Doctor survived cancer, uninsured didn't

Shirley Searcy married young and had her first child in her teens. Her mechanic husband died in a 1978 car crash, leaving her to raise the family alone. Social Security helped, but the Searcys never had anything extra, family members said.

“Life dealt her more I guess than some people have been dealt,” her daughter-in-law said.

She didn’t work outside the home, didn’t venture often beyond her four acres and the frame ranch house where she raised her children in the humble town of Blanchard, about 30 miles from Oklahoma City. In her later years, reading stories to her dozens of grandchildren was a favorite pastime, family members said.

She’d figured she’d live long enough to qualify for Medicare at age 65, they said, but she missed it, by just a year.

She’d had symptoms for at least a year before going to the doctor, her family said.

“She put off going because of no health insurance and she wanted to trust the Lord. She was hoping to be healed,” said her daughter, Melba Spalding.

A relative referred her to Klaassen, a primary care doctor in the city, because she’d had abdominal pain, lost weight, and had bloody stools. She’d been hospitalized several months before and urged to get a colonoscopy, but still hadn’t had one when she went to see Klaassen.

With his own diagnosis fresh in his mind, Klaassen knew immediately that it was colon cancer. A colonoscopy weeks later confirmed the diagnosis and the family learned the disease was incurable.

The diagnosis was “heartbreaking to all of us,” said Spalding, 50, the oldest of Mrs. Searcy’s children. The family had always been close, and Mrs. Searcy “was pretty well the hub of it,” she said.

With her colon diseased, Mrs. Searcy had a colostomy, surgery that creates an opening in the abdomen for waste removal, and worried about how to pay for all her medical supplies, Karen Searcy said. She didn’t want to burden her family, but Karen said she and her husband, Kenneth, lived nearby and helped out.

Still, their own finances have sometimes been a struggle.

Karen said they had no health insurance when the first two of their four children were born. They needed help to pay for the births.

Now they’re covered through Kenneth’s job as a plywood salesman — a godsend since he has diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol and co-payments alone for his medicine have totaled $90 a month.

“There’s a lot of mixed emotions about health care in my mind,” Kenneth Searcy said. “You really can’t afford it, but you can’t afford not to have it.”

With insurance, Mrs. Searcy would have sought treatment sooner, family members said.

“I believe with all my heart that if she had gone to a doctor early on, that she would still be living,” Karen Searcy said.

She said her mother-in-law held up pretty well after her surgery in January 2003. But by that Thanksgiving, when she could no longer make her holiday pies, the gravity of her situation finally hit her.

“She broke down and cried and she realized that her strength was gone,” her daughter-in-law said.

Shirley Searcy died a month later.

Klaassen last saw his patient several months before her death, but kept in touch by phone, and her children said that was a comfort to her.

“Shirley spoke very highly of him,” Karen Searcy said. “He was not just a doctor, he was a friend. Their situations being the same, I’m sure created a bond between them.”

Klaassen also thinks things would have turned out differently for Mrs. Searcy if she’d been insured.

“If she had survived at least a year more, she would have had new pills available to her,” the same ones that have helped control his disease, Klaassen said.

“People think that everybody’s taken care of, that there’s a safety net,” he said.

“People say ... nobody ever dies because they don’t have insurance, and I say, ‘Yeah, they do.”’