My Story: Interacting With Doctors as an Older Woman

JZ mentions how positive her experiences with doctors have been as she gets older.

Transcript:

OBOS Today: What do you feel like has changed in the last 15 years? 

JZ: Um I’ve gotten a lot smarter. I’ve read a lot more books. Just a lot of orthopedic changes and corrections and surgeries and negotiating that and staying as mobile as possible, I just did a water aerobics class here in our, in our building. 

OBOS Today: Yes, no that sounds like fun. I would do that. 

JZ: And I wasn’t the oldest one. 

OBOS Today: Wow. 

JZ: Cause this building is mostly older people. Just naturally occurring people. Yeah. 

OBOS Today: Yeah um, I guess, I was also wondering if, like, 

your experiences with doctors has like changed at all throughout your life? 

JZ: Um, only improved. I think growing up in Washington, where we had good medical care and then the 10 years I was at National Institutes of Health, I had a lot of free medical care and report, and that’s how I got into this arthritis study, and um yeah I think Washingt—, Washington and Baltimore are very rich in having resources so we’ve got all the Hopkins stuff and the Washington hospital system so it’s been a very advantageous place to be for healthcare, and NIH. 

OBOS Today: Yeah, have you ever had any like poor experiences with doctors, or has it always been kind of? 

JZ: Um, sometimes not being listened to and being aware that I wasn’t being listened to. But more positive than negative, and some like, for instance, Dr. Fau—, Anthony Fauci from NIH, he used to bring down his list of isotopes he wanted to order a chemical set and hand them to me, and he okay here Judy and we’re doing AIDS research. We’re doing HIV. And we’re doing, um, the influenzas and the European and African diseases that we’ve worked with in this country, but they were way behind and watching those researchers work. So, it’s been a very enlightening experience. 

OBOS Today: That’s awesome. I did not know that. 

JZ: It has been. It’s, it’s, you know growing up around Washington and Bethesda is just a wonderful place to be. 

OBOS Today: That’s cool I did not know you knew Anthony Fauci. 

JZ: Yeah, yeah, I was his, it was the watering part of his laboratories before he got to be “Anthony Fauci” yeah. So yeah, that that was cool that was.