. He didn’t notice that a bird had built a nest in the pipe, blocking it completely and allowing carbon monoxide to fill the entire house.

The story does have a happy ending, as the whole family recovered and the mother had a healthy baby. The farmhouse has electricity and central heat now. At last report, though, the barn was just about gone.

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Charles Griffin, Jr., was a family practice and trauma center physician in eastern Iowa for some 40 years. Now living in North Carolina, he tells friends, “I am no longer tired…just retired.”