For all of you who read, responded and recommended by little rant last week, I wanted to give you a little update. For those who missed my rant, you can read it here. Thanks to the various suggestions that people made, I was able to do research into the local immigration resources and was pleasantly surprised at how many potential resources there are. I was back at the clinic today, where I could get the family’s contact information. I was hoping to get the interpreter from last week to help me make a phone call (as she was an interested party willing to help), but we just not free at the same times due to both of us having busy schedules. I am worthless on the phone with my minimal Spanish and since my call would not be completely medically related, I was hesitant to bring in another translator. So instead, I used Google translate to put a letter together detailing all the resources I found and some of your other suggestions. I also did tell the mother I would testify at immigration court for no charge. I told her I wanted to share their story and contact some elected officials and asked for her permission to do so. Hopefully she will be agreeable and contact me back. If I do not hear from her, I will try again to call her next week. I hope to have further updates for you all if the family is willing to keep in touch with me on this.
I wanted to write this not very interesting update for two reasons. I wanted to let you know that I was deeply touched by the responses to the story. I am still surprised at the response! I read every one of the comments and feel honored to be a part of the DK community. But most of all, I wanted to let you all know that you empowered me. Too often, it is easy to get angry at an issue and then let it drop a few days later as life moves on and things get busy. I do that fairly often, I must admit. But because of all the interest that you all had in my patient and his family, I felt an obligation. I feel this obligation not only to them, but to you. And this has helped me push forward with doing what I feel I can do to help, even when it is tempting to give up. For this, I wanted to say my sincere thanks to everyone.