My daughter was planning on going to a nursing class and had to take a tb test when it came back positive. She isn't sick, but they wanted to test my son and his came back positive also. I hate the health department people. They give you the news like "Oh okay it's positive, you need to do this this and this..." like i am listening to them, when in reality I haven't heard anything they said after "it's positive". So they send us to the hospital to get chest x-rays. The little snot they have working at the desk starts complaining, "This doesn't have a name on it, your paperworks not right...yada yada yada." At that point I really just wanted to leave and go home. She tells everyone in the waiting room that we don't have any insurance and we can't pay." To which I reply "You guys are the ones that wants the xrays not me" Apparently she was not educated enough to know that public health policy is such that the health department will pay for the xrays. So we get the xrays. They say that will take a month so we talked it over and we decide to go to the Indian Health Services since my kids are natives. I go in and explain to the health nurse to see if we can get the results from the xrays sooner. She tells me to put a mask on my son and that they will give him an xray and we will know the results that same afternoon. So we do the xray go home and wait, she never calls, but the Health department in our county calls and says get back up here right away. So we run up there and they don't let us into the building but come out to the parking lot and tell us he needs to do a sputum test for three days and that he can't go to work. He calls in sick and we get up the next morning to do the sputum test but before we give it to them I tell them we first need a note from the doctor releasing him from work. They give me a note that says "B.'s tb is positive must stay off work until more tests are done." I took it back to them and said this won't work because it will start a panic where he works and he will get fired. so they write a better one that says he needs to be off work. We take the note to his job and they say that is not good enough because he needs a definite time that he is returning. We return back to the doctor and tell him we need a date he can return to work. The hospital said the doctor is gone and he can't give a date to return to work because he can't give a diagnosis because he doesn't have the sputum test back yet. So I went and talked to his work and they let him take a weeks vacation that lets us buy some time but I still don't know what to do. I hate dealing with the public health nurses, one of them keep prefacing everything she says with, "I don't know how much you know about this but....." Okay well if you would actually ask me you would know that I know quite a bit about it. Let's see my dad tb and spent 2 years in a sanitarium at talahina. At one point the health nurse called law enforcement on him and as a young child i remember him having to be taken away by the sheriff. Because once you have tb you are no longer "sick" you are a "criminal". OH and if you would ask I could tell you that my son's uncle had tb and died of it in 2006 and his uncle and aunt both had it at that time and nothing was done to try and control it then but now you are acting like we have committed a felony. It would have been nice if you would have been as diligent about curtailing this disease in 2006 as you act like now. Anywho, they don't care about my son or daughter or if they live or die all they care about is keeping them from the public. During all of this my son or daughter has not seen a doctor. They refuse to give my son a note keeping him off work until the test come back so I find it rather funny because the conversation goes like this "Don't go to work at all" "Well okay give me a note so i can be off work" "We cant do that because we don't know how your test will come out" "well then I am going to work", it's crazy. My mom remembers when my dad had to go to the tb sanitarium and she was telling how bad they were, I said, "Yea that was bad but at least he got medical care, they won't even let my son go into the building." It all just seems so hopeless.
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