Elena Delgado

When companies deny their workers health coverage, everybody suffers. But few have suffered more than Houston janitor Elena Delgado.

In 2006 Elena noticed a boil growing on her lower back. A holder of the Harris County Hospital District’s “Gold Card,” she made a medical appointment and got medicine to treat the boil.

The medication did not work. The boil grew inward, leaving a concave hole in Elena’s back. She sought more treatment. Months would elapse between appointments and she saw a different doctor each time. The boil got infected.

Unable to fall asleep because of the pain, Elena would often succumb to exhaustion. She would fall into a deep sleep from which it was hard to awake. On an October night in 2006, Elena’s mother could not rouse her. She dialed 911.

With the emergency rooms at Houston’s public hospitals full to capacity, the ambulance carrying Elena was diverted to the private Memorial Hermann Hospital.  Doctors, aghast at how far the boil had been allowed to advance, called for a lifesaving surgery that would prove long, painful, and expensive.

Elena lay unconscious for a week after the procedure. “The doctors didn’t think I was going to make it,” she says. Three days later she was released. Four months passed before Elena was able to get a follow-up appointment.

Recovery was hard. For one year, her mother Eloisa and her brother José stood over her sick bed, cleaning her wound, feeding her, bathing her.

Today Elena is back at work at Centerpoint Energy Tower with GCA Service Group, Inc., a large cleaning contractor with 20,000 employees nationwide. While she is healthy, her pocketbook is not. She carries $6000 in outstanding medical bills from her ordeal.

As a member of Service Employees International Union Local 1, Elena now has access to a personal doctor through the Houston Service Workers Clinic, which began operation in February, 2009. The clinic was built under terms of a collective bargaining agreement reached by Houston janitors and their employers in 2006, when Elena was sick. Elena is now fighting to improve access to healthcare for other workers.

“After what I’ve been through, I want every janitor in Houston to be able to see their own doctor,” Elena says.