Alphas, Friends & Family

"One of the Originals" Retires from AlphaNet

Joyce Finch has retired after more than a decade with AlphaNet.

She does it with regret, but she’s had more than her share of medical challenges in recent years. “It’s just time,” she says.

One of the first AlphaNet patient services coordinators (“One of the originals,” says fellow coordinator Fred Walsh), Finch is the first to retire.

Her history with Alpha-1 goes back to late 1991, when she had three asthma attacks that sent her to a hospital emergency room. In January of 1992, she saw an allergist who, remarkably, diagnosed her right away with Alpha-1. “I was in denial for five months,” she says. “I told myself, I don’t have this thing, I just have asthma.”

But in May that same year, she saw a pulmonary specialist who confirmed the diagnosis and put her on Prolastin infusions. “My home IV company was charging outrageous prices,” she says. “My doctor had given me the names of two other Alphas in Michigan, and I called the nearest one, Mary Pierce. Mary suggested I give AlphaNet a call.”

And that was the beginning of her long relationship with the company. She started getting regular calls from Terry Young, the first coordinator and the company’s general manager. She soon became an AlphaNet volunteer; then a fulltime paid staffer.

“In the beginning, I only had about 20 people, mostly in Michigan (her home state) but in Florida and California too,” she says.

She was there as the company grew, during the hectic first days of Bayer Direct (now Prolastin Direct) in 1999, and ever since. For years now, Michigan has been her coverage area for AlphaNet. But her influence goes much further than that. “Joyce was the AlphaNet coordinator for many people who themselves became coordinators,” says Terry Young. “So her style of taking care of Alphas became, to a large degree, the usual AlphaNet coordinator style.”

Marta Strock, also a longtime AlphaNet coordinator, agrees. “I thought of Joyce as my Alpha mentor.”

These days, no home IV nurse comes to Finch’s house in a little town outside Grand Rapids, MI. Her husband Ed does the job. “I mix, Ed sticks.” Ed uses her arm veins, which have been receiving infusions for more than 15 years now. “He’s a wonderful sticker. First time, every time.”

A few years ago, she developed Vasculitis (inflammation of the blood vessels, which she is convinced was a side effect of an asthma drug she was taking). This caused severe hearing loss. Hearing aids didn’t completely correct the problem; it made her job difficult, since coordinators spend most of their day on the phone talking to Alphas. The health issues piled on: a stroke in 2005, a heart attack in 2006.

So, with sadness, she retired in early March, with lots of Alpha friends and great memories about being a coordinator. “I thoroughly enjoyed the job,” she says. “Many Alphas I was talking to right through this year have been mine since the beginning. I got to know a lot of people well that I wouldn’t recognize on the street; people I will never see in person. When I did meet them, say at a support group meeting or education day, I’d recognize them by their voices.”

One of the coordinator’s common challenges was correcting misinformation. Which leads to her description of the very best part of the job:

“Telling people they’re NOT going to die immediately! Telling them that treatment is available, that with good medical treatment and by taking care of themselves, they can enjoy life and live a long time.”

A lot of Alpha friends are wishing Joyce Finch exactly that.