My story starts with one patient, who had sickle cell disease. He was in his 40s when I met him, I think maybe 42, a very slight guy who walked with one crutch because the disease had destroyed one hip socket already. We got him at our home health agency because he had a port that needed flushing periodically. He'd been passed around through about all the (white) doctors in town--we didn't have any black ones--and you could tell they didn't care about him. He had a hematologist in Knoxville, but that guy didn't much care either, apparently. Anyway, the weekend nurse got him to trust her, and eventually I did too, because we both believed him when he said he was hurting . (Also neither one of us ever said anything about his marijuana use; she and I discussed it and figured whatever helped was okay.) He would let one of us flush his port but nobody else. When I left home health and went back to the hospital, he would end up there on occasion and most of the nurses claimed he was "faking" his pain. I knew he wasn't and if I happened to be working and he knew it, he would ask for me to come and flush his port and maybe give him his Dilaudid, which I gladly did. When we got a new hematologist in town, somehow the weekend nurse from my (former) home health agency wangled a referral for him and after that things went much more smoothly for him. I think she must have had a little talk with the nurses at the hospital too. She was German and very nice but also extremely protective of her patients.
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