Places To DoThings Part III

Places to be Sick

My memories of sick people and the places to experience sickness begin with very early childhood. I was one of 9 children in my family. We had all the childhood diseases, sometimes several of us had the same malady at the same time. They included whooping cough, measles, chicken pox, mumps, red eye, and scarletina. Accidents were treated at home. For sore throats or coughs we had mustard plasters for the chest and fatty bacon wrapped around the neck. Since we tended to wear shoes only for church our toes and knees and feet were often scraped and we regularly stepped on glass, nails or really tough thorns. To prevent infection we soaked the appropriate body part in kerosene and then applied a famous “black salve” which allegedly had the power to draw out both any unwanted material in our body and any infections it may cause.

My first trip ever in any capacity to a hospital was when I had a ruptured appendix at about age six. It could easily have been fatal as antibiotics were still in the future. Yet I have some very pleasant memories of that illness, such as my “rich Uncle Frank” gave me a fancy little toy sail boat and a certain nurse told me she loved me and said she would wait for me to grow up and then she’d marry me. I believed her.

It slowly became clear to me that childbearing was not an illness but a natural process. It occurred at home-, usually overnight when I was sent to sleep in the home of a relative. Dr. Wedemeyer with his little black bag and a certain Ms. Schwaush were always in attendance.

Many years later I spent entirely too many anxious moments in emergency rooms of hospitals. The saddest was when I rushed to the hospital in Hong Kong to see one of our high school students (I was the principal) who had had a terrible collision between his bicycle and a truck carrying long iron bars. In those days the Hong Kong hospitals were overwhelmed. I found him lying on a stretcher on the floor of the emergency room. No one was attending him. I frantically rushed to a nurse and exclaimed my anxiety. “Oh,” she calmly replied ,”we have looked at him. There is nothing we can do. He will be dead in a few minutes.” And he was.


Too often my visits to hospital emergency rooms have been to attend to persons who had attempted suicide. One was to visit another Hong Kong student. She had swallowed poison after her father had locked her in a dark closet for 3 days as punishment for going to a tea room with another member of our church youth group She survived and is today doing very well. Several times I have been at the bedside of adults who were overwhelmed with depression and had decided to stop all sufferings.

I especially appreciated good hospital care when my wife Jane gave birth to our five children, even though on one occasion she had had to climb up three flights of stairs to get to the delivery room and another time I was told that the nurse wanted Jane to pull her knees together to delay the birth as no doctor was around. But it was also at a Hong Kong hospital where the personal physician to Madam Chiang Kai Shek happened to be in town from Taiwan, saw my wife and made a very difficult but accurate diagnosis of a cerebral aneurysm, without any use of an angiogram or other body imaging tools.

Now that I live in San Diego I still can’t believe the almost first-class resort-like atmosphere at UC San Diego Thornton Hospital, or the immediate excellent care I received at Scripps Hospital Encinitas where within hours of my arrival there I had a heart stent perfectly in place. And as I think of that excellent care I contrast the setting with that of Bethesda Hospital in Ambur, India where beds were even lined up outside the rooms. Yet it was also at that hospital where I was deeply impressed and forever moved by how caring medical personnel, loving family members and praying loved ones are among the greatest blessings one can have when it has been determined that one needs a place to go because he /she is sick.