Vox Meditantis

I never meant to become the person everyone calls when their elderly parent needs help with the healthcare system. It just happened, one conversation at a time, until suddenly I was the unofficial patient advocate for half of Riverside.

It started about eight years ago when my mother had a stroke. She was sixty-two, still working part-time at the community centre, still walking to Mount Olive Baptist every Sunday morning like she’d done since before I was born. One Tuesday afternoon, everything changed. The hospital paperwork alone felt designed to defeat us – insurance forms that contradicted each other, discharge instructions written in language no ordinary person could parse, follow-up appointments scheduled at three different facilities across New Castle County. I took a week off from my job at the school district office and became her translator, her scheduler, her advocate in a system that seemed to assume everyone had infinite time and a medical degree.

What I didn’t expect was that once people in the neighbourhood saw me managing it – actually getting answers from doctors, actually getting the insurance company to cover what they were supposed to cover, actually keeping all the appointments straight – they started asking for help. First it was Mrs. Chen next door, whose husband needed cardiac rehabilitation after his heart attack. Then it was the Kowalskis down the street, trying to get their father into a decent nursing facility that would take Medicaid. Then someone from church, then someone from the community garden near Minerva Creek, then a colleague’s aunt, then a stranger who’d heard I “knew how to deal with the system.”

Eight years later, I keep a binder in my kitchen with contact information for every social worker, patient liaison, and community health advocate in the city. I know which doctors at Christiana Care New Corinth Medical Centre actually listen and which ones rush you out after five minutes. I know how to appeal a denied insurance claim and which words trigger an actual review instead of an automatic rejection. I know that if you show up at the emergency department at shift change, you’ll wait three extra hours, and that the medical transport service is supposed to give you forty-eight hours’ notice but often doesn’t. I’ve sat in more hospital waiting rooms than I can count, holding someone’s hand whilst they try to explain their symptoms to a doctor who’s already looking at the clock.

The responsibility found me because I’m stubborn and I couldn’t stand watching my mother be dismissed. But it stuck because I’m good at it – better than I am at most things, if I’m honest. I can read the fine print. I can stay calm when everyone else is panicking. I can translate medical jargon into plain English and plain English into the specific bureaucratic language that actually gets results. Most importantly, I’ve learnt that half of advocacy is just refusing to go away. You call back. You follow up. You show up in person when they ignore your emails. You bring documentation. You stay polite but immovable, like water wearing down stone.

New Corinth’s opioid crisis has made this work more necessary and more heartbreaking. When overdose deaths peaked at eighty-nine in 2017, I started getting calls about younger people – thirty-somethings trying to get into treatment programmes with six-month waiting lists, parents trying to fight their way through the impossible maze of addiction services whilst their children were dying. The system fails people at every turn, especially if they’re poor, especially if they’re Black or Brown, especially if they don’t have someone who knows how to fight on their behalf. I’ve become that someone, even though I never trained for it and nobody pays me to do it.

There’s a bitter irony in becoming an expert within a system that shouldn’t be this complicated in the first place. Every time I successfully get someone the care they need, I’m simultaneously proving the system works and proving that it only works if you have an advocate who knows the tricks. It’s exhausting. Some weeks I get three calls before breakfast. Some nights I lie awake thinking about the people I couldn’t help – the man who died whilst waiting for a bed in rehab, the woman whose cancer treatment was delayed four months because of insurance paperwork, the families bankrupted by medical bills even though they had coverage.

But I keep doing it because this city has taught me that we survive by showing up for each other. That social worker who wrote about brussels sprouts and Crocs understood something essential about New Corinth – people here are real, and they help not for the aesthetic but because it matters. The eighty-seven-year-old man who wrote about nearly drowning in the Delaware as a child remembered the stranger who lay down on the ice to save him, someone whose name he never even learnt. That’s the kind of city this is, for all its problems. We reach.

So yes, I’ve become the person who knows how to get your mum’s prescriptions sorted, who can explain what palliative care actually means, who will sit with you in the clinic and ask the questions you’re too overwhelmed to ask. I didn’t ask for this responsibility. But I’ve learnt that being good at something difficult and necessary is its own kind of purpose. My worn-out binder, my phone full of healthcare contacts, my ability to stay patient through the tenth transfer to another department – these are the tools I use to keep people in my community alive and cared for.

It’s not the life I imagined when I was younger, back when I thought success meant leaving this place for somewhere shinier. But somewhere along the way, I stopped performing and started mattering. And on the nights when someone calls to say their father finally got into that specialist appointment, or their mother’s pain is finally being managed, or they didn’t have to declare bankruptcy after all – those nights, I sleep a bit better. Not because the system is fixed, but because one more person made it through.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.