Ask Me Why I Hurt Read Free Page A

job immediately. She was already looking over the budget in painstaking detail. It was the sort of job I detested, but fortunately Jan was good at it.
    The day we announced the van was done Jan came to my hospital office. I was supposed to be answering e-mails, but in truth I was floating on a cloud of daydreams, seeing myself at the wheel of our van for our first day out, which was slated in a week.
    “What’s up?” I asked her, dubiously eyeing the stack of papers in her freckled arms.
    She walked in and unceremoniously dropped the papers on my desk. “This is the budget,” she said. There was a friendly smile on her sunny face, but her eyes were sober.
    “OK,” I said, looking at the papers as if they were distasteful. I didn’t reach for them.
    She flipped a few pages. “We’ve gone way over, but you already know that.” I nodded. In my faith, I was sure we would make ends meet. Somehow.
    “And we didn’t budget any money for medications.” She crossed her freckled arms. “The van has no medications.”
    I jerked abruptly to life. “Medications?” I felt cold water dash down my spine. In my daydreams I froze at the wheel.
    “I know it probably came up in meetings,” she said forgivingly. “I’m sure people figured most of our patients will have state insurance. But I’m not so sure they will, or will be able to get it. Even if they can, do we really want to give some homeless child a scrip fora lifesaving med and tell him to go find a pharmacy to fill it? How is that supposed to work? We need to have at least a basic supply of meds for uninsured people and for emergencies.”
    “Jeez.” My mind went into calculator mode. I knew it was extremely expensive to stock medications. Just a month’s supply of some psychotropics can cost close to a thousand dollars, and that was one month for one patient. A full stock of everything from antibiotics to asthma meds for the unit was going to be astronomical.
    “It’s an understandable mistake,” Jan said soothingly. She was right. Most of the patients at the children’s hospital had private or state Medicaid insurance. Even if they were poor, their meds were covered. But it was very possible that most homeless kids would not be insured, and I wasn’t familiar with how to get them eligible for the state medical insurance. I needed to research these procedures. One more thing to do.
    “As understandable as it is,” I replied, “we don’t have a dollar left for it.”
    “I know,” she said compassionately. “But we can figure it out, Randy.”
    I was very depressed when I went home to Amy that night. Her dad was in town, visiting from California, and we all had planned to go out to his favorite hamburger joint for dinner. I was quiet as we ordered. Amy asked for her usual cheeseburger and added tons of fixings. Absently I made mine plain. Just salt and ketchup were enough for me. I was thinking that there was no way I would ask any of our donors for more money. Already they had given far more than they had planned.
    “You’re quiet tonight,” Amy whispered to me.
    I didn’t want to spill such embarrassing news in front of her father. He would think I was incompetent. But he asked about how the van was proceeding, so finally I confessed the problem. We talked about it as the waitress brought our sodas.
    “I can’t believe I overlooked something so essential,” I said.
    Amy’s father listened. He was a shrewd businessman. He began peppering me with questions. For the first time I found my plans for the van closely questioned. It had been easy to talk in ideals.It was much harder to explain exactly
how
the van would work. How long had we budgeted our money to last? What exactly were our goals, and how would we determine if we were effective? How many kids did we plan to see? How would we track our successes and our failures? The more questions he asked, the more I felt I didn’t have any real answers. I started to flounder and heard my stutter