TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Disaster response teams often see the atypical. Cases in point: A woman with a respiratory condition so severe she needed regular breathing treatments, yet the tubing used to provide her medicine had been used to siphon gasoline. A blind, 86-year-old New Orleans-area evacuee, with an extensive infection covering her entire lower leg, was in need of prompt medical treatment, but her primary request centered on obtaining a drag off a cigarette.

Those are two examples of some 15 people treated by The University of Alabama’s Capstone Rural Health Center staff who recently traveled to Hattiesburg and Poplarville, Miss. as medical volunteers assisting in hurricane relief efforts.

The three-person staff of the UA center, located in the Walker County town of Parrish, capitalized on the clinic’s Labor Day closing to provide medical treatment, supplies, and medicines to sick and injured storm victims. Kathleen Thomas, a nurse practitioner and instructor in UA's Capstone College of Nursing, was joined on the medical relief trip by the center’s nurses, Peggy McGraw and Tammy Snow, and a Tuscaloosa paramedic, Charles Stewart.

“I was proud to be able to go and do what little we could,” Thomas said. “I feel like we did help some people, and I wish we could have done more. There are people in the areas that were not hit the worst, and they were sort of overlooked.”

Overlooked, yes, but not without some relatively serious medical conditions and, considering the lack of electricity, telephone service and traveling ease, many of the sick and injured were unable to reach their primary care physicians, Thomas said.

“We took antibiotics, blood pressure medicine, insulin, medications for those with breathing problems, and we took some injectable antibiotics,” said Thomas. “We were able to give some of them as much as a month’s worth of their meds.”

The volunteers also traveled south from Hattiesburg, through the devastation, to Poplarville, Miss., finding an elderly Chalmette, La. evacuee inside a storm-damaged home.

Thomas said treating this 86-year-old, who said she had hidden, with a pillow over her head, inside her assisted living facility’s locker room as the storm passed, was the most memorable part of the trip.

“She had a huge hematoma. It covered her entire lower leg from her knee to her ankle.” Hurt during the hurricane, the blind woman was uncertain how she sustained the injury, but one thing she was certain of…she needed a cigarette.

“I told her, ‘that’s the last thing you need,’” Thomas said. “She said, ‘don’t worry, honey, they only give me one puff.’” Thomas cleaned and treated the injury and provided antibiotics.

Thomas said the group made the decision to travel to the areas to help after overhearing of the need for medical assistance in that area from a patron at the Northport Diner the previous day. The medical team traveled with a group from a local church to a Hattiesburg church, converted into a make-shift shelter, where food and supplies were provided.

The Capstone Rural Health Center, which opened in the summer of 2001, was made possible by a $1.2 million Health Resources Services Administration grant to the UA Capstone College of Nursing. Dr. Jeri Dunkin, a UA professor of nursing and holder of UA’s Martha Saxon Memorial Endowed Presidential Chair, is the center’s project director.