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    Ask Me Why I Hurt: The Kids Nobody Wants and the Doctor Who Heals Them
    Ask Me Why I Hurt: The Kids Nobody Wants and the Doctor Who Heals Them
    Ask Me Why I Hurt: The Kids Nobody Wants and the Doctor Who Heals Them
    Audiobook8 hours

    Ask Me Why I Hurt: The Kids Nobody Wants and the Doctor Who Heals Them

    Written by Randy Christensen, M.D. and Rene Denfeld

    Narrated by Johnny Heller

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The unforgettable inspiring memoir of one extraordinary doctor who is saving lives in a most unconventional way, Ask Me Why I Hurt is the touching and revealing first-person account of the remarkable work of Dr. Randy Christensen. Trained as a pediatrician, he works not in a typical hospital setting but, rather, in a 38-foot Winnebago that has been refitted as a doctor's office on wheels. His patients are the city's homeless adolescents and children.

    In the shadow of one affluent American city, Dr. Christensen has dedicated his life to caring for society's throwaway kids-the often-abused, unloved children who live on the streets without access to proper health care, all the while fending off constant threats from thugs, gangs, pimps, and other predators. With the Winnebago as his moveable medical center, Christensen and his team travel around the outskirts of Phoenix, attending to the children and teens who need him most.

    With tenderness and humor, Dr. Christensen chronicles everything from the struggles of the van's early beginnings, to the support system it became for the kids, and the ultimate recognition it has achieved over the years. Along with his immense professional challenges, he also describes the trials and joys he faces while raising a growing family with his wife Amy. By turns poignant, heartbreaking, and charming, Dr. Christensen's story is a gripping and rich memoir of his work and family, one of those rare books that stays with you long after it ends.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 4, 2011
    ISBN9781452672236
    Ask Me Why I Hurt: The Kids Nobody Wants and the Doctor Who Heals Them

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    Reviews for Ask Me Why I Hurt

    4/5

    36 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I chose this book because I moved to Phoenix when I was fourteen.My mother ended up on drugs, Meth and I lived with a friend for a while. I did wind up at a youth housing facility called tumbleweed I met a lot of kids who had been on the streets. Their stories I will never forget. Their were wonderful and caring staff later I named my first born middle name after a staff member. I understood what these kids go through I couldn't go to my father's because he was abusive and the man my mother married later was a child molester. People need to know most kids teens don't run away because their home life's are so great. Almost every girl in their had been sexually abused by someone in their home. I can remember having to apply for insurance because I didn't have any as a teen. The system needs more support for teens. They get over looked. I want to volunteer some day and give back. I would recommend this book to anyone unless you have lived it you don't have a clue and if you have lived it you will feel like it matters to people.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Dr. Randy Christensen runs a mobile health clinic (from a van) serving homeless youth in Arizona. Their stories are touching and shine a light on the challenges homeless people have in accessing services. Well written -- I found myself wanting to know what happened to the various patients profiled.
    • 4/5
      I like this book. It inspired me! It also broke my heart. Randy Christensen’s Memoir will make you look at yourself and wonder what you can do. He starts up a mobile medical clinic. He helps homeless youth. It opened my eyes to homeless youth out there. It also pointed out the red tape this had to go through to continue on. This is an easy read. I would recommend this book especially for those you like non fiction biographies and memoirs. I give it 4 stars.
    • 1/5
      I picked up this book expecting a narrative about the shortcomings of our health care system and how one man tried to help an often-overlooked demographic. This accounts for roughly half of what is included in this narrative. The other half is a lot of self indulgent details about the strain Dr. Christensen's work put on his marriage (marginally relevant) and his wife's difficulty with pregnancies (completely irrelevant). The stories about the homeless kids are truly moving, but it's really not worth wading through the personal stuff if you are looking for a book about health care.
    • 5/5
      Dr. Christensen was 34 when he started the mobile medical unit in Arizona to help homeless youth. The hospital on wheels, actually a van that needed more than a little tweaking to work, was donated, but getting it functioning and stocked was an exercise in patience. Luckily he had great people on his side, including Jan Putman, a no nonsense nurse-practitioner, and his wife Amy, also a doctor, who understood him putting in long hours. Ask Me Why I Hurt chronicles the beginning of the mobile medical clinic, the kids they saw over those first years, and how working with them affected his family life.Try to imagine being dropped off on the street as a teenager. You have no money, no place to live, no job, and no way of getting help because you don’t have a valid ID to prove who you are. Now add on lack of coping skills because of childhood abuse or trauma. You are sick because you ate food people threw away; you are exposed to the elements, and exploited by mean people who prey on kids like you. You have been injured and beat-up and you need to see a doctor, but you don’t have health insurance and the county medical services can’t help you without an ID and some type of contact number or address. This is reality for thousands of kids in every State. Some of these kids ran from abusive homes, some have mental illness, some have lost their parents, some are struggling with addiction and some have aged out of foster care. They don’t have family to count on, they don’t have a support network or mentors and they don’t have a voice in our political process. You may not see them in your neighborhood or you may not recognize that they are homeless, but they are out there hurting. We may not be doctors that can physically heal them, and yet we can do our part. They need us, especially our voices and votes for compassionate change. I couldn’t put this book down, the stories of the young men and women jumped off the page, and so did the stories of Dr. Christensen’s fellow workers and his family. The chronicle of Nicole really touched me; a beautiful homeless young woman with mental illness languishing on the streets year after year not getting the help or the medications she needed to become whole, made me weep. The courage of these kids, even when everything was against their survival, gave me hope. I didn’t know anything about Dr. Christensen before receiving this book through the Amazon Vine program. I hope he’ll continue to publish more about his work with the homeless youth.
    • 4/5
      Christiansen's memoir of creating a mobile healthcare service for homeless teenagers is both inspiring and heartbreaking. Dr. Christiansen gave up his hospital appointment to transform an old RV into a mobile clinic. He discovers that there is tremendous demand for his services, and that America's homeless teenagers face multiple and complicated problems.What is particularly striking is just how tragic the stories of Christiansen's patients are. The majority are homeless because they have run away from abuse. Most have weathered horrible situations. One of his patients lives in a hole in the desert. These children don't just need medical care, they also need attention, compassion, and a competent adult to pay attention to them. This book highlights the difficulties of providing care to this population. It is nearly impossible to get these children enrolled to receive benefits, as such things require identification and parental help. Likewise, it is prohibitively expensive for Christiansen to stock drugs, but it is generally impossible for homeless teenagers to fill prescriptions, especially regular prescriptions for chronic conditions. The problems that are regularly recognized in the American medical system are magnified for Christiansen. This book is also something of a personal memoir, as Christiansen is trying to start a family at the same time that he is beginning his work with the mobile clinic. I found the personal memoir to be much less engaging than the professional. Ultimately I left this book inspired by what Christiansen has managed to do, and terribly depressed by the extent of the problems.
    • 4/5
      Having to rewrite my review my browser acted up when I was almost done the first time. :( well anyways I won this from first reads and I'm glad I did. This is a wonderful memoir about Dr. Christensen and his team who go around helping the forgotten,unwanted, and unloved kids. He treats them, loves them and helps them, he gives them hope. Each kid with a different story begging and ending. It doesn't matter he treats them almost as there his own kids. I was sad when he couldn't heal the ones who couldn't be healed, but I was happy when I read the good endings of the children who he could heal. I highly suggest you read this even if you don't like memoirs, I really think you will like this one