Understanding

I have been on the new chemo at half-dosage for 12 days. So far, there have been no serious side-effects except worrisome weight loss, and on Friday, my blood counts were virtually normal. Additionally, the edema in my left leg and foot has improved significantly. If this continues for another 10 days, the dosage will be increased. I am trying to eat as much as I can to halt the weight loss. Because of my reluctance to go through another surgery to make my hard-to-heal wound even larger, an enzyme ointment is being used to liquefy the dead tissues in the wound. The hope is that it will work so well that the surgery may become unnecessary.

Patch Adams

Because his father worked for the military, Hunter “Patch” Adams’s family was constantly moving to diverse places, helping him to learn to accept differences in others and to be able to quickly make friends. When Hunter started school, he goofed off all the time because he got so bored with the “simple” stuff. Soon after his father died in Germany, Adams moved with his family to Northern Virginia to live with his aunt and his uncle, a lawyer and independent thinker, for a few months before later moving to West Virginia. He became very close to his uncle, viewing him as a surrogate father. After moving to West Virginia, he met his first girlfriend, Donna, and dated until she broke up with him in his freshman year in college. Right around the same time, his uncle committed suicide. He became greatly depressed and suicidal, and dropped out of college just before Halloween in 1964. He checked himself into a mental hospital after a failed suicide attempt.

In the hospital, Adams made friends with many of the patients. He realized that his own problems faded away as he focused on helping others and soon discovered that the key to human happiness is to have loving and caring people in your life. He realized his passion: healing people with laughter. When he checked out of the hospital, he immediately applied to medical school without a college degree. He finally entered pre-med school in ’64 and three years later, entered med school at the Medical College of Virginia, as the oldest first year student. He loved to go and visit the hospital patients. He would make them laugh and perform funny antics around them. He believed in the necessity of personal interaction between patients and doctors and questioned the traditional impersonal approach to medical care. Adams eventually developed the idea for a medical clinic built around his philosophy of doctor-patient interaction.

For 12 years (1971-1983), he and his friends operated a pilot project. Four adults, including three physicians and their 16 children, moved into a large, six-bedroom house and called themselves a hospital. They were open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for all manner of medical problems ranging from birth to death. They saw 500-1000 people each month, with five to fifty overnight guests a night, totaling 15,000 people over those 12 years. They were never sued. At least three thousand of the patients suffered from mental illness, but they did not give psychiatric medicines. They referred out what they could not handle. It was truly ecstatic, fascinating, and stimulating. No one gave them a donation and they received little foundation grants, so their staff had to work part-time jobs to pay to practice medicine.

Through the success of the pilot program at the Arlington, Virginia location, a model health care facility is being planned on 310 acres purchased in Pocahontas County, WV. Its goal is to integrate a traditional hospital with alternative medicine–acupuncture, homeopathy, etc. Treatment will combine integrative medicine with performing arts, crafts, nature, agriculture, and recreation. The Institute will include a 40-bed hospital, a theater, arts and crafts shops, horticulture and vocational therapy. Over five years ago, Dr. Adams and staff temporarily stopped seeing patients so that they could coordinate plans for raising $5 Million needed for the Institute’s permanent and expanded home, a “model health care community.” Currently planned is an immediate phase of this dream, a $400,000 WV facility so that their medical service to patients can resume within the next two years.

May this find you and your loved ones in good spirit and health.