Please Know...

As I come to know these fine people, they share with me more of their personal and sensitive stories. Their collective story is what I am trying to share with you as my way of breaking the stereotypical beliefs that exist. "Blog names" have occasionally been given to me by the person whose story I am telling. Names are never their actual names and wherever I can do so, I might use the opposite pronoun (his/her, etc.) just to help increase their privacy.

Throughout this blog you are now seeing advertising. I need to provide this so as to keep going financially with this ministry. If you see something that is inappropriate to this site, please let me know - maybe get a screen shot of it for me. I do get credit for any "click" that you might make on any of the ads. If you're bored some night and want to help me raise some needed cash, visit my site and click away to your heart's content....


Thursday, December 12, 2019

Substance Use Disorder and An F2 Tornado


As I start writing this blog, I’m sitting in Concord Auto Body Shop six weeks after getting a bit to close to an F2 tornado on October 31 while driving home from my employment at Recovery Centers of America.  A very large tree branch found the back door window on the driver's side.  It is being replaced with the same window of a deceased car of the same model that gave its life just a few days ago when its driver wanted to be in the same location as the car in front of them.  I’ve been told that this minor surgery will take, at most, a couple of hours.  

Forty minutes from where I sit, a person I know and love from the streets of Kensington is suffering from a medical situation that very much needs a procedure for healing that will take a couple of hours.  Having been in the hospital recently for the early stages of this same situation, and, having not been treated for her growing withdraw symptoms while she was being treated for this, she signed out AMA[1] in agony with symptoms that she knew she could relieve on her own with one injection of “Medicine.”  

Her faith in the medical system was injured by this lack of care of treating the all of her and not the selected symptoms of her one at a time.  This and the accompanying lack of compassion as representatives of Hippocrates withdrew from her out of their own discomfort of being yelled at as her suffering grew leaves her reluctant to try again to get the care she knows she needs.

And so she sits in a park or walks the streets and begs and seeks ways to find funds to support her medicinal needs as a medical situation secondary to her SUD[2] grows in its critical need for attention.  

It would have been so much more beneficial for her and the hospital to heal her in her entirety.  To start her medical care with her socially accepted symptoms and then move to those symptoms of a disease that finds itself in the file of “Socially Stigmatized Diseases” is to not treat the patient in her entirety.  

To make her whole again, you, representatives of Hippocrates, must treat her in her wholeness and not symptom by symptom.

My car is almost ready to roll.  She’s still in agony.

P.S. If you ever need auto body work, please consider Concord Auto Body Shop! :)





[1] Against Medical Advice
[2] Substance Use Disorder

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