Crossroads Health Center has literally changed my life.
I know this sounds cliche but stick with me here. If you’ve read the previous CVIP blog posts then you understand what our job entails. You also understand the population we work with. So, I won’t go into those details. What I will share with you, however, is how these two things have impacted my future.
I’ve known I wanted to be a doctor since (about) freshmen year of high school. Science has always been my favorite subject and I enjoy helping others. The idea of working with underserved populations, however, never crossed my mind. That is, until I started shadowing in the University of Cincinnati Emergency Department.
The difference between this shadowing experience and my Crossroads experience is that, after leaving my shadowing shift in the ER, I felt as though I did not want to work with patients on Medicaid. The patients seemed rude, uncooperative, and often times like they just wanted needed pain medications. What I didn’t take into take into account when processing these encounters, was that these patients were in (what they felt was) an emergency situation (even if it wasn’t always a “true medical emergency). They had the same stressors at home as our patients at Crossroads (I’ll get into those soon) do but they had the added stress of feeling incredibly sick.
Now, let’s fast forward to my time at Crossroads.
During the training process, it was explained very clearly what a day may look like for our patients. Many of them have a family to provide for- which means working at least one (maybe more) job(s). They also may not have reliable transportation or means of communication. Some of our patients don’t even know where their next meal will come from or how they’ll afford their medications. Once I thought about these stressors, I had a new perspective on why these patients in the ER seemed rude and uncooperative. What I realized was that the patients weren’t rude at all but were simply blunt; probably because they didn’t have time to waste- they needed to get better and get home to provide for their families. They also weren’t uncooperative, but instead simply didn’t have the means to take care of themselves the way middle to upper class families do. On top of that, these patients needed pain medications because they really were in pain. When you can’t take care of yourself the way you need to, then your illnesses are managed and when an illness and its symptoms aren’t managed then there is typically pain involved. I was starting to understand that the underserved population of Cincinnati is completely stereotyped and misunderstood.
The thing that truly changed my life, however, was being able to interact with our patients. For people with so many things going on in their life, they are all incredibly kind and grateful individuals. I work on the pediatric referral team at our OTR location and the amount of parents that are on top of their children’s referrals, while still working a job and taking care of the entire family, is astounding to me. As a college student, I barely manage to care for myself, let alone do everything these super parents do.
Now that you understand the transformation I’ve gone through while volunteering at Crossroads, I will explain how it has affected my future. As you can probably guess, I have developed a passion for working with underserved populations (a complete 180, I know). It is because of my time at Crossroads that I have decided to earn a Masters in Bioethics (with a focus in public health) before I attend medical school. Instead of performing research, as I originally planned, I will have the opportunity to observe public health ethical dilemmas in the health field and I will learn how to handle these dilemmas when I am a physician. After medical school I want to work in emergency medicine at a public hospital. It is my goal to ensure each of my patients are treated with the respect and care that they deserve. The CVIP program has put life and humanity into perspective for me, therefore encouraging me to do whatever I can to change the world (no matter how small my role in doing so may seem); I will forever and always be grateful for that.
-- Gabby Truitt
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