Yesterday at
work was crazy to say the least. Things
had been busy, but I was keeping up until a new patient, who we’ll call John, showed
up. You see, this patient had just been
diagnosed with a giant blood clot in his leg.
Blood clots in the leg are bad, because if they get loose they’ll travel
to the lungs and cause something called a pulmonary embolism which can be
deadly. Usually, a patient with this
kind of blood clot would be sent right away to the hospital. However, John refused to go and so he was
sent to me to try and keep alive in the outpatient setting.
Unfortunately, besides the ginormous blood
clot in his leg; John had many things going against him. He was poor and uninsured so medication cost
was an issue. He didn’t own a phone so I
would need to take care of everything with him in the appointment because there
would be no way to call and follow-up with him later. And, he understood things on a 5th
or 6th grade level so I needed to keep his treatment regimen as
simple as possible. Yeah, the 15 minute
appoint John had scheduled with me wasn’t going to be nearly enough time to get
things sorted out.
I knew that we needed to start a medicine
called Coumadin (a blood thinner) for John, but here’s the catch--- while it’s
dirt cheap, it takes FIVE whole days to start to work and when you’ve got a
giant clot in your leg, you need something to work right away. So I was also going to need to start
something that would work immediately to cover for the Coumadin while it
started to work. That something else is
an injectable medication called Lovenox, and besides the pain of it being an
injection it’s also SUPER expensive; and I knew there was no way my poor
patient could afford it. So, I went to
work looking for ways to find the Lovenox for John. I checked the clinic and found we only had
two doses of the right strength of Lovenox (which meant I would be leaving this
guy 6 doses short for the weekend). I
began picking the brains of physicians asking their opinion of what I should do
and I called in a social worker to help too.
All the while, I was popping in to John’s exam room from time to time
checking in on him, asking more questions, and educating him about his current
medical condition.
Eventually, I was able to find a pharmacy
that had a different injectable medication, Arixtra, which would also do the
trick and although it was also super expensive, the pharmacy was willing to
donate the medication to John! The only
catch was they didn’t have the right strength available and John would have to
give himself two different injections of two different strengths to get the
right dose of the medication. So, I traveled
to the pharmacy, picked up the medication and then went to work putting
together daily packages containing only the medications John would need for
each day; so he wouldn’t get confused and underdose or overdose himself. I then finished by writing out step-by-step
instructions for each day such as, “Thursday morning: Give yourself a blue
injection. Then give yourself a pink
injection. Then take 2 of the green
pills.” To go with each individual
package. Finally, after two-and-a-half hours I had
found medication to keep John alive and out of the hospital for the weekend and
had packaged it in a way he could understand.
Despite being exhausted and dreading the rest of the day as I was now 2
hours behind schedule and my appointments were starting to stack up, I was
thrilled to have this happy outcome.
As I went back to the exam room with a
smile on my face and the medications in hand, I was greeted by a very angry
John. As I entered the room, he began
screaming at me asking me if I realized that I had wasted two-and-a-half hours of his
day. Didn’t I realize that this was his
day off and he wanted to go grocery shopping?
How dare I waste his time?
I had to fight back tears as I tried to
explain to him why things had taken so long and how many people I had talked to
and how many hoops I had jumped through to grant his wish of keeping him safe
and out of the hospital. But, he wouldn’t
listen to what I was trying to say and after grabbing the bag of medications, stormed
out of the office angry with me.
Now that I’ve had some time to calm down
from the frustration, I’ve reflected on my experience with John and I’ve had a
remarkable epiphany. How often do I go
through life like John? How often do I get
so focused on how I think things should work out, that I don’t acknowledge all
that behind-the-scenes work Heavenly
Father is doing for my own good? How
often do I miss the blessings in my life because they don’t come in the ways I expect? I think it’s safe to say in the eternal
scheme of things, I’m just girl with a 5th or 6th grade
comprehension level, who owes her Heavenly Father an apology, because WAY too
often I get caught up in my own expectations of how things should go and miss all of the ways He's working to bless my life.