Editor’s note: this is the first part of a two-part story. Part two will run in the Thursday edition of the Daily American Republic.
ASCENSION ISLAND — Poplar Bluff native Lara Christy spent many years trying to find the right balance between work and life. Now it looks like she may have found it in the middle of the south Atlantic Ocean, on one of the world’s most remote islands.
Christy arrived on Ascension Island in mid-April to work as a nurse. The island is one of the more isolated locales in the world and has roughly 800 residents.
“I worked as a registered nurse for 10 years and then became a nurse practitioner,” Christy said. “I’ve been working in that capacity for an additional 10 years. For many years, I’ve been trying to find a way to achieve a work/life balance that allows me to be healthy and to take care of myself, as well as my patients. The ‘work hard, play hard’ model is something that I’ve been trying to achieve.”
The year 2020 brought many changes to Christy’s life. In addition to dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, she lost her father, longtime Poplar Bluff physician Dr. John Christy.
“I returned home to Poplar Bluff for several months to care for my father as he was in home hospice,” Lara Christy said. “That contributed to my re-evaluation of my life and my goals. When I returned to North Carolina, I was told that due to the pandemic, my cardiology job had moved 90 minutes away to another office.”
Christy commuted for several months while she looked for another option.
“The pandemic has been devastating and burdensome to many health care providers, and I found myself looking for something new and fresh that I could do,” she said. “Between the pandemic and the loss of my father, I needed a change to give myself the time and space to heal and avoid burnout.”
One of Lara Christy’s whitewater kayaking friends — who is also a remote paramedic — pointed her in the direction of Ascension Island, which sits just south of the equator, between Africa and South America.
“She has been rotating three months on, three months off, to Ascension Island for almost a year,” Lara Christy said. “One day, on a whim, I searched to see if they needed any nurse practitioners, and they did.”
Ascension Island has an auxiliary airfield that is shared by the United States Air Force and the Royal Air Force of Great Britain.
“The U.S. military base has a medical clinic where I’m now employed,” Christy explained. “I live on the base, and I’m enjoying the simple lifestyle with no commuting.”
Ascension Island is about 1,000 miles from the coast of Africa and 1,400 miles from the coast of Brazil. The nearest island, Saint Helena — known for being the place of Napoleon’s final exile — is 800 miles to the southeast.
Airplanes from the United States visit Ascension every two weeks to resupply the island and take military base personnel back and forth, while ships also resupply the island on a similar schedule.
“Ascension Island is 5,000 miles from Florida, and we fly here on a C-17 military plane,” Lara Christy said. “Due to the low-resource nature of a remote island, the Ascension Island government and the two military bases have worked very hard to keep Ascension and nearby Saint Helena COVID-free.
“We all quarantine on arrival — and after that period, we are free to move about the island without masks or other restrictions. Vaccination rates are extremely high here, and we have not had any outbreaks. That was a huge incentive for me to come here.”