Barb Price says she began experiencing irregular bleeding one day while at work, and initially didn’t think much of it.
“I was going to dismiss it, and one of my co-workers put her mom hat on, and her mom foot down and was like, ‘You’re calling your doctor,’” Barb says.
Barb uses Marathon Health as her primary care provider, so she scheduled an appointment that day at the Marathon Health MyClinic @ Traders Point, which she can access as an employee benefit through her job at Bosma Enterprises. She says the clinic staff was immediately concerned and told her to come in as soon as possible.
Bosma Enterprises provides employment, rehabilitation and training for people with blindness or a visual impairment, and over half of their employees – including Barb – are legally blind. To accommodate its employees’ needs, Bosma Enterprises offers transportation services to and from the clinic.
“Even if you schedule the same day, Bosma will put in a request for a driver,” Barb says. “And Marathon Health’s really good about calling back over when we’re done so they’ll send somebody back over to get us.”
Barb saw Marathon Health physician Dr. Mark Fakhoury, who determined she needed to see an OBGYN, and Marathon Health’s referral team scheduled an appointment for Barb a week later at St. Vincent in Indianapolis. The OBGYN performed a dilation and curettage procedure, which revealed precancerous cells.
“They referred me to another doctor, a gynecologic oncologist at St. Vincent, and they decided to do a full hysterectomy,” Barb says. “Upon doing that, they found that I had Stage 1, Grade 1 uterine cancer. They went ahead and did a five-dose radiation treatment, internal radiation treatment to make sure they had gotten it all.”
Barb is now feeling better, and she says she’s grateful Dr. Fakhoury and the clinic staff took the time to listen to her concerns.
“The day I was there, I know there was at least an hour that the doctor spent with me,” she says. “Marathon Health takes the time to spend personal time with their patients and takes the extra time to make them feel like they’re somebody, not just shuffle you in and shuffle you out. Had I not called into the doctor that day, who knows six months from now what would’ve been going on.”
