One December morning, four months after he arrived in the LDS Brazil Florianopolis Mission, Elder Eric Stakebake woke up feeling “horrible.”

After speaking by telephone with the health secretary in his mission, Stakebake was told to go to the nearest urgent-care clinic. When that looked to be a three-hour pain-filled wait, he was taken to the local hospital’s emergency room.

Although Stakebake got a quick evaluation and an intravenous line, it was still going to be a long wait for an ER doctor. A member of the local LDS congregation showed up to help with translation — “I didn’t speak Portuguese all that well yet,” Stakebake says — and also called the mission president for further instruction. Those within earshot only heard the member’s responses: “Yes, president,” and “OK, president.”

Suddenly, Stakebake received uncharacteristically immediate and intense attention from the ER doctors and staff. He later learned why.

• RELATED: Top 10: Most/least expensive LDS Church missions

“When they overheard the phone conversation, they thought it was President Obama calling,” he said. “The rumor went around the hospital that the president of the United States had called about an American missionary.”

Stakebake had appendicitis. His appendix was removed and he was soon on the road to recovery.

“I felt everybody took care of me,” said Stakebake, who returned home to Pleasant View seven months ago. “If anything, the health system of the country can (be a challenge). But the church did all it could. I never heard anyone complain about any kind of care from their mission.”

Such an experience is a far cry from the ones told in “Sick and Far From Home,” a Slate.com piece posted Tuesday, Oct. 13. In it, writer Mark Joseph Stern says he interviewed two dozen former missionaries and “other sources with knowledge of missionary life, including active church members.” All but one agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity and all reported the same basic story: “Mormons who fell dangerously ill on their missions say the church denied them access to medical care.”

In a response emailed to the Standard-Examiner, LDS Church spokesman Eric Hawkins took issue with Slate’s claim.

“Our best efforts are employed for every missionary who has any medical issue,” Hawkins wrote. “To suggest that missionaries are denied adequate care is simply false.”

Hawkins briefly addressed the process when a missionary needs medical attention.

“When a missionary is injured or becomes ill, the Church makes extensive efforts to provide the best health care available and covers the costs of medical treatment,” he wrote. “This includes an expansive network of area medical advisers and nurses who work with mission presidents and their wives to arrange for medical care of all types and in locations throughout the world.”

A blog post from the church’s Mormon Newsroom points out that the Missionary Handbook encourages missionaries to counsel with leadership “right away” about health concerns and in emergencies to “get help immediately and then inform your mission president as soon as possible.”

This isn’t to say returned missionaries don’t have their horror stories.

Will Treadway, of Hooper, served in the Paraguay Asuncion Mission from 2000 to 2002. He says he had bad experiences with health care on his mission but also accepts some of the blame.

“I need to preface what I tell you by explaining I’m the type of person who doesn’t like to tell others about his problems,” Treadway said. “So, many of the medical issues I had, my mission president didn’t even know about.”

About a year into his mission, Treadway got the mosquito-borne dengue fever.

“Think of the worst flu you’ve ever had in your life,” he said. “It’s ten times worse than that.”

Treadway reported his illness to the mission office and they sent him to the pharmacy for treatment.

“But after that, I was left to my own devices,” he says.

He says it wasn’t until a week later that anyone from the mission office even bothered to ask how he was doing.

“I would’ve liked to have had some concern,” he says, “but I’m glad they at least told me about the medicine.”

Treadway doesn’t blame his mission president; he says the mission president isn’t usually the one who deals with missionary illnesses.

“I don’t think he even knew,” Treadway said. “Typically, medical needs are delegated to someone else.”

Treadway also dealt with some severe ingrown toenail problems that he feels were handled poorly by the mission’s medical staff.

“I think they have something put in place (to deal with missionary medical problems), but it’s totally inadequate,” he said.

What resonates with Treadway about the Slate piece is that it illuminates a problem he thinks many don’t know about.

“I can’t speak for the whole mission, but in my own experiences, they try to make do with what they have,” he said.

Treadway allows he has heard of missionaries getting extraordinary care, so he believes it goes both ways. However, he grades the medical care he received on his mission as a “C.”

“I don’t agree with the (Slate) premise that the church denies care to missionaries,” he said. “But they need to do better in some areas. To be honest, I had more bad experiences than good.”

Trevor Johnson, of Logan, served an LDS mission to Honduras from 2006 to 2008. He broke his ankle playing soccer.

“We didn’t even have an x-ray machine in Honduras,” he explained in a social media message. “I ended up going over to Guatemala and got x-rays and fitted for a cast. I ended up on crutches for six weeks and my ankle healed up well enough that I finished the last 10 months of my mission.”

When he got home Johnson had surgery on his ankle and he says it’s been fine ever since.

“I felt like missionary medical did the best they could with what we were given,” Johnson says. “… Overall, I thought most of our missionaries, including myself, were well taken care of.”

Scott Troxel, of Farmington, served in the Brazil Salvador Mission from 2000 to 2002. He sympathizes with those quoted in the Slate piece.

While on his mission, Troxel complained about shortness of breath and chronic headaches. He consulted with the mission nurse and other medical personnel, who simply advised him to drink less milk. (“I wasn’t drinking any,” Troxel points out.)

Troxel learned the cause of these symptoms five years later, when he had open heart surgery for a completely blocked artery.

“I’ve struggled quite a bit with this,” he said. “… Being critical of the church is obviously a bit worrisome. But I could have died.”

Troxel said he thinks emergency care and preventive care are two entirely different things in the mission field.

“If I’d gotten hit by a car, I’d have gotten great care,” he said. “But preventive care? Absolutely not.”

Troxel says he served in the poorest part of Brazil, in “some really remote places,” where he would have been afraid to go to a doctor anyway. He also said he had that typical missionary bulletproof zeal: “The Lord will take care of me.” And finally, he says he simply wasn’t mature or assertive enough to advocate for his own health. So at that time, on his mission, he had no problem with the lack of medical care he received.

“In hindsight, it was an afterthought, at best,” Troxel says of mission health care. “In the MTC they lined us all up and gave us vaccines and boosters, but that was the only doctor I saw in two years. The health care for missionaries — at least 15 years ago — was just that, an afterthought.”

Contact Mark Saal at 801-625-4272, or msaal@standard.net. Follow him on Twitter at @Saalman. Like him on Facebook at facebook.com/SEMarkSaal.