We battle the stigma facing our patients in recovery from addictive disorders. We battle both public and private insurance companies who seem to think that their role is to prevent people from getting too many services instead of helping them afford care for their medical needs. And we battle the fragmentation, inflexibility and arbitrariness of the entire medical system that keeps our patients from accessing their own records, getting timely appointments and care, or keeping us in the loop of communication that would enable us to take proper care of them.
Often, we battle for the people whom all those signs and wonders have yet to bring out of Mitzrayim. People for whom no “real” diagnosis can be found, who don’t “meet criteria” for the disease we believe they have, or who don’t experience the “expected benefit” from the medications they receive. We battle for people who have the one-in-a-million side effect that “couldn’t possibly” be from the medicine they’re attributing it to, and for people whose excessive bleeding, numbness, disorientation, or other serious symptom has been dismissed as “that happens sometimes.”
Occasionally, the battle is for those who’ve left Egypt—only to find themselves, like the Israelites, in an endless desert with a long way to go before they get home. These are the folks who survive one cancer to find that their treatment has caused another—a phenomenon so common in survivors of childhood cancer that many pediatric cancer centers have survivorship clinics dedicated to monitoring for those second cancers. Others grapple with loss of jobs, family, or identity that didn’t survive their illness, even though their bodies survived. Sometimes when the scans are clear, the real work is just beginning.