About eight years ago my mother (a single, middle-aged woman) suddenly became very ill. She hadn’t been working at her job long enough to have insurance.
As her illness took it’s toll, she ended up losing her job. She just didn’t have the energy to get to work. She was having ‘panic attacks’ several times a day and her heart would race at over 200 BPM.
I paid to fly her down to move in with us. She was sleeping a ton, hysterical when awake, losing her mind, running a fever... something was terribly wrong.
No insurance. Too young for medicare. Couldn’t get to a dr for tests and a disability diagnosis for medicade because she had no insurance.
I called my family dr (an internal medicine dr) just to ask him for advice.
He told me to bring her in.
Eventually we got help from social services, but - in the meantime - my dr started running tests and got her stabilized.
I will never forget his kindness. His genuine concern for my mom. The look of real worry that he wasn’t going to be able to save her. He ran every test that he could and didn’t say anything about money. He was ready to eat every dime personally to save this woman he didn’t even know.
G-d bless doctors like you and him! On behalf of everyone who didn’t say it, I’ll say it: THANK YOU.
(BTW, it was a thyroid storm complicated by liver failure. This was due to taking handfuls of Tylenol every day for years to self-medicate an old back injury. Yes. We found out that 1,500mg of Tylenol taken every four hours for eight consecutive years will kill a liver. Add that to Grave’s Disease and it nearly did her in. She’s fine now. Disabled and a little slow physically, but plucky!)
Goes for me too! I worked in health care until last year. My colleagues were some of the most selfless people I've ever met. I've seen docs, nurses, and others assaulted with fists, full urinals, and weapons. I've seen seem them cursed and threatened. Kicked and spat upon. I've seen them miraculously function on no sleep. Give up holidays. Kids birthdays. Baseball games. Work unpaid overtime. Go weeks without a lunch break. And this is just a bit of the sacrifice they make as they go about NOT discriminating between those who pay and those who don't.
So that night Obama got out there with his teleprompter and insulted docs for performing surgeries just to make a buck, I was beyond incensed. He was insulting the very taxpayers who subsidize his AF1 outings and his family vacations, and who display more integrity and selflessness in their pinky fingers than he has shown in his entire presidency.
End of rant :)