Ask Me Why I Hurt Read Free

Children’s Health Fund to help bring health care to America’s most vulnerable children. When he heard about the idea of a mobile medical unit to serve homeless kids in Arizona, he eagerly got on board and offered to help.
    As soon as I heard about the plan, I ran into the office of my boss at the hospital, Jeff Weiss. I wanted to run the van, I told him. I
needed
to run the van. But he wasn’t so convinced. I was young, he said. I had barely started my career as a doctor. It was the kind of position that called for a doctor with tons of experience who possessed more than a little street smarts. Besides, funding was iffy. There probably wouldn’t be enough money for a director for the van, he warned me. But I insisted. Finally, after weeks of my constant lobbying, he relented. I suspect he thought I’d never give up. There was still no money for my position, but I was confident it would all work out.
    When I called my wife, Amy, to tell her I had been offered the position, my childhood stutter had returned, as it often did when I was excited. I had to take a few deep breaths and avoid the problem words that sometimes tripped me. Finally I got it out. “I got the job,” I said.
    It felt more like a question than a statement because I needed Amy’s support. I felt the world stop until she answered.
    “Go for it,” she said. So I said yes, with neither a moment’s hesitation nor the faintest idea of what I was getting into.

    “OK, what do we do next?” I asked the folks who had gathered to help plan the launch of Phoenix’s newest mobile medical unit. It was our first meeting. I was bubbling over with enthusiasm and so excited I could barely sit still. Silence greeted my question. Embarrassed, we all looked around the table. How
did
one start a mobile medical unit?
    “Are there any books on the subject?” someone asked after a long pause.
    Someone else opened up a laptop to do a search. More silence. “Apparently not.”
    “Well, one thing is clear,” a colleague said. “We have no idea what we are doing … yet.”
    “We can at least start with a name,” I said.
    “How about something after Jim Crews?” a HomeBase staff member asked. Jim Crews was the CEO of Good Samaritan Hospital and a big supporter of the van. “Something like the Crews’n Healthmobile.”
    “Perfect,” I said.
    It turned out that making a hospital on wheels was incredibly complicated and expensive. The first step—getting an RV to remodel—was probably the easiest. Jim Crews arranged for the donation of a 1991 Winnebago. When the van arrived, I ran out behind the hospital to take a look. It was an old Winnebago, sure enough, but to me it was beautiful. The hard part was going to be turning it into a functioning hospital. Months of meetings were spent finding out the regulations on everything from which oxygen tanks we could use to what medical equipment would fit. We wanted a van that could offer high-quality hospital-level medical care, which meant having the right equipment that met hospital-level standards. The Children’s Health Fund donated thousands of dollars, the Phoenix Children’s Hospital and HomeBase chipped in, and the Flinn Foundation contributed huge amounts in a seed grant. The donations and grants were a godsend, yet the costs were staggering.
    But finally the van was finished. We celebrated with verbalchampagne, telling one another, “Well done,” instead of the real stuff because not only were we completely out of money, but we’d gone way over budget.
    One of my first duties as the still-unpaid director had been to hire a nurse-practitioner. Jan Putnam was the first person I interviewed, and as soon as we were done talking, I knew she was the person for the job. She was trained in emergency care and was an excellent nurse-practitioner. More important, she had experience with at-risk populations. It was hard to believe this peppy lady was fifty. She had the zip of a woman half her age. Jan took to the