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Healthcare in Bayou La Batre After Katrina

By Andrew Grace, special to Alabama Public Radio

http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wual/local-wual-483737.mp3

Healthcare in Bayou La Batre After Katrina

Bayou La Batre, AL – Bayou La Batre, thirty miles south of Mobile, was hit hard by hurricane Katrina. Of the 2,300 residents who live there, an estimated 2000 have been displaced by the storm. Dr. Regina Benjamin operates a low-income health clinic in Bayou La Batre. The same storm surge that destroyed most of her patients' homes also gutted her clinic. As she awaits word about the future of her practice, she spends her days working at the Red Cross Clinic. Andrew Grace visited her there and has this report.

"How many hurricanes I been through? I been through just about every one of them, just about. The only time water's been on my property is 1916 storm. My grandmother and all of them rode the rooftop. I won't stay again. We leaving. If it looks like it's even coming this way, we're going."

William Zirlott stands in front of his pickup truck at the Bayou La Batre Community Center. He's just finished helping his elderly mother into the cab. Since the storm, the Community Center has become a temporary Red Cross Shelter and clinic. The Smith's house was flooded during the storm, but they aren't staying here at the shelter. Instead, they've just stopped by to see their doctor, Regina Benjamin.

"She's got a portable building that's supposed to be coming in here. She's working on it. Like I say, that's our doctor and we're gonna keep going to her."

Inside the community center, the stage has been transformed into a makeshift clinic. A dozen patients sit in folding chairs beneath a mural of sea horses, fish, and sea urchins. White portable stairs, normally leading toward the stage, have been flipped vertically to provide shelving for the modest supply of donated equipment and drugs. Dr. Benjamin finishes with one patient and the nurse quickly brings another, an older woman from Gulfport, Mississippi. She needs to refill some prescriptions, since she can't get in touch with her regular doctor. But toward the end of the exam she confides there's also something else bothering her.

"I have crying spells and I just can't help it there's some councilors here, have you talked to them at all? Are you interested in talking to them? I think I might be all right."

Many patients who express their mental and emotional problems are reticent to see the handful of councilors who've volunteered their time. But these problems persist in an increasing number of patients Dr. Benjamin sees.

"The first patient I saw this morning, her husband died about a month ago, and she's gone through this storm and she's just a wreck, and she doesn't know what to do, her kids it's just too much for her, it's overwhelming her. They don't know where they're going to live. They're sleeping here, or their sleeping in a tent, right outside, or they're sleeping in those homes that've been wet. And while they say they cleaned them up, the sheet rock in the wall holds in all of that moisture, and now it's mildewing, and it's mildew everywhere. And it's not a safe, a medically safe place to be."

"I'm Dr. Benjamin...."

The next patient is a Vietnamese woman named Ann who speaks halting English. The Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian population accounts for one out of three residents in Bayou La Batre. Most, like Ann, came to work in the seafood industry.

"I open oyster. Me and my husband open oyster. But right now, I got no job. I don't know what I do."

Dr. Benjamin writes Ann a prescription and tells her to go to the CVS. For those who can't afford the medicine, she has asked the pharmacist to just bill her. She says she'll find some way to pay for it.

"Okay, good luck. Thanks. Bye Bye."

For Alabama Public Radio, I'm Andrew Grace.

"Okay. Next."

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