Category Archives: Wendy Welch

The Funny Side of Malfunctioning

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So if I’m going to take you on a journey with me into my brave new health world, let’s start with how I entered it. Which is, if I do say so myself, a very funny story.

I went to Mexico with the Wayfaring Writers. One of the attendees was a retired MD whose granddaughter had given her the flu just before she left, so she was getting antibiotics from a local clinic.

In Mexico, if you want antibiotics, you go to the pharmacy, see the doctor attached to it in an office next door, pay something around $5, and get a diagnosis. Watching my friend do this, I kept thinking how nice it would be to take a little souvenir home: cheap Cefalaxin. I’m one of the lucky ones allergic to penicillin. Getting cheap C to take back sounded good, but there was one problem.

I was healthy as a horse.

My MD friend smiled at me. “You’d have to lie. The easiest lie is to say you have a UTI. Those symptoms are easy to describe.”

“Are you enabling me?” I laughed.

She shrugged, and smiled again, and said nothing.

So two days later, having wrestled my moral concerns into submission, I went to a pharmacy, and saw a doctor. I paid him $3 and began describing the symptoms I did not have.

He kept staring at me. He knows I’m lying! Hot guilt suffused my face.

He asked, did I have a fever? Did I have a backache? Was I short of breath?

These are not UTI symptoms.

When I answered in the negative for all these, he said, through the Spanglish sign language combined with his phone’s Google Translator, that he was going to take my blood pressure. He used an electronic arm cuff, read the meter, and his eyebrows shot into his hairline.

He got out a sphagnometer (the manual cuff that requires a stethoscope) and took it again. Then he wrote something on a pad, and said, “You’re getting an EKG.”

Uhhhh, okay……

Twenty minutes and $15 later, I was naked on a bed while  a very handsome man ran his hands over my breasts. I swear to you, in that moment, the ONLY thing I could think was, I really should have been more specific about my fantasies for this trip.

I told the doc on our trip about my adventure, and she said likely the doctor who sent me for the EKG was reacting to something I was doing without knowing it: panting, perhaps, short of breath; or flushed because of the exertion of the heat and the heart not liking each other in a country full of salt and alcohol. Both of which were flowing through my veins at that point quite freely.

Two hours later, I was back in the kind doctor’s office with an envelope, which he took, studied, pursed his lips. Then he reached for his phone.

You have upper left blocked.

Dude, I need a noun. But Google was not yet up to providing “ascending aortic aneurysm.” That would come two months later, when I was hooked back into the American system struggling to get appointments.

I think fondly of Mexico these days, and that souvenir envelope containing the EKG that may well have saved my life (and a box of Cefalaxin). As anyone with an aneurysm can tell you, the most important thing about having one is knowing that you do.

So I’m on an interesting journey and will tell you more later, but all hail that kind doctor who looked, really looked, at me, and saw through me straight to my heart in the best possible way.

For Those Who Have Ears to Hear

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My day job took me to DC. I’m on the 12th floor of a hotel, looking out over the city, which had a snowstorm. Overnight, it looked like the little pellets inside a snow globe, and in the lamplight as I watched the snow fly, it was beautiful.

I stood looking out my hotel room window, and thought, “There are two men out there who have done the same, only with acquisition on their minds. They don’t see a strange mix of buildings and beauty; they see something they feel they own.”

Tuesday, the meetings I attended talked about how to talk to the legislators regarding rural health policy (think the sexy topics of Medicare and Medicaid) which we will do today. I am at the National Rural Health Association’s annual Policy Institute, since you ask.

Tuesday, several men in suits told us which words to avoid, which words to focus on. What no one discussed much was, how do you talk to people who work for someone who considers us serfs? Who looks out over the city and doesn’t think, “how can I make this place better,” but “how much can I enrich myself from this place?”

Maybe we didn’t discuss it because there is no way to get into that mindset and come out whole.

There was one interesting group discussion. Someone pointed out that “rural health” can be framed as a national security issue. If we can’t make them feel compassion for the loss of places where women can go to have babies, perhaps we can shock them with the potential loss of their own safety and security? We supply the food, the raw materials that become power (as in electricity, don’t stretch that into a metaphor, k thanks?). We supply the soldiers that fight wars and “keep” peace. Rural is vital to the proper functioning of the United States.

Mmhmm. Today is the day we go talk to the elected men (and some women) in suits, who work for the men in suits looking out their windows at what they believe they own. Those elected ones, they must be in some confusion at the moment. One hopes. It depends on why decided to occupy an office in the capital in first place. Did they believe they could make the world a better place, or that they could better their worlds? That they could do both with integrity and good results?

Moral high ground is slippery, and sometimes it walks through dark valleys. Good luck, elected officials. You’re going to need it.

But so are we, the grass roots non-profits and other care providers who find ourselves suddenly framing arguments without using certain words, and shining bright lights on how lucrative we are to their agenda. We’re being drawn into their kind of fight, and it would be naïve to believe that we can refuse to do that with any good results for the people counting on us to get them care.

I am praying to hold onto some integrity, intelligence, and a sense of humor today. Humility may come in handy, too. When people speak different dialects, you need to speak theirs to get things done. It’s called code switching, changing your accent and vocabulary to make communication more clear. It doesn’t usually have a moral component.

Except this time. Here we go.