Life Lessons at Richmond

Friday was my last day working at OHSU Richmond’s clinic. I began working with the idea that the temporary assignment would last six to eight weeks. Here I am three-and-a-half months later.

I truly enjoyed my experience there. I took it to help pay the bills and let me search for a communications/marketing job, but what I did was so intense and emotionally exhausting that I came home and had little to no creativity left. It was all used in dealing with the widest array of humans I have ever encountered while sitting in one chair.

The Richmond clinic is a federally funded, sliding-scale clinic. What this means is, while they incorporate the average families, they also have provisions to assist extremely poor and often homeless people as well. I spoke to heroine addicts, single pregnant teenagers, and high-level business professionals.

While it is not what I want to pursue as a career, I did enjoy it. I didn’t necessarily enjoy what I did, and I had quite a hard time working with some patients. There were times when I had to leave the front and calm down. Just from one “problem” patient. The thing was that for every one of these, I saw a beautiful person, struggling against life, against everything, but still beautiful. While I could fill pages and pages with examples, I want to describe two that choke me up. Even now.

The first is a duo. They are hard to describe because I don't know much about them. They were a sister team, the oldest at 24, the younger at around 8-years-old. The older sister was bound to a wheelchair, and one knew by the way she sat in it that she would be there for a very long time. Her younger sister always came in with her, always pushing the wheelchair and tending to the every need and desire of her older sister. What crushed me inside was the brilliance and love they had maintained, for each other, for those lucky enough to interact with them, and for life itself. They were always in a great mood, always caring and always reaching out and helping others where they could. I have often wondered how I would cope with losing the ability to walk, run, climb and jump. I don’t know how I would live, but if I could live with half the grace and joy that these two girls bring to this world, I would consider it a grand success.

This last example is amazing. We all hear about druggies. We all hear about people who cut their addiction, but how many of us actually get to see it happen? When I first began working at Richmond, B (omission of her name is obvious) was a brand new patient. I think I actually did her paperwork for her first appointment. She was addicted to Percocet® at a rate of 300 per month. Prescribed by a doctor. She was taking them to help her get off another addictive drug, and the addiction of the Percocet took over. One day a voice inside her told her it was ridiculous, and she went for help and was referred to the clinic. She was lucky enough to be paired up with the most hard-assed doctor at Richmond. He broke her pattern, and she came in once a week for a bloodtest and pills. It was so bad that she would come in the day before her appointment with mathematical equations showing (down to the hour) how he had shorted her meds. Her findings were obviously flawed – she was having a hard time cutting down. It got so bad that she had to come in every two days for pills because she couldn't be trusted with a week’s worth. Last Friday she came in and told me that she had just got back from seeing her brother in Chicago for two weeks, and that she kept clean the entire time. She said it was hard, and stressful, but this was the first time she felt healthy enough to travel for years. She is so much stronger now, and she loves it. She came in here and fought the fight, struggled, was knocked down and got right back up. She had a lot of help from the clinic, but she walked the dark paths by herself, and she won. I will remember her (and the hardships I watched her go through) for the rest of my life.

This is a bit lengthy, but it is so important. I hold everyone who works at that clinic in the absolute highest regard for what they do and the lives they impact on a daily basis.