Rural health care is an emotional topic because it's often a matter of life and death. While writing about health care, I listened to a tobacco farmer who cared for his father with lung cancer, a cattleman who received a neurologist's misdiagnosis and has limited use of his hand after a car accident nearly three years ago, and a young mother whose premature baby was in the hospital several weeks nearly 300 miles away.
I shared their pain. When we lived near the city, I didn't appreciate a doctor down the block, a hospital 10 minutes away or a specialist across town. Now I do.
We moved from a county with 1,095,662 people and 23 hospitals to a county with 14,821 and no hospitals. Two years after we moved to my husband's grandparents' farm, I was pregnant with twins, labeled high risk and experiencing premature labor. After two one-hour trips to the emergency room in a rescue squad vehicle that felt more like a cattle truck, I was close to getting a room at the Best Western hotel 10 minutes from the hospital. Fortunately I didn't have to; we were blessed with a healthy boy and a girl.
An even bigger challenge came in the fall 2007 when twin boy, Joshua, now 11, began vomiting about an hour after he ate anything. We went to our local osteopath 10 miles away and then to the pediatrician 45 miles away. The pediatrician, originally from India, diagnosed Joshua with the flu, but I knew better. A child doesn't continue to vomit for more than five days without something being seriously wrong. The mysterious vomiting continued for six weeks. During this time he was getting some nutrition, but lost more than 10 pounds and missed weeks of school.
This is a kid who normally spends his days fishing in our farm pond, shooting blackbirds with his BB gun or building forts in the woods. Once he got sick, though, there were days when Josh wouldn't eat, get off the couch or even turn on the TV. On one of those days, I took him to the emergency room 45 miles away. His eyes rolled back in his head and I had trouble keeping him awake. He looked like a sick ewe before it dies. I prayed, cried and was terrified.
I learned that living in the country you have to travel farther, work harder and seek specialists to get access to quality health care. We received a referral to a gastrointestinal specialist at a children's hospital 90 miles away. The specialist said we probably would never know the cause of Joshua's illness. Had the problem been detected immediately, the illness might have a name. We were now three months into the symptoms. As I write this, Joshua still has stomachaches and headaches, has undergone dozens of tests for every illness from allergies to Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Though the problem isn't life or death, could the illness have been diagnosed if quality health care were closer?