by Glenn Taylor
Northern News Services

INUVIK (Dec 19/97) - Judith Rowe is celebrating 40 years as a nurse. And as she'll tell you, health care in the North has changed radically since she first set down in 1968 in Hall Beach.

Rowe came to Canada from England in 1966. At the time, she said, "the government was just clamoring for nurses to come North." Like many British nurses, she soon found herself on a plane, heading for tiny Hall Beach.

The first person she met when she got off the plane was her future husband, Bob Rowe of Boreal Books. It was love at first sight, and the two wed shortly after.

In the meantime, there was lots of nursing work to do in the community of, then, 197 people. "The first night, about 18 dog teams tuned up at sunset, and I nearly jumped out of my skin," said Rowe. "I had no idea what was going on!"

The community's brand new nursing station was lost in a fire before it even opened. Rowe's home was instead converted into a health-care centre.

Nowadays, nurses routinely send patients by medevac to southern doctors. But it wasn't that way in the early days, said Rowe. "Nurses were more or less expected to cope," said Rowe. "Back then, we handled everything from birth to death."

There was only one phone in Hall Beach, which Rowe often used to speak to doctors in Iqaluit and elsewhere. But even that was gone one day, when a snowmobiler drove over the cable, knocking the station into silence.

In those days, a flight came every second week to deliver vegetables and other perishable food goods. "There was no milk, but there were cartons and cartons of cereal under the floor space. I couldn't get rid of the blooming stuff!"

Toilets were by way of honey buckets, and water was taken from ice blocks from local lakes. With the scarcity of fresh water, nurses were only able to bathe about once a week.

Tuberculosis is making a quiet comeback to the North, but in those days there was nothing quiet about it, said Rowe. The disease was rampant and nurses spent a good deal of their time ensuring residents took their medicine.

Minor ailments, like colds and coughs, were non-existent, mostly because the people were still living off the land then, and common complaints were largely shrugged off by the rugged people.

In 1970, Rowe returned to the North for a brief stint at Resolute Bay. With oil and gas activity running at a feverish pitch, many southerners were flying into the community, bringing with them a host of communicable diseases.

The Asian Flu caught like wildfire in the community, and Rowe was working 20 hours a day to fight back the flames of the potential deadly ailment.

About 80 per cent of the community was suffering from Asian Flu, and she raced back and forth between houses to make sure people took their medicine. Back at the nursing station, she boiled kettles to keep the humidity high enough in the room to comfort children in beds suffering from the disease.

Nutrition was also a problem in the community. "Many of the men were working for the oil companies, or on the DEW line, so they were receiving decent meals," said Rowe. "But with them working and unable to hunt, many of the women were not getting proper nutrition."

When Rowe returned to the North, and Inuvik, in 1993, she found that health conditions had improved tremendously since those early first years here.

"The life expectancy of people was about 45 then."

She credits better nutrition and health care delivery for the improvements in basic health