Mike Espel: At the Intersection of
Faith and Pharmacy
The year was 2008. Michael Phelps swam his way to 8 Olympic gold medals and 7 world records in Beijing. Marvel’s first movie, Iron Man, trailed Warner Brothers’ The Dark Knight at the U.S. box office. And, Barack Obama, then a young Senator from Illinois, made history as the first African American to be elected U.S. President. For Mike Espel, the year was a turning point for his career at St. Vincent de Paul. A neighbor had arrived at the Charitable Pharmacy, located at that time in the Liz Carter Outreach Center, in hopeful search of a new insulin pump. Hers had stopped working, she explained, and she needed the device to help control dangerous swings in her blood glucose levels. Mike’s heart sank at the request. 4
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Helping patients to improve their health was his passion, and it was the reason he agreed to take on the role of Director of the Charitable Pharmacy just a year and a half earlier. But, resources were tight, and the Pharmacy typically didn’t receive donations of insulin pumps. As he prepared to turn the woman away, a thought popped into his head to check a box on the Pharmacy’s top shelf. It wasn’t logical, he knew. But he went to look any way. As he pulled the box down, he saw it contained the exact insulin pump that the woman had been using – and desperately needed. “I knew at that moment that God was with me,” Mike recalls. Waves of emotion poured over him as he realized God had provided exactly what he needed at exactly the right
time. It was divine intervention. Now, Mike will often point to that encounter as a defining moment in the trajectory of the Charitable Pharmacy, and his personal journey to understanding the power of prayer. The first few years of operating the Charitable Pharmacy were stressful. When Liz Carter, then Executive Director of St. Vincent de Paul, approached Mike with an idea to start a Charitable Pharmacy and an offer to serve as its leader, he knew he was the perfect person for the job. With 32 years of experience working in pharmaceutical care for the Cincinnati Health Department, he believed he had the background and leadership skills needed to succeed. But, Mike says, after the Pharmacy launched in 2006, he was burdened with constant worry about its survival.
