My name is Jason Spelts. I am homeless in the greater Denver area and wanted to express sincere gratitude for Dr. Sarah Stella’s “This Doctor Has Spent Two Decades With Patients Experiencing Homelessness.” In my thirteen years of homelessness, this is the first time I have read anything where I left saying to myself, “Holy shit, this person gets it!”
I am one of the invisible people she speaks of. Having already been diagnosed with spinal stenosis, CES, arthritis and a herniated disk, I recently found out I’ve been walking around with untreated severe and chronic PTSD. Which has, undoubtedly, kept me away from any form of treatment until now. I have spent more than a decade sleeping in hidden places, staying clean to not look homeless, and avoiding people (particularly other homeless and police) in order to survive. It wasn’t until I found myself unable to walk that I finally got on Medicaid and went to the doctor for the first time since being discharged from the Air Force some 33 years ago.
People like me exist. We aren’t in most homeless counts. When social services learns where we sleep or camp, the location is flagged in a database shared with police. Inevitably, the local government will decide it’s time to “crack down” on the homeless. The first targets for police are the locations in that shared database — at which point, the very things we need to survive extreme weather are stolen and destroyed. It happened to me two days ago. With the stenosis and other back issues, I’m unable to carry the things I need to survive. Some days I can’t walk, even to a toilet…