Weeks 6 & 7: Long Winter Nights and Mad Dog Bites

This is a bit of a late post this week, but I do have a few stories I've been saving up to share.

First, a weather update:

Sunlight count: There is none. Well, no official Sunrise or Sunset since December 4th. But we do get some dusky light and occasional amazing pinks and oranges across the clouds from about noon to 4pm.  The sun will rise again January 5th 2014 at 13:50h!

Temperature: All over the place. As I write this, it is -32C with the windchill making it feel like -43C. Only 5 days ago it was -1C, but with winds gusting up to 77km/hr!

Braving the 77km/hr winds on the way home from the Northern Store.

Last week I went on my second community visit, this time to Aklavik for two days. Aklavik is a community of about 600 people located about a 20 minute flight south west of Inuvik. In the winter, it is connected by an Ice Road - which just officially opened for traffic this morning!

The Cessna C-208 Grand Caravan - a single turboprop engine plane that seats 10. This is a real Limo compared to the little 4-seater plane Adam flew in last month to Aklavik.

Located on the Peel Channel, a major waterway in the Mackenzie Delta, and on good trapping routes, Aklavik became a centre for trading and transportation in the area early in the 20th century. A Hudson's Bay trading post opened in 1912, and it was the home base for government operations in the northwestern arctic until the 1950s, when the town flooded one too many times - apparently there is a bad flood about once every 10 years, but even on a good year everything gets a little soggy when the Peel overflows its banks in the spring. The government decided to move its operations, including the residential school, to Inuvik, and expected the community to in essence, "shut down" - people would either follow the government jobs to Inuvik, or fade back out onto the land. That didn't happen. Although the community shrank considerably, it persisted. The official motto of the town is "Never Say Die." Seriously.

The Aklavik Health Centre

We ran a busy clinic at the health centre, but had a chance to unwind and swap stories with the nurses over hot coffee, homemade soups and bannock for lunch.

A last peak at the sun out the window of the health centre at lunch on December 3rd. There were boys out playing road hockey behind this shed all afternoon, in -25C temperatures. So very Canadian. 

As we chatted over lunch, one of the nurses mentioned that there had been two dog bites in the community the previous week.  The physician I was travelling with is the public health officer for the region, whose responsibility it is to track infectious diseases and public health risks, one of which, of particular concern here, is Rabies.  She asked whether they had identified and tied up the dog to observe. The nurse admitted that she just found out this morning that the dog had been shot by its owner.

"Oh no," she said, all distraught. "Oh I hope they didn't shoot it in the head! I bet they shot it in the head. Oh no."

Now to me, shooting a dog that has just bitten two children doesn't sound like the craziest of things to have taken place in the north. Why would she care just where exactly the dog was shot?

Apparently, the standard procedure after a dog bite is to tie the dog up, watch it for 10 days, and if it doesn't exhibit any abnormal behaviours then the person can avoid taking the rabies shots. However, if the dog has been shot, then the head needs to be cut off, sent to Yellowknife, where the brain will be examined, intact, and tested for rabies.  Otherwise, if the rabies status of the dog is unknown, the bite victim needs to take a series of four rabies vaccinations over 2 weeks, not the nicest of interventions to receive.

So, this story gets better. Warning: gruesome details ahead. It turns out that the body of this dog has been taken to the town dump. Someone needs to go retrieve the body, cut off the head (which it turns out, thankfully hasn't been blown to bits), put it in a bucket, and send it to Yellowknife on the plane. This doesn't really fit into anyone's job description, but one of the nurses gets voluntold for the task.  That evening we find out that the dog's head was too large to fit in the bucket, so she had to wrap it in a garbage bag. When she called down to the lab in Yellowknife, she was told it had to be transported in the bucket, and so she should go ahead and "cut off the face of the dog to make it fit."  Which (good for her), she refused to do. They sent up a bigger bucket the next day. How incredibly disgusting.

Farewell to Aklavik

I've really enjoyed getting to see the surrounding communities on these clinic visits. As residents, we only get to accompany the docs on the shorter flights to the close communities, but there are several settlements north of here on the arctic ocean that I would love to visit some day. I took care of a patient from Sachs Harbour, which is a tiny Inuvialuit (Inuit) hamlet of about 100 people on the southwest coast of Banks Island. It is the most northerly community in the Northwest Territories. My patient was an elderly lady in her 80s, admitted with a pneumonia, and was accompanied to Inuvik by her great-grandson, who was an incredibly inspiring young man. The night I met them, he was wearing a Western sweatshirt! It had been given to him by a friend, he had never actually been to Ontario, but when I asked him about it we began chatting about his life. 

He was in his early twenties, and had been raised by his great-grandmother almost from birth - he called her 'Mom'. He proudly showed me the beautiful sealskin gloves and kamiks (boots) that she had sewn for him, and described how her own wolf-skin kamiks were made from the first wolf he ever 'harvested' (such a nice term for hunting they use here!).  She had obviously passed on her love of the land and traditional knowledge to this boy and he was passionate about it. He couldn't wait to get her out of hospital so they could share a meal of "real food" - they were having caribou for dinner the night I discharged her. Try telling an Inuvialuit elder who you think might be aspirating (not swallowing well i.e. choking on her solid foods) that she should stay on a "thickened fluids and pureed" diet... not a chance!  

When they left, the boy gave me a hat with a polar bear print and "Sachs Harbour" written on it, as a thank you for caring for his Mom. It was really touching. And inspiring to see a young man staying not only out of trouble with alcohol but remaining in touch with the traditional way of life, trapping, hunting, and eating mostly off the land - the only things they buy at the store in the winter are sugar, flour, tea and salt! Hopefully someday I might be lucky enough to get the chance to see his community.

Circumpolar map - with the North Pole in the centre. This is on the floor at the Inuvik Airport. Circumpolar map - with the North Pole in the centre. This is on the floor at the Inuvik Airport.