Doc Survived, Uninsured Patient Didn't

Dr. Perry Klaassen is pictured in his office in Oklahoma City, in a Thursday, March 8, 2007 photo. Dr. Klaassen lived to tell about his frightening ordeal with colon cancer. His patient did not. They were the same age, in the same state, suffering from the same disease. But there was one huge difference: Klaassen had health insurance, his patient did not.(AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki) (Sue Ogrocki - AP)

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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.