STRUGGGGGGGGGGGLING

I know Marin said no incompletes but I can't make this happen. I am going to keep working on it and hopefully have a better shape for it by tonight.

QUESTIONS: Can I make this something? Is there anything intriguing about college health centers? What IS intriguing?



Not a single smudged finger print dirties the wall of the waiting room, the magazines all say 2009, and a chemical new carpet smell still lingers. Lisa Ailstock, the Director of Health Services at Kalamazoo College, smiles and directs me through a doorway and down an equally shiny hallway.

Entering her office, it’s obvious she’s a busy woman. Her desk looks well-organized but only because it’s stacked with what I imagine to be every filing contraption available at Staples; all are full of loose paper, files, or books.

A private liberal arts college is not where Ailstock thought she would find her niche. Her career started serving Kalamazoo’s low-income population in a clinic setting. Her resume is filled with experience in the public health sector, serving those without a lot of options in the American health care system. She sees her profession as a way to serve. The Tagore quote “I slept and dreamt that life was joy, I woke and saw that life was service, I acted and behold service was joy," is at the bottom of every email.

As she spent more time as Physician’s Assistant at Kalamazoo’s Family Health Center, she became better schooled in local health clinic politics. Eventually, Ailstock left the FHC to co-start her own practice when bureaucracy started to get in the way of the mission. ……..“We tried to keep costs low, taking Medicaid, insured patients”

“Thanks, we really are excited to have all this space…” she beams when I compliment the sterile new offices. The Health Center recently moved into a portion of the new student center. Actually, I missed the Health Centers of my first years, where I had begun my intimate relationship with Lisa, the kind of intimacy created by seeing someone every few months in the midst of some sexual or emotional crisis, usually both at the same time.

As the main provider of healthcare at Kalamazoo College, she knows more about me and many of my peers than a lot of our closest friends. She’s seen us, physically and emotionally, in ways that we hope to never see ourselves.

If a medical professional wanted to serve those who are most in need in the, no one would think they would end up working at a private liberal-arts college. But she has found that the college population is definitely and uniquely in need of a certain kind of healthcare because they are at a very interesting and exciting moment in their lives.

“I love the students and the student issues”



The students drew her in to a new way of looking at serving a population in need.
QUOTE.

Being a healthcare provider at a college is to guide a lot of students taking the first steps on their own in terms of reproductive care.

She has gotten involved in the politics of repro., rights on behalf of students.

A 2005 federal law financially dissuaded pharmaceutical companies from selling their products to these pharmacies at slashed prices. College women were particularly affected. Students previously paying under $15 a month for birth control now face the unpleasant choice of either budgeting over $50 a month or switching to cheaper and less effective methods. As colleges experienced double or triple contraceptive price increases, the likelihood of women switching to cheaper and less effective methods considerably increased.
.QUOTE


Mental health? She was very into helping students through mental crises as well.Another unique, or really critical (in terms of time in their lives and first independent choices) aspect of serving college students?

“students here particularly are hard on themselves”
“I think there is an incredible amount of isolation”
“I can have one student in a room…” 27:00 minutes
“This is a neuro-transmitting, chemical…”