Social worker key component of treatment

For 12 years, Tanis Hernandez has been the go-to employee at the Center for Asbestos Related Disease Clinic in Libby.

The social worker and grant writer does just about everything and anything she can to help the patients and staff of the clinic, called the CARD Clinic locally.

“The doctors and nurses around here call me the “anything else girl,’” Hernandez said with a smile.

Joining the CARD Clinic in 2002 when it was still a part of St. John’s Lutheran Hospital, she initially was hired as a social worker.

Now, Hernandez’s official title is one she loathes: administrative director.

“It doesn’t really have anything to do with what I do,” she said. “I prefer programs director or really anything else.”

The CARD Clinic left the hospital to form its own nonprofit organization in 2003, and has since grown from a handful of employees to a staff of 23. Another full-time social worker eventually assumed some of Hernandez’s duties, freeing her up to take on various other responsibilities.

“Our funding was unstable, and someone had to rise up,” she said about her all-encompassing job. “But I still get to help patients speak to staff on occasion. When I do, that’s what I like to do. I get to be a real social worker.”

Hernandez prefers to be behind the scenes. She credits the doctors, nurses and staff with helping the thousands of patients CARD has seen since opening its doors.

Primary funding for the clinic comes from the federal Centers for Disease Control as part of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, in the form of a renewable four-year $10 million grant.

Hernandez said the human element of the clinic is not lost on her.

“One of the unique things about CARD is as patients get sicker, you see them more and more,” she said.

Patients become like family, Hernandez said. Libby is a small town, and doctors know their patients and their families.

“I’m not from Libby,” said Hernandez, a Kalispell native. “I moved here in 2000. Most of the staff are from Libby, though.”

The CARD Clinic sees 850 new patients every year, and more than 300 have died as a result from the toxic asbestos dust that blanketed the area for decades while the vermiculite mine was in operation until 1990.

“I’ve probably been exposed,” she said. “Not as much as someone here in the ’70s, but from a personal perspective, you have to keep risk in perspective.”

Hernandez and her husband, a forest worker, have built close ties to the community.

Many of the patients at the CARD Clinic struggle with more than just the disease.

“It’s a hard thing for patients that it affects everyone differently,” Hernandez said. “A lot of our patients never worked in the mine at all.”

Many of those stricken by asbestos-related diseases weren’t miners or foresters, but people who simply lived in the town. Family members who came home and knocked the sparkling dust off their clothes may never have lung issues, while those who played in mine tailings as a child just a few times cling to oxygen tanks.

“There are guys feeling guilty because their wives are sick and they are just fine,” Hernandez said. “It takes a lot for someone to say they can’t vacuum their own homes anymore. I help them get in touch with resources available to them.”

The CARD Clinic allows sufferers from asbestos-related disease to get help around the house, access mental-health professionals and myriad other resources.

An unlikely source for some of these resources comes directly from the federal Affordable Care Act. Hernandez helped lawmakers draft language for what is known as the “Libby provision.”

This provision is three-pronged.

First, it allows organizations in “Public Health Emergency” areas to apply for grants from the Centers for Disease Control, such as the grant from which CARD gets most of its funding.

Secondly, it extends Medicare benefits to all those dealing with asbestos-related disease in Libby, regardless of age.

Lastly, it funds a Medicare pilot program, which earmarks federal money to hire people to rake leaves or shovel snow for asbestos patients. The program also pays for patients’ athletic club fees and medical-related travel expenses.

“[Former U.S. Sen. Max] Baucus set us up for that one,” Hernandez said. “I got to develop relationships with federal aides. They would call me up and help me help them word the provision right to best serve us.”

While the federal funds help Libby’s many asbestos victims, the unfortunate reality of the Libby amphibole asbestos exposure is that numbers still are increasing.

Hernandez isn’t sure if or when she will see fewer patients at the CARD Clinic, but it might not be in her lifetime.

“This is a slow-motion technological disaster,” she said. “It wasn’t like 9/11 where it’s over and you mourn and rebuild. We won’t see the end of this for the next 10 to 40 years. All those people affected. It won’t be soon.”