My grandmother, who is 80, was recently diagnosed with stage 3 Ovarian Cancer in addition, the doctors found a tumor in her abdomen complicating the matter. She had been seeing doctors in a rural area for months. They would give her medication to take, tell her that she suffering due to her weight completely missing the deadly diagnosis. After months of suffering, my family members insisted that she get a referral to the Mayo Clinic. It was there that she was diagnosed. The doctors there had told her that if she would have come six to seven months ago this would have been a different story and much easier to treat.
This led me to question the rural health care system. Why should people in rural areas receive less than adequate health care than that in larger areas? Which led me to think, how many other people have walked through hospital or clinic doors in rural areas misdiagnosed and mistreated? I would think that many people have had their lives cut short due to similar situations such as my grandmothers.
I have been contemplating for months about whether I wanted to go back to school. Central Michigan University has a Doctoral Program in Health Administration. I am a self prescribed "systems" person and I feel that the health systems in rural America need to reexamined and redesigned to provide the most affordable health care to rural Americans without compromising service. Maybe, just maybe if I went back to school I would be able to produce the change that I want to see in this system so other families don't have to have to suffer.
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