A sick woman's odyssey without health insurance

Finally, they were taken into the back of the ER. She was given a hospital gown. A woman inserted a needle into a vein and took her blood.

"I thought she was setting me up for the CT scan," she said.

"Then another lady came in and told the first lady I don't have insurance," Ruby recalled, "and they took the needle right out of my arm."

"The whole vibe just changed," said her son, who has worked for six years in building services at The Inquirer's printing plant in Conshohocken. "The thing was out of her arm. Mom changed back into her clothes, and we just walked out after sitting there all those hours."

"I felt like I was pushed out of there," she said.

She said the ER staff told her she could not afford surgery, that it would be too expensive without insurance.

A Temple resident physician, Roxana Samimi, also signed a form for medical assistance, checked the box indicating Ruby was "temporarily disabled," and wrote under diagnosis: "gyn mass (35 cm); needs surgery."

But Ruby did not return to the welfare office with this form. She had just come from there and figured what was the point.

As she left the hospital, Ruby also said a caseworker "gave me a paper to go to the free city health clinic."

The next day, Ruby did - Health Center No. 10 on Cottman Avenue, one of the city's eight clinics.

"I showed a nurse at the health center the paper from my doctor that said I need surgery and she said we don't do that here," Ruby recalled. "I should apply for adultBasic or welfare."

So she went home in disgust, maybe to die.

She did look into "Special Care" insurance, offered by Blue Cross plans, she said, but "never sent the application in because at the bottom in very small print it says if you have a preexisting medical condition, the coverage will not kick in for a year. So I knew there was no point."

The anxiety and frustration were immense in Ruby's tidy Logan rowhouse last week, where the mantle clock chimed the passing hours and the portrait of her grandsons reminded her of why life is so precious.

"What really pissed me off," she recalled in unusually blunt language, "was how all these gunshot victims can get treated at Temple and they send me back home. I guess I've got to shoot myself in order to be admitted.

"I guess I'm not that crazy."

After receiving a call in early October from Ruby's son, who had seen this series running in the newspaper, The Inquirer referred her to the Pennsylvania Health Law Project, a resource listed in the newspaper.

The nonprofit health-law project helps poor, elderly and disabled residents get health care.