Hospital Visits- Medical Care

Today I visited a former colleague in the hospital He is a patient at the UCLA Ronald Reagan Hospital for Neurological Care. My first visit to that not yet one-year-old hospital. It is a large impressive and beautiful facility. There was valet parking with a greatly reduced fee for persons with a handicapped sticker. The entire building is gleaming white, inside and out. The corridors are very wide and spotless. Floors look like shining marble. Walls have marvelous nature photographs, many of them of graceful white polar bears frolicking in the arctic snow.

Staff went way beyond the normal call of duty. One attendant followed me to make sure I was at the right door. When I buzzed the intensive care unit an assistant not only admitted me to that unit but also walked me to the patient. The windows of his single room offered a vista extending to the Pacific Ocean a few miles away. He was attached to the latest in equipment costing thousands of dollars. When the nurses came to aspirate him through his tracheal inserts they were efficient, courteous, proficient.

Tom himself may or may not have ever been aware that I was there. He had fallen, hit his head hard. At least a third of his skull had been removed to relieve the pressure and to drain off massive bleeding. On a previous day he had been responsive, today less so.

I held his hands. Spoke as warmly and gently as possible. Assured him of love. hope, and God’s presence. I had the feeling that he was in good hands, in every sense of those words.

As I left Tom, another visit some time ago came into and flooded my mind. It was at the Kowloon General Hospital in Hong Kong. The hospital was vastly overcrowded. In spite of the efforts of many and the care of lots of compassionate people the place was dirty, overcrowded, understaffed; with ancient equipment and no air conditioning in 90 degree heat. I had come to see another patient with a head injury. One of my students riding home on his bicycle from Concordia High School had a terrible collision with a truck hauling reinforcing iron bars. My student was lying uncovered, still in his school uniform, on the floor on top of a stretcher. He was alive but blood was oozing from his massive head wounds. No one was attending him. My status as a foreigner helped me reach an attendant. I pointed to my friend and pleaded for attention. “Oh can‘t you see? He is dying. There is nothing we can do to save him”

His parents had not yet arrived. So I got down on the floor with him. I held his hands. Spoke as warmly and gently as possible. As best I could in my limited Cantonese I assured him of love, hope and God’s promise. Two days later we buried him on a hillside overlooking mainland China.

Two very divergent streams of thought fill my consciousness as I drive home. The first is simply gratitude that I have so often been offered the opportunity to visit friends in the hospital. What a blessing it is to me to just be there to provide presence and to draw even from their weak bodies a sense of connectedness that endures.

The second is much more cerebral and much less hopeful. Which of those two hospital alternatives can we as a nation provide to those who need it? What are the possibilities and the limits? If I or one of my grandchildren will lie in a hospital needing
medical and human care, where will it come from?