Helping Lea Advocate For Better Healthcare

After 32+ years of being paralyzed, I have skillz as a healthcare advocate for myself.  Yesterday I got to use those skills to help Lea.  She suffers from week-long bouts of body pain.  When she went to her doctor at the public health clinic on Monday, he dismissed her pain out of hand as either being a mental health issue that he could not treat or, more nearly, drug seeking behavior.  He did not do any tests or even examine her body.

When we went on Tuesday, he did at least touch her body at a few of her pain points.  After the doctor described her problems as “being subjective”, I asked about running some objective tests.

I pointed out that they had her for being positive for Hepatitis C and another clinic reported her being negative for HepC, he at least ran another test for HepC instead of merely for HepC antibodies.

Dr Hwang nattered on about mental health issues and stress.  I countered with her having been doing Mindfulness Based Stressed Reduction (MBSR) as explained by Jon Kabot-Zinn for months.  He then said he could not give her medication to help with the pain (since she is a former IV heroin addict).  I countered that with asking that he try to find the cause of the pain to see if that could be treated pointing out that Lea has been diagnosed as having and not-having Lupus.  He agreed to run a preliminary blood test for signs of auto-immune diseases.

It sucks that I had to develop these skills as a healthcare advocate for my own needs.   It is great that I am now able to use them help others get better healthcare.   On Monday, she got dismissed out-of-hand from the clinic with no hope for any kind of diagnostic help.  On Tuesday, they drew blood and ran some tests.  That was great progress and brought Lea tremendous comfort in the change from being treated as sub-human to being seen as a patient with valid healthcare concerns.

I am grateful for my healthcare advocacy skills and for being able to help someone else see a future that involves a much higher quality of healthcare than being told she has mental health issues and having her pain ignored by her primary care practitioner.  She slept ten hours last night—8 hours more than the night before.