True Wealth

Last week I focused on the challenges of working in a community health center.  This week I would like to touch on the rewards.

I have now practiced medicine for nearly fourteen years.  As an obstetrician, I have seen the cycle of life played out every day without apology for age, creed, race, or socio-economic status.  After all these years, watching a baby take their first breath is still a miracle, having a drug rep bring free Chic-Fil-A lunch is still the highlight of my day, and raising the subject of evolutionary biology is still the fastest way to start a fight.  Through the good days and the bad, I am humbled by the appreciation shown a doctor for treating all patients with respect.

A story from my work at Johnson Health Center puts serving in a health center into perspective.  I’ve used some poetic license to keep things anonymous.  I laugh about it now with my staff, but at the time, I thought one of them would have to bail me out of jail.

If you have never visited Lynchburg, it is a wonderful town, but someone must have been drunk when they laid out the city streets!  It’s like the legendary labyrinth at Knossos with a car-eating Minotaur lurking around any corner.  In my rural southwest Virginia hometown, my Ford F250 truck and I fit right in, but on the narrow winding streets of Lynchburg, I look like a combat tank on the loose.  After two weeks of work, I was still using my G.P.S. to get from my hotel to the clinic and praying the battery didn’t die.

One evening, I was driving back to the hotel in the rain and came to a particularly dangerous freeway intersection.  I hit my brakes and the truck kept on going…into the back of a compact car.  My truck swallowed the rear end of this car rendering it un-drivable, while my truck only suffered a dented bumper.  I jumped out of my vehicle, terrified that I may have hurt someone, only to find that I had hit one of my pregnant patients and her two children!  After making sure that none of them were seriously injured and accepted my traffic ticket, I followed my patient in the ambulance to the hospital.  She was observed for several hours, under my care, and the pregnancy suffered only a nervous scare. We passed the time talking about our own families.  Getting past the obvious cultural differences, we had similar humorous stories of parenting and everyday life struggles.  We both left with a newfound appreciation for each other’s walk in life.  A few weeks later, we encountered each other in Walmart.  She introduced me to her friends as “her doctor.”  To which they quipped that wasn’t I just another downtown clinic doctor?  Shaking her finger, she corrected them that: worried for her in a car accident, I sat in her hospital room and talked with her like a friend, and what regular doctor would do that?

As long as there are patients willing to pay for favoritism, there will be doctors willing to take their money, but the true wealth comes from treating the lives of all people as valuable as your own.  Investing yourself in the lives of even the frustrating patients will be returned to you in kind.  You do the medicine, let God do the judging, and the odds of life will mostly fall in your favor.