Singers: ♪ Oh, whoa, whoa, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, whoa, whoa ♪ ♪ Oh, whoa, whoa ♪ ♪ [Wind whistling] ♪ [Bird squawking] ♪ Woman: This hospital closed in 2013.
It was actually offered to the VA for a dollar, and they declined.
We buy these hospitals and clean them up, but our guests are actually not sick patients from the community.
They're actually paranormal investigators who come in in hopes to come in contact with past nurses, doctors, and patients whose energy may still roam the halls of this hospital.
Is there anybody here in this room with us?
Brooke, voice-over: People come to this place and spend thousands of dollars to investigate.
This once-abandoned building is now a profitable business for the city.
We pick hospitals that have been closed because a hospital's a really special place, especially in a small town.
They cover all aspects of life, from birth to death.
♪ Usually your small-town hospitals are a gathering place for the community.
People would come in on their lunch break and go to the cafeteria and sit in the waiting room and just eat it like it was just like a Hardee's.
The hospitals in small towns mean a lot to people, and they are the center of a community.
♪ ♪ We actually coined the term "BFF" a long time ago, so-- I think God had this ordained because we've outlasted husbands.
I mean, you know?
As you get older, you learn that, you know, you really keep your friends close because they're rare.
It helps when there's two of you there standing together, and it keeps you from going so weary.
Dr.Tyson, voice-over: We're family nurse practitioners with the Health Wagon.
We're on the road out here delivering free health care to those that are uninsured, underinsured, and just those that are without access to health care.
Dr. Tyson: We had this one patient, he had severe gout, and I was like, "Well, come in here," and you know, "I'll have Paula come in here and look at it."
And I told Paula before we went in the exam room-- I was like, "Paula, he has gout in his toe."
Do not step on his toe."
Well, he stuck it out right in front of me!
When I came in, I fell over him.
♪ OK. Breathe.
Dr. Hill-Collins: I was just telling them how good you had always been to me.
Betty: You've always been good to me, too, you and Teresa both.
Yes.
I've got a book of poems that your mom wrote that you gave me.
Dr. Tyson: Beautiful poetry.
She was really good at writing poetry.
Betty, voice-over: I worked in the bank till I retired.
I don't have any children.
I got a lot of nieces and nephews that seem like they're part mine.
I was engaged two times, but it just never worked out, and--I don't know-- I don't know if that was-- I know it's God's plan for us to be married.
That's His plan.
I never did understand why it didn't work out for me that I didn't get married, but so far, I haven't, but I'm not giving up yet.
[chuckles] Oh, I still might find the right one, right?
[chuckles] Oh, me.
I'm a diabetic.
I have both kinds of arthritis, fibromyalgia, the asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
I have a hard time moving around.
I hope everybody realizes that we're blessed to live in this country where we have freedom.
A lot of countries don't have freedom like we do.
Ramin: And, Betty, when you sit here, what do you dream about?
For the Lord to come back and get me.
[chuckles] Oh, no.
I just try to be as happy as I can be.
I just try to be happy.
Some days, it gets kind of-- kind of hard, you know, but most of the time, I'm pretty happy.
Mm-hmm.
♪ ♪ Dr. Tyson: Hello, Cheryl.
How are you?
Fine.
You know, OK. Dr. Hill-Collins, voice-over: This is not just the weak, the poor, the vulnerable among us.
It's the working, middle-class people.
It is teachers, electricians, accountants, physical therapists, people that have to meet $3,000 deductible before their insurance will even pay for their insulin.
I've tried the patch.
I've tried.
I've been hypnotized.
I've tried everything.
That one girl, he had her levitating.
I mean, two people could lift her with fingers, she was that stiff, but I seen her at the store the other day, didn't help her, either, so-- She got levitated, but she didn't stop smoking.
Yeah.
No.
OK. How's your diabetes?
My sugar levels have been perfect.
What was the worst complication?
All the bones from my arch come out the bottom of my foot and left a hole about the size of a baseball.
I had a misdiagnosis from a podiatrist, told me that I would be in a wheelchair and I would lose my leg.
You had sent me to Lexington, and they knew exactly what it was, how to treat it, and I have a functioning foot... With an arch.
with an arch, and I work 12, 13 hours a day at Kroger's, walking all day long.
Ramin: Do you have insurance?
I don't anymore.
They took mine because I work too much at-- I made too much money.
So you have too much money for insurance.
Are you a wealthy woman?
[chuckles] I'm working at Kroger's-- I mean, hello, is that?-- I mean, in the deli.
No.
No.
I'm not a wealthy woman.
Her inhalers, one inhaler is $414 for one, and that's barely a month's supply.
How can you afford that?
You know, if you come here illegally, you can get more benefits than if you were born here.
It's not right.
Ramin: What about the men in your life?
[Laughter] No.
Ha ha ha!
This is my best friend.
This is my only friend.
[Laughter] Oh... Ramin: When you were a child, what did you dream about?
Moving away.
[laughs] Going to the city.
[chuckles] What did you hope to find there?
I don't know.
Got married, had kids, wanted my kids raised here.
Teresa: Oh, so I did.
That's my fault, huh?
OK.
Wanted my kids raised here, not around a big city.
[laughs] Yeah.
Ramin: What do you dream about now?
Not losing my home.
How are you doing, Mack?
Dr. Tyson, voice-over: Our patient population here, they're very proud, and they will not go to the E.R.
They die... Dr. Hill-Collins: Because they don't have the money to pay it.
Dr. Tyson: They know they can't pay it.
Well, Mack, if you want to come on back here, I want to take a look at that.
You did a good service to our country, but it took a toll on your body, didn't it?
Yeah.
It sure did.
Mack: I went to Vietnam in 1968.
I was a 19-year-old.
Seemed like some people got out of the going to the Army on account of school, but I was in a technical school.
I helped put a lot of my buddies in body bags, and I put a little kid in a body bag that just-- He was coming with a hand grenade, I guess, and it blowed up on him.
I got to having problems with my eyes and with my heart, and I had to go in the hospital.
They couldn't really find my nerves, and I was shaking and everything, and then later on, the veterans, I reckon, sued the government for coming up with Agent Orange.
We was out in the boonies.
When they'd spray, our backs would get soaking wet, you know.
[Whirring] I was going to the VA, and they kept telling me there wasn't nothing wrong, so I run into Paula, you know, at the Health Wagon.
She called me back the next day, said, "I got to send you somewhere"... so I went to Kingsport, and I had high aggressive prostate cancer, but the VA kept telling me, "You're fine.
Don't worry about it.
Come back in 6 months."
But if I hadn't went to them, I probably wouldn't be here.
I think anybody-- if you walk into a hospital anywhere in the United States, you should be treated free because it's the United States, you know?
It's the greatest country on Earth... but they don't take care of their own people.
♪ Man: In a lot of our remote area, you get down to single-lane, winding roads.
That's hard for ambulances, so there is always someone dying en route to the hospital.
[Birds chirping] Without the adequate hospitals and health care, I believe that we have had several people to end up in caskets like this one or this one.
Ramin: Have you picked out your own casket?
I have not.
[laughs] I have not picked out a funeral for myself, but I think I'll let that be the last thing.
[chuckles] My plans are to be buried beside my wife.
She was a school teacher and enjoyed that very much.
She passed when she was only 57 years old.
She was buried 15 years ago today... and... that was rough.
It's always hard to give up a family member.
It's always hard to give up a friend, and in a rural area, these people are our friends.
We know most of them, and if we don't know them personally, we know their family.
Jeff, come on back here.
Dr. Tyson, voice-over: Finances are the judge, jury, and often the executioner of what our patients experience.
Nurse: How are you feeling today?
Dr. Tyson, voice-over: The life expectancy in Nicaragua is higher than it is here, and it's like a third-world country here, and this is the United States of America.
Man: Fire in the hole!
Man: I've been a coal miner for a little over 30 years.
I'm a fourth-generation coal miner.
My dad's dad worked and my dad, and then there's 4 boys.
It's a blood thing.
Everybody says a coal miner's a different breed, different type person, and it didn't take me long to realize that's what you had to be, so... [Oxygen device clicks] we was crawling around in a vein, like, 32 inches high 10, 12 hours a day, and that's where you stayed on your hands and knees, the whole shift, so, in the coal, in the mud and the water and oil and the whole 9 yards.
First week, two weeks, my knees kind of blistered over, and finally, they started callusing up.
Once they're callusing up, I didn't even wear knee pads.
I just crawled bare-kneed, probably for 15 years, I guess.
Then my knees started getting bad, and I never will forget when I went to the doctor, and he said, "You're supposed to "get up off your legs at a certain age, you know.
"Before you're 8, 9 months old, you're supposed to get up and start walking."
I said, "Well, you need to come over to the mines.
Let me take you in, show you what I do for a living."
He didn't take me up on my offer, but anyway, I offered.
[chuckles] And then you got back problems.
I've got 4 disks out in my back.
I've got 3 out in my neck.
I ripped a disk out in my shoulder, but I let it go for-- I was looking at about a year of downtime, and I couldn't afford it raising a family, so I just had to cortisone it and work and keep it going.
I went far as I could with it, and I made it about 6 years, and then I had to have a total replacement.
I have black lung disease and what they call "rockosis," which is from the coal dust and the rock dust underground.
I mean, I had health insurance up until the day, you know, I got disabled, and that's cut off.
That's just their policy.
Now all I've got is Medicare.
It pays 80%.
Ramin: And who pays for the 20%?
I struggle to pay for it, struggle badly to pay for it.
The company doctors, when you go up against them, their whole job is there just to try to make you out of a liar and just say there's nothing wrong with you.
They're paid to do that.
Last doctor I went to said I had the lungs of a 23-year-old.
[Oxygen device clicks] We went on vacation once to Mexico.
That's about as far as I've ever been, been on probably 3 vacations in my life, I guess, so I ain't got time.
That's all we done is work.
[Oxygen device clicks] My daddy done it.
My dad done it.
His dad done it.
My brothers done it.
That's all we done.
[Oxygen device clicks] ♪ Dr. Hill-Collins, voice-over: Every man here has chronic diseases.
If we could catch the disease process early, they're not gonna be disabled when they're 40 and 50 because they're gonna have treatment.
[Birds chirping] Where she is, I am, and where I am, she is.
That's the way it's always been for us, except deer hunting, you know.
That's the only time that we was ever apart.
August the 9th of 2015, she had multiple strokes... 7 years later, here we are.
She was a data processor at a community hospital, and then she got a pituitary tumor.
Of course, that disabled her.
It's just that we don't get to do the things of the world-- fishing and camping and going to Dollywood and stuff like that, you know, living.
We've managed to slide through and survive to this point as far as having doctors and stuff, and then we've called on the Health Wagon here for some guidance, and I told the doctors that I needed a boss, and so I've got one.
I was a meter reader for the Town of Wise for 30 years.
I had real good health insurance while I was working, but then I had to retire because her health had failed her.
If I had a medical emergency that was life-threatening, they would find me dead.
One or two days in the hospital, I'd be completely financially ruined.
Ramin: And you had told me you imagined Melanie getting up and walking again.
[Breathes deeply] God, what a dream.
I've had that dream.
I'd give all I got and all that I could ever have to see that.
I'm so proud of him...
I just want to bust at the seams.
I've always dreamed about, you know, if-- I didn't have any children, but if I had had one or two or 3 or 4, what I would be doing right now which is taking care of them, and, you know, it's been like I've dedicated my whole being to Danny, and... That's what it's been because all we've had is each other.
The whole world is falling apart.
[Sniffles] If they'd spend half the money that they're using on destroying it, nobody would want for nothing, would they?
But helping people?
Shoot.
♪ ♪ [Wind howling] ♪ ♪ [Birds chirping] ♪ Dr. Hill-Collins, voice-over: Remote Area Medical is an organization that provides free medical care to underserved communities across America.
Hundreds of patients line up in the middle of the night hoping to be seen.
Man: Almost all of these folks have had some type of employment and some type of life that's different, and then once you fall on hard times, once you have that missing tooth, then it's difficult to get a job.
Once you don't have a job, you've lost any health insurance.
It's a downhill cycle very, very quickly.
Woman, voice-over: I'm a stay-at-home mom.
His name's Levi.
He's two, and he's mean.
I don't know.
He's just a boy, pure boy, loves mud.
Came to get 4 teeth pulled.
I went to a concert, and I got into a fight, so they broke off.
Well, we're poor as crap-- [Victoria chuckles] so if we have children, we pretty much get punished for it because they want us to pay these outrageous amounts of money on our child's, you know, daycare centers.
They want us to, you know-- I mean, a box of diapers right now for a good brand that my son's not allergic to, which is only two brands, and it's still $25 for a box, and that might last us two weeks, so that's $50 a month just in diapers.
I mean, it's just-- it's just hard.
Our parents wanted us to be happy.
Our parents wanted us to grow old and do what we love doing, but yet we can't because when we do have the children and we try to do something that even makes us happy, that job doesn't offer health care or that, you know, and you just need health care because, coming from somebody who hasn't even seen a doctor in 8 years, yeah, I haven't seen a doctor in 8 years.
I haven't had health care in almost 8 years.
What did I dream about?
Um, I don't really-- I don't know.
I didn't imagine it like this.
♪ ♪ [John Prine's "Angel From Montgomery" playing] John Prine: ♪ I am an old woman ♪ ♪ Named after my mother ♪ ♪ My old man is another ♪ ♪ Child that's grown old ♪ ♪ If dreams were lightning ♪ ♪ Thunder were desire ♪ ♪ This old house would've burnt down ♪ ♪ A long time ago ♪ ♪ Make me an angel ♪ ♪ That flies from Montgomery... ♪ ♪ Singer: ♪ Oh, whoa, whoa, oh ♪ ♪ Oh, whoa, whoa ♪ ♪ Oh, whoa, whoa ♪
