“ Being a physician and having the training I have, I felt like I had been given a lot. I wanted to help make access to health care more just and fair.” Rebecca McAteer, M.D. ’08 Pennsylvania. The year before she moved to Nepal, she finished an academic faculty development fellowship in medical humanities at Georgetown University Medical School in Washington, D.C. A woman of deep faith, and long intrigued with Asian culture (“I even belonged to the Asian cultural society in high school!”), Dr. McAteer joined United Mission to Nepal (UMN), which assigned her to Tansen Mission Hospital. The 60-year-old, 165-bed facility is located in the Palpa District of western Nepal, a nine-hour car ride from Kathmandu. She made a two-year commitment to the hospital, and spent three months studying intensive Nepali—four hours a day, five days a week. The language lessons helped, but what ultimately made her fluent was working and living in Nepal. “It’s amazing how you learn the language by hearing it constantly,” she said during a phone interview from her apartment in Tansen. “It’s full immersion, sink or swim.” Shortly after her arrival in Nepal in September 2013—and once she had the language under her belt—she began logging 12hour days, five to six days a week. She rotated between the pediatric, maternity and adult medical units, working with a team of physicians to treat a steady overflow of patients suffering from hypertension, diabetes, stroke, myocardial infarctions, viral gastroenteritis, pneumonia, iron deficiency anemia, urinary tract infections, rheumatoid arthritis and more.
CULTURE SHOCK Although she tried to prepare herself, she was nonetheless struck by the prevalence of infectious diseases—typhoid fever, leptospirosis, meningitis, malaria, tuberculosis and HIV—many of which are not even routinely treated in the U.S. “It’s difficult to see patients who are suffering and dying from potentially reversible or preventable things that you don’t have the resources to fix,” she lamented. She was also dismayed to see illnesses such as cancer,
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diagnosed at advanced stages because of lack of access to health care; or heart failure, stemming from late presentations of untreated strep throat or congenital heart disease. In her blog, WhereGodCalls (https://wheregodcalls.wordpress.com), she described an 18-yearold woman with “severe systolic heart failure and a massive MCAterritory ischemic stroke with hemiparesis—the tragic, preventable sequela of longstanding rheumatic heart disease.” But her greatest shock came at 11:56 a.m. on April 25, while she was on a spiritual retreat with colleagues in Pokhara, about four hours north of Tansen. “We began to feel the earth shaking and the windows rattling. The ground was swaying and the water in the pool was sloshing over the edges,” she recalled. “Having grown up near trains and under plane flight paths, my first thought was, ‘There must be an airplane overhead or a train nearby.’ Within a second we all realized it was an earthquake.” She couldn’t sleep that night. “My heart was still pounding,” she recounted. Early the next morning, after a 5:30 a.m. aftershock jolted her awake, she and fellow Tansen physician Josh Riggsbee, M.D., responded to a request from UMN to partner with a team from the International Nepal Fellowship (INF) and travel to the Gorkha district, near the epicenter of the earthquake, to assist in medical relief efforts, and assess structural damage and humanitarian needs. A jeep brought them to Pokharidanda and Mailun, villages where 80 to 90 percent of the buildings had been completely demolished. They set up outdoor medical clinics, conducted triage and treated 450 patients who suffered mild-tomoderate crush injuries inside collapsing stone houses, or from falling rocks outside. “The vast majority of problems were anxietyrelated aches and pains,” she noted. “Anyone who was severely injured had been taken out by a road that could accommodate vehicles.”