Though she’s not an emergency room doctor, Pam Ogor has responded to medical emergencies around the world, most recently in Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina and in Pakistan after an earthquake in Kashmir.

Dr. Pam Ogor is always looking for trouble. If she doesn’t find any, it usually finds her. The diminutive doctor is a family practitioner with Covenant Health Care System; her practice is located at St. Michael Hospital in Milwaukee. She loves her local patients, but given the chance to helicopter into a remote region of Pakistan or bounce over dirt roads in Tanzania, she’ll pack her stethoscope in a flash.

Ogor has taken her medical skills to people struck by horrific natural disasters and Third World problems. The fall of 2005 is a special case in point. Fortuitously, in June, she had completed a course in humanitarian relief and disaster at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio when Katrina struck. With her helpful office staff, she rearranged appointments in order to spend two weeks in September in the ravaged area.

Starting out in Gulfport, she and another doctor worked out of "something like a MASH truck," she says. "In Biloxi, we worked at the Safety Administration Building, one of the few left standing, and the neighbors cooked for us. You learn to do whatever needs doing because there were no hospitals, clinics or pharmacies. Oftentimes we went to people’s homes to help; for example, we had to get glucometers to diabetics. In a Wal-Mart parking lot, I gave immunizations from a Humvee. In Gautier, Miss., we helped people from a deli. The deli owner cooked for free until the food was gone."

Back home, she was just getting into her daily routine at St. Michael, when the earthquake struck Kashmir as well as border villages in Pakistan and India. Then Relief International, a group based in Los Angeles, called, and faster than you can say "Where’s-my-passport?" Ogor was on a plane out of Chicago for the 17-hour flight to Islamabad, Pakistan.

The journey from Islamabad to Mansehra was in a four-wheel drive vehicle over hard-packed dirt roads that wound along riverbeds and over mountain passes. Their little caravan paused frequently to let herds of goats — which have the right of way — pass in front of them. "When I was there in October, we were dealing with acute care: shelter and food plus taking care of pneumonia and flu cases. Some workers helped with post-trauma cases," she says. "World Health Organization shipped in boxes of kits to us containing everything from suture material to cases of amoxicillin.

"I never felt unsafe or threatened," she says. What she did find unusual on arrival was the absence of women. "We were seeing only men because women can’t come out of their homes and see a male physician."

Back in Whitefish Bay where she lives with her husband and son, Ogor can reflect on the skills required of medical relief work in disaster areas and explain how a girl from the South Side of Chicago grew up to be so adventurous.

"You can’t plan for a disaster. It is total chaos when all infrastructures are destroyed and there is no organization," she says. "The best thing to be is totally flexible. If you need to sew someone up, you use whatever you’ve got. On the other hand, from the medical personnel perspective, it’s sort of nice not doing the routine paperwork and dictation required in a practice in the U.S. It’s also very exciting and I get pumped up."

She credits trips as a child in the family station wagon for infecting her with a bad case of wanderlust. At 21, she camped on her way to New York in order to meet up with her group, Operation Crossroads, going to Togo in West Africa. She was in Togo for six weeks giving immunizations in remote villages. Medical studies were completed at the Chicago College of Osteopathic Studies. But the call of the road is never stilled for long. Since 1995, she has worked in Haiti, Bangladesh, along the Amazon in Peru and in Nepal.

Patients sometimes call her at home, but with or without a good night’s sleep, Ogor is at her office bright and early. Her curly hair and slender build give her an energetic look that contradicts the faint dark circles under her eyes; sometimes patients call at night, more often during flu season. As she talks, it’s obvious this is a woman who is extremely happy being helpful and always ready for some new excitement. "I have a grungy old backpack that I keep filled so I can grab it and leave at a moment’s notice. I didn’t know if I’d be good at disaster work; after all, I’m not an emergency room doctor, but I guess my success is that I can just roll with it.

"I’ve also learned as an American we cannot go in with an ‘I’ll save you’ attitude," she says. "We must be sensitive to other cultures and especially work to train medical personnel within the culture so that they are able to care for themselves."

Much of her practice in Milwaukee has to do with chronic diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. She cares for her Milwaukee patients physically and as friends. "They don’t complain when I’m gone, because they seem to appreciate what I’m doing. I think they feel useful through me."