McALLEN, Texas — Many of the patients who come to Paul Toscano’s free mobile clinic are jobless.
Uninsured. Undocumented. Desperate.
The Houston Chronicle reports that the physician’s assistant treats so many inside this retrofitted RV that it’s impossible to remember them all. Some he’ll never forget.
He closes his eyes and thinks of a woman who knocked on the door eight years ago. She’d wanted a Pap smear, a routine screening to check for signs of cervical cancer. But he’d turned her away; told her to come back when she wasn’t menstruating.
She never did.
“That happens here,” Toscano said one recent afternoon. “Patients disappear.”
Welcome to the Rio Grande Valley, where women are nearly twice as likely to die from cervical cancer compared to the rest of the country. The disease is now relatively rare in the U.S. but flourishes here in a section of Texas where half the population has no health insurance.
Toscano and another medical assistant travel along the Mexico border in the University of Texas Health Science Center mobile clinic, parking outside schools and treating as many people as possible, many of them women. But an abnormal Pap requires up to two return visits, an added burden for those without steady jobs or reliable transportation.
