An Open Letter to President Obama and Congress – Help Bring Paula Home

By Denis Campbell

The healthcare debate rages across Capitol Hill with lobbyists fighting against a ‘single payer’ option as if it were the moral equivalent of the anti-Christ. Before you blindly accept any bill, please examine the very real (and ironic) face this debate has taken on for this journalist.

Paula Persichini-Petitti is a woman to whom I once joked, “you would be what would happen if Mother Theresa, Joan Jett and a drug-free Janis Joplin merged.” Paula is one tough, rock and roll loving, hard living, Boston-area born and bred “broahd” with a “haht” (heart) of pure gold. Listening to her thick Boston accent you would start with a first impression that would be one of the absolute biggest mistakes you could ever make.

Paula was born a rebel. She graduated from the nursing program at Blue Hills Regional Institute and became a radiology specialist at a time where technology was evolving and most said she could not do it because she was too young. If you have a death wish or desire physical harm, merely suggest to Paula that she ‘cannot’ do something.

Ironically, she now lays with tubes coming out of her body, a respirator helping her breathe and in a coma in a Rapid City, South Dakota hospital. She has spent nearly every summer of the last several years, working with Russell and Pearl Means helping Native Americans of the Lakota Sioux Nation in Pine Ridge Reservation. There she counsels and teaches indigenous families about the twin health threats of alcohol abuse and diabetes in one of the USA’s poorest communities. (more...)