It’s a little after 10 in the morning, and Brownie Thomsen is sitting in her kitchen, her feet propped up in a chair as her little dog runs back and forth beneath her. Her fridge is covered in photographs and cards – one hand drawn watercolor wishes her a happy 100th birthday. Thomsen smiles, as she looks out toward Sitka Sound.
She first saw those waters from the window of an amphibious World War II era plane over 75 years ago.
“1949. June 9, yeah,” she says. “I came up on Totem Travel, which was a PBY from Seattle. When I came, there were people with goldfish in jars and people holding strawberries on their laps [in] a big crate. Was kind of interesting. I’d never seen that before.”
Thomsen came to Sitka not too long after graduating from nursing school in Iowa, toward the end of a tuberculosis epidemic that began when Russians first colonized Alaska in the 18th Century, taking a heavy toll on Alaska Native people. The first successful treatment for TB, streptomycin, was discovered in the early 1940s, but the disease didn’t begin to wane in Alaska until the late ‘50s.
Sitka looked quite different when Thomsen arrived in ‘49. There were far fewer people here, her utility bill cost $10 dollars, and there was no bridge. A shore boat was necessary to get to the tuberculosis hospital with more beds than there were cars in town. And for her first few years, the beds were always full.
“The minute somebody left, there’d be another person to fill the bed. I mean, that went in on for several years, and we did surgery all during that time,” Thomsen says.
Thomsen started out working in the surgical wing, located in the old Army barracks on Alice Island. That’s where Thomsen met Dr. James Cunningham.
“I told him that I liked surgery, but I’d never done thoracic surgery. And he said, ‘Well, if you’re willing, I’ll teach you.'”
It was a challenging job dealing with the brutal and deadly disease.
“I remember one patient hemorrhaging. It was a terrible thing,” she says. “All you can do is put them on the side they’re bleeding from and kind of comfort them, because there wasn’t much to do, and suck the blood out.”
Thomsen says she’d do two or three surgeries a day, and that was just part of the work.
“That was back in the days before plastic, and we had rubber tubing for blood transfusions, and filters, and you had to soak the filters in some kind of acid for 24 hours, and then you’d roll the rubber tubing to get all the blood clots out and rinse them,” Thomsen says. “We sharpened needles and washed syringes. We did all of that.”
She’d later work in the pediatric wing, with children who had tb of the lung and bone– treatment that took a long time.
“You had to feel sorry for them, you know,” she says of the children, whose hospital stays were often long enough to warrant a house mother and a school teacher for the ward. Thomsen says they celebrated holidays, and got to spend sunny days outside, but the long-term isolation and time away from their families was tough.
“They had to have some kind of entertainment, like they’d tie a piece of food on a string or something, throw it out the window so a seagull would grab it, and they could pull it in,” Thomsen recalls.
By the late 1950s, TB in Alaska was on the decline. While Thomsen’s memories of TB feels like lightyears from now, TB itself is very much alive and infection rates are on the rise. Alaska has the highest TB rates of any state, according to the CDC.
Now, many are worried that funding cuts by the Trump administration could help spur a resurgence. Thomsen recalls an article she recently read about the cuts to USAID that disrupted treatment and testing internationally.
Having fought TB for many of her 100 years, she is concerned by this trend. When the US helps control TB across the world, it’s reducing the risk of the disease regaining a foothold in this country.
And then it won’t be just goldfish and crates of strawberries that travelers will be bringing with them to Alaska.
“If you happen to go to one of the countries where it’s so prevalent, you should be very careful or be warned about it, because, you know, if you got in a crowd with somebody coughing, you could come back with TB, and then it’d spread some more,” Thomsen says.
“If they don’t stop at it with the way people travel nowadays, it could be back here again.”
