Table 3.

Experience with physician

Level of comfort and trust with doctor/satisfaction with care
Trust	Well the doctor that I’m seeing… the doctor that I worked with referred me to him, and I have a lot of faith in him, and I also have a lot of trust in him. So …I feel safe…I feel good with him, because he doesn’t give up. When something doesn’t work out, he uses something else, but he is always doing something. He doesn’t give up.
Communication difficulty	But it’s just that one doesn’t understand the doctor because he speaks, like, in other words there are words that are too… that one doesn’t understand.
Lack of availability	In my case the physician was not around … every time we would make appointments to talk to her a she was always busy and on emergencies. She was never there. So we… well, we waited until we went to see the physician in Seattle and with him we were able to talk. He would explain a lot to us.
Lack of time	They want to send us out as soon as possible from where we’re at Everything is hurried up…
Insensitivity	Now, another thing. When there is a case like that… what would it be called? …lack of thought That a person comes, or that they send a person from the clinic where a person is hospitalized and at the moment they say to him, that the tumor was cancerous. What do you believe they should tell him? Tell him little by little, being that she [his daughter] was pregnant and seeing how he was there lying down. Don’t you think that they could go about telling us little by little?
Negligence	…my mother-in-law… her physician … he never wanted to tell us anything. He would get mad, yell, and tell us that she was going to be released. But that is not the response we were looking for and after…he said he has going to go on vacation and was going to pass the case on to a female physician and that is when she said, the physician, that the operation was not necessary…but they had already operated her, all she needed was chemotherapy and whatever she had would have gone away. Because what she had was a small tumor and she said that supposedly with radiation she would be cured. But I think that they left something in her because she would cry a lot, a lot from the pain. She was skinny, and becoming slimmer and slimmer and she would go to the clinic in Grandview. They would tell her that …. it was gastritis… She went to Toppenish on emergency because she didn’t feel good and … they… did that thing and use that camera, colonoscopy…And that is when they detected that it was a tumor and they tested it and it was cancerous…. And we were very upset with the doctor because…for one year and it was …that is only gastritis and gastritis and all the medication was for gastritis … if they would have done the exams she might have been able to fight. …we never knew, because we were here and my mom was in Mexico. But they took her to Mexico… and in reality, like they say; they didn’t tend to her right. They hurt her a lot, after; she said they just left her. She wanted to be at home and calm. …the doctor that I had … she ignored me completely. She did not want to run tests on me, did not want to do anything to me. Finally I switched doctors. What I am hearing, is that the majority have to go through one or two doctors in the, here in the clinic before they are able to find out that they have something. I was dying; the pain was so intense that I could not bear it. Then I returned, in February I returned and I said, “Doctor” I said, “I cannot do this anymore. Please give me a pass to go with another doctor.” I said, “People have told me that there are tests that can show what is wrong with me. Where there are machines that can, those tests can do it, they can detect it.” He said, “I am going to order an MRI for you.” But we begin with the problem of the insurance; it did not want to cover. They did not want to give me medical coupons.
Hesitance to refer to specialists	And they don’t want to send you out of the clinic because they will lose money … … because I spoke with other private doctors, the first thing they would say to me was, “do you have medical coupon?” No, “do you have insurance?” No. “We cannot help you. You need a reference from your family doctor in order for us to help you.” So it is very difficult