Evelyn Powell is 68 years old and extraordinarily sick.
“I have emphysema. I’ve got arrhythmic heart failure, got asthma,” says Powell, who runs a rooming house in Portland, Oregon. “I was in and out of the hospital all the time, it would be a month, a whole month, I’d be in the hospital three or four times.”
She’s the kind of patient who gets labeled a “frequent flier” by healthcare providers. It’s a pejorative label, and from a distance it’s certainly easy to judge Powell: she struggled to keep track of her medication. She ate lousy food. She kept smoking.
Physician assistant Cassie Ryan-Mapolski sees plenty of patients like Powell at her Portland clinic. Sooner or later, she says, you end up stuck.
“There can be those moments where you’re like, ‘I don’t know what else to do for you. Why are you here? What do you want? What do you want me to do? I have no way to help you, I have no way to help you help yourself,’” she says.
[For more of this story, written by Dan Gorenstein, go to http://www.marketplace.org/top...ored-social-services]
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