Next we visited Irene, a woman in her middle forties, married to Ed and the mother of four. How could Frances and I refute her logic? We didn't even try. Then she would end up in bed in a nursing home, which was to her a fate worse than death. She insisted that she must continue paying him because she needed surgery on her other hip, and if she didn't pay him he would refuse to replace her other hip. I told her that she should just not pay the doctor anymore because she couldn't afford to. Her sole income was her social security check of about $125 a month. She told us that she had a hip replacement and she was paying the surgeon $25 a month for the rest of her life. She limped to the door and let us in, though she had never seen us before. I can't remember her name, but I'll never forget her story. Our second visit was to an elderly woman. I can still see Florence the day we met her, proudly showing us a framed picture of her son in his dress U.S.
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She called a cab and the cab driver and she placed her deceased husband in the back seat and drove him to a hospital emergency room so that he could be declared dead. Florence's husband died at home that night. By "worst" I mean the project that had the worst record of violence, domestic and otherwise.įirst, we visited Florence, a widow, who told us the sad story that when her husband became very ill at home one evening no ambulance would come for him because the project kids used to shoot guns at the tires. We set off to visit these women who resided in probably the "worst" public housing project in the City of Scranton that is located in northeastern Pennsylvania. Sister Nancy who worked with Team Ministry gave us a list of four very poor women with medical problems.
Frances wanted to visit poor women in their homes who were ill, because she saw them only in a hospital setting. Frances was a nurse and I was a burnt out schoolteacher. We were two Sisters, members of a religious community and loosely connected to a rather radical ecumenical group, Team Ministry, that did all kinds of good stuff for the destitute. This story tells of the miracles that occurred when we, my friend Frances and I, were trying our best to find a way to provide doctors' visits to the poor. If I don't get at this task, no one else will, because no one else lived out this saga on a day-to-day- basis as I did. I'm 76 years old, and my time is running out. Let's get started! I've been meaning to write this story for at least twenty years, and I've run out of excuses not to. I hope, too that those who are trying to fix our broken healthcare system in the twenty-first century will feel a bit braver as they go out to meet this problem that they are trying to solve for the American people. It was a hell on earth for them in 1975 as they tried to cope with illnesses that no one would treat I hope that in some small way our story may engender a ray of hope for people today who are suffering in the same way. So how does my story that began almost thirty-five years ago relate to our current dilemma? It does because four individuals that we encountered in 1975 were as destitute then as Americans who have no health insurance are today. More than 50 million Americans are uninsured and as layoffs occur this number increases daily at an alarming rate. This worsening economic environment fractures even further the already broken healthcare system in the United States. Our nation has an exciting new president, but we are facing a severe economic crisis, the near collapse of our financial system coupled with widespread unemployment. It is important to know why I am embarking on writing this piece that cites certain milestones in the history of the Scranton Primary Health Care Center.
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