The office is strangely quiet.
It's the end of a long day of seeing patients, and I have a stack of messages from patients I need to call back.
I have been open six months, and my small family practice office in East Camden already has 900 patients. I'm starting to worry about what I will do in a few months when we can't fit any more patients in the building. Sometimes the waiting room is standing-room-only.
On this day, two mothers sat chatting in the waiting room while their children played together. A nervous boyfriend pretended to read a sports magazine, with his young, pregnant girlfriend next to him. A husband sat impatiently with his wife, not wanting to be at the doctor's office.
Spanish and English mixed through the room as patients and staff changed languages in midsentence. I designed this office to reduce stress, with plants in the window, lavender aromatherapy diffused in the air, Diego Rivera paintings on the walls, cushiony armchairs, and music by Billie Holiday. This is a city with a lot of stress.
On this day, I saw a pregnant patient who was bleeding, a possible miscarriage. I tended to a 6-month-old baby, in for a regular checkup. I care for four generations in this baby's family, and I've seen them so many times that they feel like my family.
In the next room was a 50-year-old woman in the middle of a divorce. We spoke in Spanish about the pain of the break-up of her long marriage. I'm fluent in English and Spanish, but by the end of the day, it's hard to get the right words to come out. I ran to the next room and started speaking Spanish to a Vietnamese patient. She smiled and responded in English.
My wife and I moved to Camden more than five years ago after I finished residency in Seattle. I came here because I am an idealist and I believe that everyone deserves respectful, personalized, culturally competent, high-quality medical care. I'm a young doctor trying as hard as I can to turn back the hands of time and recapture something we've lost in medicine.
There was time when small physician's offices were everywhere. You saw your own physician at every visit, and doctors even came to your house. I am determined to be that old-time family physician in a new century. I am trying to fix the health-care system, one patient at a time, by focusing on the well-being of families, not just organ systems and diseases.
