Somebody to Lean On

Angela still recalls her first meeting with Dr. Dang, who would become her primary care physician. “She was very soft-spoken. She listened, she paid attention. When you’re talking to her, she’s very attentive.” Instantly, Angela knew that Dr. Dang was someone with whom she could be honest. “I opened up with Dr. Dang about my drinking and my binge drinking.” 

Angela told Dr. Dang that she was in a “dark, dark place.” Angela says that “medical people know what that means: I was ready to end my life. Dr. Dang encouraged me to find the strength.”

“I saw that Angela was very depressed,” says Dr. Dang. “She didn’t have the energy or willpower to do anything at that time. Before she met me, she was already vomiting up blood from the heavy drinking. So I said, ‘You’re down and you can’t go down any farther, so you have to get up and we’ll help you.’ ” 

Angela did not know it then, but she had found a lifesaver in Dr. Dang and a medical home at AltaMed.  “Dr. Dang seen me breaking down,” recalls Angela. “By this time, I was weighing 360 pounds.” Dr. Dang prescribed medications to treat Angela’s depression and connected her with behavioral health specialists and therapists as well as a dietician. “When we treat our patients, we treat the whole person, not just their health problem. This state of wholeness involves their mental health and their physical health,” says Dr. Dang.

Dr. Dang also linked Angela to Alcoholic Anonymous (AA) and recommended screenings such as bloodwork panels and a colonoscopy. Angela had no income, so Dr. Dang helped her get disability pay. Any paperwork Angela needed was completed, signed, and waiting for her at the AltaMed clinic front desk so she could pick it up. When the diet changes were not helping reduce weight, Angela became pre-diabetic and had high cholesterol and high blood pressure. Dr. Dang suggested bariatric surgery so she could reach a healthy weight and schedule her knee surgery.

Every specialist Dr. Dang referred Angela to for a higher level of care found a serious health issue. When Angela was scheduled for bariatric surgery, for example, her surgeon discovered that she had an undiagnosed hernia and ended up correcting that condition and postponing the bariatric surgery. Despite the setbacks, Dr. Dang was there to make Angela feel supported on her journey. Dr. Dang reminded Angela that she had the “toolbox” to help herself and motivated her to do so. As a case manager, Angela helped her clients develop advocacy skills and connected them with community resources. Dr. Dang continuously encouraged Angela to help herself by drawing on this vast knowledge and experience.

Today, Angela is sober and “living her best life.” Angela found that AA was not for her. She found that her spirituality and a “good isolation”—a sort of spiritual retreat she created for herself with Bible reading and prayer—cured her of substance use addiction. She is twenty pounds away from her goal weight of 230 pounds so she can qualify for knee surgery. She is currently living in a transitional shelter and looking forward to permanent housing.

 “Primary care physicians are the quarterback for the team,” says Dr. Dang. “We have the very important role of redirecting patients where they need to go to take care of their health.”

“Dr. Dang is my hero,” Angela says. “It means the world to have a doctor like Dr. Dang. At AltaMed, you don’t feel like a number. You don’t feel like they are just in it for the money. You don’t feel like you’re just part of the system. You feel like you actually have somebody who cares.”

Angela, too, has demonstrated her caring ways while living at the shelter. She helps new clients make their transition to living in the shelter and prays for them when they ask her to do so. When one of the women at the shelter left abruptly and abandoned her dog named Yodi, the agency that ran the shelter wanted to charge her with animal abandonment and to send him to the animal shelter. “Let’s just save them both,” said Angela, who adopted Yodi. “I thought dogs were nasty and expensive because I am a cat person.” Now, she finds that Yodi, a Pomeranian and Chihuahua mix, has brought her so much joy. She uses him as emotional support and as part of her physical activity program. The three daily walks that Yodi and Angela enjoy together have helped her keep weight off after gastric bypass surgery. 

She is keeping a journal that she hopes to shape into a memoir. “It’s the journey of my life,” she says. “I want to leave something to my kids so they’ll know how to take care of themselves. The scares I went through in the past two years was a wake-up call. I also want to share with women and young girls how important it is to take care of ourselves.”

She also does diamond paintings—intricate rhinestone mosaics of peacocks, flowers, and the word “home.” She also admires bees, a miracle of nature, and collects anything at the dollar store that has bees on it. She uses it as a motif for sayings that are important to her: be kind, be nice, be patient.

She creates vision boards where she envisions areas where her new home will be and works on saving money. “I work with an agency called SparkPoint and they help individuals like me create a budget, develop credit or clear up credit, and explore resources.”

After all that she has experienced Angela feels that she would be a more effective case manager. “As a case manager back then, I did a lot for my clients instead of empowering them,” Angela says. “Now I know how to empower them. Based on experience and my relationship with Dr. Dang, I know how to be on the other side and how to let them navigate to get what they need, and then how to follow up with them. They have a saying, ‘When you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. But if you teach him how to fish, you feed him for life.’ That’s the way I look at life now.”