A guest post by one of our summer interns, Ariana Gatewood.
After a severe concussion playing soccer, symptoms lingered far after what I had been told to expect. Bright lights became overwhelming. Loud noises were unbearable. School days often ended in the nurse’s office, lying in a dark room waiting for the world to quiet itself. There was no neurologist in my hometown. Like many families from rural areas, this meant an hour plus drive to the nearest city for specialized healthcare and painfully long wait times for an appointment once you manage to even find a physician accepting new patients.
After months of waiting for a follow-up visit, the neurologist told us that the concussion triggered chronic migraines. I rested because it was all I thought I could do. When that wasn't enough, I learned to adapt. I missed football games and other school events, hanging out with friends. I had to carefully plan my days around avoiding things I knew could trigger a migraine. I assumed this was simply what life looked like now.
Years later when the migraines became unbearable and began effecting my school performance, my family found another neurologist to see if anything could be done. It took a couple months of trial and error testing different medications, but we eventually found a medicine that worked for me.
What surprised me most wasn’t how quickly I felt better, it was the realization that effective treatment had existed all along. The greatest barrier hadn’t been my symptoms. It had been access.
That realization is one of the reasons I was drawn to pediatric health policy and advocacy. This summer, through my internship with Cornell Pediatrics, I’ve had the opportunity to see advocacy from an entirely different perspective. I’ve participated in conversations on Capitol Hill about proposed changes to Medicaid, SNAP, and SSI and the potential impacts on child health, explored pediatric subspecialist shortages, and had the opportunity to learn more about the many barriers that prevent children from accessing care.
This internship has reinforced something I didn't fully appreciate before: advocacy is not a role reserved for policymakers or people with particular job titles. It belongs to anyone willing to identify a barrier and work toward removing it.
Advocacy looks like a pediatrician taking the extra time to help a family navigate Medicaid enrollment.
- It looks like a physician writing to a legislator about how a policy will affect patients.
- It looks like a medical student having the opportunity to train in a rural community.
- It looks like a parent asking one more question because they know something isn’t right.
- It looks like a young person speaking up about their own experience.
Advocacy can start as simply as refusing that “this is just the way things are." Each effort has the potential to improve a child's life. Looking back, I often wonder how different my childhood might have been if specialty care had been available closer to home. I can’t change that experience, but I can use it to better understand what other children and families continue to face today and to advocate for removing those barriers for the next generation.
Every child deserves access to the care they need. Building a healthcare system where that is possible requires all of us to be advocates in whatever capacity we can.