La injusticia

I'm sitting in my car, in rush hour traffic, grateful to finally be done with this hellish week.  I turn on the radio, only to hear another advertisement telling me that I should be freed from the terrible burden of shaving by getting laser hair removal.  Ah yes, the important things in life.

I look to my left.  I have just passed McDonald's, one of the three in Savannah that was raided on Wednesday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  Evidently, a few managers at the restaurants were selling fake IDs to prospective workers.  When ICE cleared out the restaurants, everyone who was white, black, and basically anything other than brown was told to leave.  That's good; I mean, Africans, Canadians, Asians, and Europeans can obviously not be undocumented, right?  And neither can very light or very dark skinned Hispanics, amazingly enough.  And I'm sure all of the workers who were arrested were doing terrible things with the IDs, like putting into someone else's social security.  (Granted, if you watch Fox News, the workers used these "stolen identities" to do things like "ruin American Citizens' credit".)

I'm feeling a little more than frustrated.  Yesterday, the Georgia state legislature passed a bill, HB 87, targeting illegal immigration.  Its premise is quite similar to SB 1070 that was passed in Arizona last year, but supposedly Georgia used language that will hopefully avoid injunction.  Gov. Deal has already said he'd sign the bill.  So now if someone who is undocumented gets pulled over for having a tail light out, failing to use a turn signal, or not stopping for 3 seconds at a stop sign, they can be deported.  And there is no rule that forces authorities to notify the individual's family; the individual can simply be moved to a detention center somewhere and will wait there until deportation occurs.

The law comes at an interesting time, since Vidalia onions are literally being picked as I write this less than 2 hours west of where I am sitting right now.  Georgia's economy is based almost entirely on agriculture and tourism, and we are in the middle of Savannah's prime tourist season.  I wonder who is going to work cleaning hotels, busing tables at restaurants, and landscaping the city's beautiful area.  I wonder who is going to work the farms and the factories across the state.  Good thing there are lots of U.S. citizens who are ready to line up for these jobs when our undocumented residents leave for a less racist state.  (Did I mention that South Carolina is only a few miles north of where I'm sitting?)

This upcoming weekend is known as Orange Crush on Tybee Island.  Historically, it is a beach weekend with mostly black college students.  This year will be the first year that there won't be "random police checkpoints" on the road to Tybee, since they keep facing allegations that these stops are a cover-up for racial profiling.  This decision was announced yesterday, too.  Good thing we're replacing bigotry towards one group with bigotry towards another.

Maybe I'm just tired.  Here are two very small examples of what my week consisted of:

1.  I've been on the phone practically a million times with a married couple that I lovingly call "the twins" (aka Mr. and Mrs. R.) and their entire family.  "The twins" are uncontrolled diabetics; they were the first patients that I successfully solicited free insulin for by writing really sweet letters to pharmaceutical companies about how they barely make ends meet by selling tortillas on the side of a road in the boondocks of Georgia.  Mrs. R. had a mole between her eyebrows that caught the eye of one of our doctors; she was referred to a dermatologist in mid-March, who did a biopsy.  It turns out that she has invasive skin cancer.  The kicker of this part of the story is that the dermatologist's office knew on March 14, but didn't notify Mrs. R. until April 6 (and only after I called them a million times, reminding them to find an interpreter and call her).  Mrs. R. has been referred to the Medical College of Georgia (MCG) in Augusta, where they will charge her an arm and a leg to get treatment.  I had to book her appointment, which I had to coordinate around her special eye appointment because she was just diagnosed with glaucoma last week, too.  The daughter of "the twins" is a single mother of a 1-year-old, and is suffering from some major depression.  She came in one evening last week to talk to me and just started sobbing, so I've been working to get her some counseling.  On Tuesday, the daughter-in-law of "the twins" called to report that Mr. R. had a routine x-ray done of his back for some pain, and evidently he has cancerous growths in both of his lungs.  He had a few more diagnostic tests done yesterday and today, so I already know that next week will likely be full of trying to coordinate his treatment in Savannah with his wife's treatment in Augusta and Claxton.  No one in the family speaks more than a few words of English, but, in case you were wondering, the family is in Georgia legally.

2.  One of my patients (Mrs. A.) had a ridiculously high hemoglobin in a routine blood test last week, so we referred her to a hematologist/oncologist.  When I called to tell her that I made her this appointment and that I'd be sending an interpreter, she was all kinds of confused because she "felt fine."  The doctor ordered a few more routine tests, and discovered that Mrs. A. has a tear in her aortic septum.  In other words, there's a hole in her heart.  It's a congenital defect, but now that she's getting older, it's affecting her body.  The doctor admitted her to the hospital, and Mrs. A's daughter called to tell me they were trying to transfer her to a hospital with a better cardiology center (likely in Atlanta) where they could do surgery.  Mrs. A's daughter is younger than me and has 2 small children.  She speaks almost zero English, and she's trying to understand her mother's health situation while also taking care of her family.  Today, a social worker went to talk to Mrs. A. to find out her documentation status.  Being that she is undocumented, 2 of the 3 hospitals that were contacted for the transfer have declined.  Mrs. A. is on heparin to thin her blood; with the amount of hemoglobin she had, she was at a very high risk for a stroke.  She'll be in the hospital through the weekend, hoping that the last hospital in Atlanta will accept her.  Then come the complicated questions: how will she get there? Who will pay the bills? This is not to mention the whole issue of doing a risky surgery.  Some people have already opined that she should just go back to Mexico to get this procedure done.  (Out of sight, out of mind perhaps?)  I'll be visiting her tomorrow afternoon.  

I feel emotionally exhausted.  Today marks exactly three months until my commitment at Good Samaritan is done.  I'm trying to think about housing for the fall and about what I'll be doing with my month off this summer.  But I'm preoccupied thinking about all the injustice going on around me.