Hidden Hurt

The Healing Fields

VIDEO & PHOTOS: Hundreds of uninsured and underinsured Americans flock to Wise County, Va., every year to seek treatment at a makeshift field hospital operated by the Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps.

Yates tried to control the disease by carefully watching her diet. But that strategy didn't work. Because the Yateses live on pension, Social Security and day-care income amounting to about $38,000 a year, she worries about the cost of insulin, more than $70 a month, and the test strips for blood sugar, $70 more.

Teresa Gardner and the Health Wagon have helped Yates manage her disease. But her blood sugar has remained dangerously high, in spite of medical counseling, her careful eating habits, and her regular use of insulin.

"I told Teresa: 'I can take five units or 50 units. It doesn't help,' " Yates says. Gardner, too, has been mystified. Yates knows about the terrible toll of diabetes. "There is a lot of diabetes in our family," she explains. "My uncle was a diabetic. He lost his legs; he lost his eyesight."

Then there was one of Lonnie's cousins, Yates says. "She lost her legs, her arms, her eyesight. She just had a torso left."

In the dark moments before dawn, as the three-day torrent of humanity begins, the volunteers prepare themselves. "Please, God, give us the knowledge to help these patients," prays the Health Wagon's operating director, Karen O'Quinn.

Brock is waiting at the gate of the fairground. He begins calling out numbers that people have been given as they have arrived. There are about 1,500 people today, seven or eight abreast, drowsy, almost ghostly, as far as the eye can see.

One of an army of Lions Club volunteers, barrel-chested Greg Hart from Winchester, Va., keeps the line moving with his clear voice: "Don't let anybody charge you for anything. Everything here is free. Ladies, if you are here for the first time, we have a mammogram van. If you haven't had a mammogram, have one. My mother, who is up there," he says, gesturing to the dark sky, "would recommend you have one. She would be down here if she'd had one. If you've got a bump that might be skin cancer, or a pain you don't want to tell anybody about, there is a doctor here who wants to hear about it."

By daybreak, people are moving into a barn to check in at long rows of tables. Volunteers at computers ask questions and take vital signs, creating charts for each patient, determining what tests they will need.

"The object is to diagnose and solve as much as we can, because we only have this one shot at them," says Claudette Dalton, the medical director at Rockingham Memorial Hospital in Harrisonburg, Va., who helps run the Wise event.

Linda Yates sits down at one of the check-in tables.

"Do you see a doctor?"

"The Health Wagon."