Jay's Anatomy

The free clinic's rocking.

It's a Wednesday night. A Latino mother with three kids comes through the door, followed closely by a dark-haired woman in modest business attire and an African-American man sporting immaculate Nikes. A woman dressed in pink from her hair-tie to her pulled-up ankle socks maneuvers through the entrance with a cane and sits across from a young woman with spikes on her military-surplus purse and silver studs in both her eyebrows. The tattooed teenager doesn't look up; her eye is on a lanky guy in his midtwenties with shaggy hair and snug corduroy pants.

Patients sit shoulder to shoulder in the lobby.

Behind the front desk, students from the University of Kansas Medical Center squeeze into a physician's office, crowding around doctors who try to get in bites of dinner while doling out advice on how to handle patients.

Out in the hallway, more students lean against the wall, chatting or impatiently twirling their stethoscopes as they wait for open exam rooms.

Slicing through this chaos is Adam Obley.

One minute, the second-year med student is balancing a medical chart on top of a Tupperware container full of brownies as he coaches a patient over the phone about how to take her medications. The next, he's rifling through a drawer, looking for a tape measure or a fetal heart monitor. As he bolts from the triage area to the exam rooms to the back office, he fields rapid-fire questions from other first- and second-year med students.

"Hey, Adam, we can do Department of Transportation physicals, right?"

"Her blood pressure's 165 over 85 — should I send her to the ER?"

"Adam, do we have any blood pressure cuffs ... that work?"

Obley explains medical acronyms the way that other 25-year-old guys fire off stats from Saturday's ballgame.

These Jayhawk med students have their own brand of school pride, which shows in the name of their all-volunteer effort: the Jay Doc Free Clinic.

This year, Obley is one of three co-directors. He's the one who arrived early this evening and marked up the white board that dictates the night's lineup, assigning exam rooms and scribbling the names of two or three volunteer doctors — if he's lucky — who will coach the students with their diagnoses.

The lobby will fill to capacity as more than 50 uninsured people — many of them from Wyandotte County but plenty from the Missouri side, too — wait for someone to attend to their medical needs.

With the lanky, spectacled look of a future academic, Obley has unrelenting energy and a split-second answer for everything. But on this late-summer night, the man in perpetual motion is sitting perfectly still.

"So the antidepressants aren't working?" he asks a woman on the phone, an increasingly uncomfortable look spreading across his face.

"OK, well, would it be possible for you to come into the clinic tonight? ... There's no way for you to come in? ... OK, well, tell me a little bit more about how you're feeling.... OK, just a minute."

He turns to Sharon Lee, the doctor who, during the day, runs her own clinic, Southwest Boulevard Family Health Care, in this angular, corrugated-steel building in the shadow of peeling grain elevators at the corner of Southwest Boulevard and Rainbow. The Jay Docs work here, a few blocks north of KU Med Center; now that her own patients have left and the Jay Docs have taken over her rooms, Lee has been poring over after-hours paperwork. Obley tells her that he's on the phone with a woman who came to the clinic last week for a urinary tract infection. But the discussion has veered from Obley's explanation of her lab results.

"She says she wants to go to sleep and never wake up again."

Lee takes the phone and leaves the room.

For several seconds, questions ricochet among the students in the office. Does the woman need to go to the emergency room? Should we call the police?

Lee returns a few minutes later and assures Obley that the woman will be fine. Lee says she spent some time talking with the caller about her dead-end relationship and her lack of a job. "It was a mama call," Lee says.

"You're better at that than I am," Obley replies, visibly relieved. "But we did take care of her urinary tract infection."

Tonight, he'll barely have time for a few bites of his Wendy's salad. The potential suicide call is quickly lost in the waves of patients complaining of panic attacks and asthma attacks, heart trouble and hernias.

"How's triage going?" Obley asks second-year student Lase Ajayi as she makes a beeline through a group of students to a closet in the back room.

"Oh, you know," she replies. "Everybody's dying." ast month marked the clinic's third anniversary, but it's a rare student who can still remember Jenni Koontz, who floated the idea of a free, student-run clinic in the spring of 2002. A hundred of Koontz's fellow KU Med students rallied around the idea, securing $60,000 in startup funding from the Association of American Medical Colleges. They approached Lee, who operates a sliding-fee-scale clinic where 40 percent of the patients are uninsured, and easily talked her into allowing the Jay Docs to operate out of her facility on Monday evenings.