Before The Rescue

Before the rescue, I did not know there would be a rescue. 

I did not know that a human being could be brought so close to the edge by untreated pain, medical abandonment, isolation, and the loss of every ordinary support that makes a life livable.

I only knew that the woman who arrived in my home was suffering beyond anything I had ever witnessed.

She arrived vomiting from pain.

Tears became one of the only ways her body could reset. Exercise was impossible. Meditation was impossible. Even the practices people casually recommend for stress or pain assumed a body and mind with enough room to participate. There was no room. Pain occupied everything.

A brand-new $600 mattress was replaced with a $2,000 specialty mattress and an adjustable bed, not as a luxury, but as an effort to make suffering less unbearable. We tried to create even a small place where her body could rest without being punished for existing.

Every day, we did all we could to keep her here on this planet long enough for help to arrive.

Every week—and sometimes on call—our trauma therapist did the same.

We were not treating a temporary bad day. We were trying to protect a life that had been worn down by years of pain, dismissal, forced choices, and systems that could see policies but could not see the person in front of them.

Her light was dimming.

In the summer of 2023, I became certain I was going to lose her. I went across the street to my neighbor’s home, weeping. She worked for a major media conglomerate, and I told her what was happening. I hoped that if someone could tell the story publicly, perhaps help would finally find us.

She could not make that happen.

But she had something better.

A friend visiting from out of town was a hospital administrator. His partner lived with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome—the condition I had recognized in Kat within her first month in my home and helped her pursue evaluation for. He understood enough to recognize the seriousness of what we were facing.

He and my neighbor were preparing to go to the beach, but they paused their plans.

He listened. He asked for details. He helped prepare a one-page summary that could answer the questions an urgent-care doctor might have before seeing a patient whose care had become dangerously fragmented.

We had been referred to that clinic by OHSU because the clinic that could potentially see her could not get her in until December.

December.

When someone’s pain is life-threatening, a months-long wait is not a bridge. It is an abyss.

The 45-day bridge from one prescriber to another was not enough to cross the months-long gap in care. She had contracted RSV from her previous pain doctor on the day the mask mandate ended. Months later, she was still suffering. That office would not mask. The refusal did not merely create a disagreement; it eroded a relationship between a vulnerable patient and the physician whose care she needed to survive.

Outside of OHSU, doors kept closing.

Some systems would not take her as a patient because of strict policies against opioid prescribing. Other clinics had waitlists that stretched for months—if they were accepting new patients at all. Palliative care would not accept her because she was under 65 and did not have cancer.

The message, over and over, was that there was nowhere for her to go.

The urgent-care doctor did not provide care close to what was needed for her pain. She became angry that OHSU had sent her there and told us not to return. We were directed to a community drug-rehabilitation clinic “for safety.”

That clinic could not help her either.

She was not the population it served. She was a patient in agony—not an addict seeking treatment.

The emergency room did not feel safe to her because of her lung vulnerability after RSV. By then, the fear of exposure, the possibility of withdrawal, the terror of being dismissed again, and the certainty that no one understood the severity of her pain had all become part of the crisis.

She had already lost too much.

She had lost her thirties to undertreated pain.

She had lost her career, financial security, autonomy, independence, and ability to focus. Medications intended to help had also carried devastating burdens. High-dose gabapentin affected her cognition and memory. Her body changed. She gained 100 pounds. Being bedbound was agony. After the forced taper, being bedbound became even more unbearable.

Later, after the rescue, we would learn more about the risks associated with the medications and the depth of harm that had been done.

But before the rescue, I only knew that her suffering had gone on too long.

And I watched her get blamed for it.

Her weight became a target, as though weight were the cause of her pain rather than part of what happened to a person whose life had been constrained by injury, immobility, medication effects, and untreated suffering. But she had been 135 pounds at 5’9” when her pain was so severe that she needed a spinal fusion.

The fusion failed.

When she woke after surgery, she was distressed by someone nearby screaming without stopping. Then she realized the person screaming was her.

She became conscious of the full force of her pain.

Her parents tried to get someone to help. No one listened. Other patients began to complain about the screaming. Eventually, a family member with a medical license made a call—and that was what it took for her existential crisis to be addressed.

Not the pain.

Not the patient.

Not the family pleading for help.

A medical license.

Six weeks later, she was forced back to work or faced losing insurance. She had to walk up four flights of stairs because there was no elevator. Her pain spiked. She lost her job.

This was not just any job.

She had left a corporate career and gone back to school at an Ivy League institution because she wanted to bring heart into education—to make sure children at the margins did not fall through the cracks. She accepted the modest pay of work with purpose because she believed in showing up for people who were overlooked.

Then she became the person in the cracks.

She had opened her arms to catch others.

Now she was falling.

And I was watching her lose faith in humanity.

Before the rescue, I did not know how many people would turn away because her crisis did not fit their rules, their waiting lists, their definitions, their specialty, their age limits, or their comfort level.

I only knew that a person in unbearable pain was being moved from one closed door to another.

I knew that her light was dimming.

I knew that we needed help.

And I knew that if help did not come soon, there might not be time left.

The Promise Beside Me

During that time, I had a walking partner. She was gentle, mild-mannered, and someone with whom I shared my growing fear for Kat’s life.

One day, as the crisis became even more dangerous, she told me a story from a school where she had worked as a school psychologist. 

A principal had refused to meet the needs of a group of Native American students. Their mother became so upset that she staged a media event outside the school. The superintendent overruled the principal, and the students’ needs were finally addressed.

Then my walking partner looked at me and said:

  “You find out where to protest, and I will be right by 

your side.”

That sentence mattered.

When people are being harmed in plain sight, they do not always need another person to tell them to be patient. Sometimes they need someone willing to stand beside them and say: *This is wrong. We will not look away. We will not leave you alone in it.*

Afterward

There were two rescues.

First, Emily’s Place The One—where a woman in catastrophic illness could be seen as a human being worthy of care, safety, advocacy, and a chance to survive.

Later, a humanitarian doctor heard her story, recognized the severity of her suffering, and helped bring her out of agony.

Those rescues did more than change pain care.

They restored something that had nearly been taken from her completely: her faith in humanity.

But before the rescue, we did not know that was possible.

We only knew we had to keep her alive long enough to find the people who would finally help.

NEXT: Stranded on a healing journey across country.

*Before the rescue, caregiving meant doing everything possible—one day, one night, one closed door at a time—to keep someone alive long enough for help to find her.*

The context aligns with Emily’s Place’s stated mission of providing safe in-home housing, trauma-informed support, stability, and advocacy for women affected by catastrophic illness or injury.[1]

Sources

[1] THE RESCUE - Emily's Place https://emilysplacetheone.org/f/the-rescue

NEXT: Stranded on a healing journey across country