April 11, 2K4

Dear Mr. Antonovich,

Someone once told me that if you ever had a problem, or suffered an injustice, that you were the person to call. Well, I indeed have suffered an injustice and I fear that this same injustice may fall upon others. It is too late to rectify my situation, but I write this in the hope that no one else should have to go through what my family and I have had to endure, what we will have to endure for the rest of our lives.

My mother was the kind of person that this valley needs more of. She was kind, loving and an honest hard-worker, even when it cost her she kept her integrity. She worked in school system here for over ten years as an instructional aide at Lake Los Angeles Elementary School in the Keppel School District. She loved teaching, and always said that she had missed her calling to be a teacher. I told her that she ought to go back to school and get her credential and be one. Her response was that she didn’t have the energy to take the classes; but more about that later. She truly believed in showing kids the right way to go, and enforcing that with appropriate discipline. But as her youngest child prepared for college she began to feel that teaching part time was not enough to satisfy her, so she signed up to be a foster parent. Around the same time it became apparent that she would now also be raising one of her granddaughters. All this, and she was in her 50’s. And as you may realize, none of these details made life easy on the checkbook. So at a time in her life when she should have been preparing to retire, she was stretching her dollars and pinching her pennies.

Part of this economic hardship included the lack of adequate health insurance, something she desperately needed as a diabetic. For years the only doctor my mother saw was the one at the free clinic. I never realized why she dreaded her appointments so much until I returned from college—then also without insurance—and went with her to the clinic. The clinic disgusted me. I was outraged at the unapologetic rudeness with which we were treated. On more than one occasion the doctors and nurses accused my mother of lying about having taken her prescribed medication. They said that if she had taken it like she was told, then the problem(s) would have been solved. But despite the medication, the problems and the pains persisted. And instead of looking deeper into problem, instead of trying to help the patient like a doctor is sworn to do, they ignored her. They made no attempt to seek out the cause of these maladies. Every appointment for months, for years, she would put her hand over her chest and tell them “This hurts. It hurts right here. It hurts to breathe. It burns. And it scares me.”

Their response? Take an aspirin. Go home. Exercise, and go back to work. And she did. And day after day she grew weaker and weaker, until it killed her.

When she ended up in the hospital after a heart attack (in early May), they determined that she was in need of a heart valve transplant. But by then it was too late. During the surgery she passed away. And Why? Because when she expressed a problem, they treated her as if she were less important than everyone else. No one put forth the effort to discover the cause of her pain. They could have found it in time had they only heeded her pleas. But by refusing put the effort into their own chosen professions, a profession which by nature requires one to be selfless and serving, (and certainly makes up for it monetarily) they condemned her to death, and the rest of us to life without her.

Thank you for your time,

TygerTiger