How a New York Chauvinist Pig Learned

to Love the Middle of the Country

Dr. Kim A. Jobst, a marvelous Editor-in-Chief, whom I had the great privilege of working with for more than 10 years, once wrote an Editorial about Diseases of Meaning. The concept was that when people get ill, it’s usually for a reason beyond the obvious physical causes. When one discovers what that reason is, then one can address it and deal with it, thus, achieving some kind of healing—whether that be simply a way to face death with courage, or the strength to adapt to a new way of life caused by a disability, or just the trust in the healing that is bound to occur.

     I’ve never considered the meaning behind my back pain but I found ways to deal with it and still have a full life. Nor did I ever ponder the various colds, flus, strep throats, and sinus infections, or even several kidney stones. All of these things, while annoying, seemed far too ordinary to attach any special meaning to them.

     But, now I am truly in a situation where I am indeed forced to ponder the meaning of something that has happened to me—a nasty trimalleolar fracture of the ankle. This is considered to be one of the worst kinds of ankle injury possible. It’s the sort of thing that happens to other people—not to me. The story of how it happened is rather odd and sad at the same time. . . .

     My best friend, Barbara Nell Perrin, had died unexpectedly of three cancers that she had no idea she had had. She simply turned yellow one day and went to the ER the next, was told she had little time left, and then died. I felt duty-bound to go to Ohio to read a memorial to her and to present her son with two collages and a booklet filled with the many things that Barbara and I had done together. The trip was expensive—but, soon enough, people from work and my family were chipping in to make it possible. So, here we were in the middle of the country in a church. I stepped toward the altar and went down. There was a tiny unseen step that I had not noticed. The first words out of my mouth were “I broke both feet!”

     The rest is history—the trip to the ER, the doctors turning and twisting my foot like Torquemada to try and make my bones align until they could operate on me. I was due for the first hospital stay I ever had since I had had my eardrums punctured when I was nine years old. And what a hospital I had landed in!

     Here, in Ohio State University East’s Wexner Medical Center was the first inkling that there was a lesson to be learned from my fall. First it was the amenities in this public hospital—amenities that were given to all comers, including a private room in which my husband could stay with me 24/7, with a chair that folded out like a bed for him to sleep in, free TV, and a free phone. Then, it was the food—it actually tasted good! Really good. And OMG, the people were just awesome—every nurse, every aide, every doctor—all of them doing their dirty, messy, ugly jobs with a smile and all the reassurance that anyone could want.

    Did we need something beyond the call of duty? Yes, my husband, Jimmy, desperately needed more of his antiseizure pills. The nurse called our doctor in New York and got a rude person who refused to help. At that, I declared: “Discharge me. I don’t care if I end up a cripple for life! We are taking the next plane home. You can’t afford to go through the ER and you MUST have those pills!”

     Jimmy just looked hopelessly at me. The surgeons had said that I must have the surgery first because the fracture was so unstable.

    Oh, but the Ohio nurse wasn’t finished. She made yet more calls, one to our New York pharmacist, who agreed to allow the Ohio pharmacist to dispense the pills with a follow-up.

     Now, who the heck in New York City would do something like that?

     In New York City, I would have ended up in a room with a couple of other people, tired and worn out doctors and nurses with no time to worry about my problems, and no space for my husband to even STAND by my side. That’s what a New York public hospital would have had to offer me.

     So, my first lesson was this: Being a total New York Chauvinist Pig and a fierce advocate of single-payor healthcare, I had always looked down on “the middle of the country,” for not agreeing to this. Now I understood why and what the people in the middle of the country feared losing. They didn’t want to lose the personalized care in favor of some impersonal, institutionalized system that would regard people as so many numbers. In essence, they didn’t want the kind of so-called care offered in crowded overstrained public hospitals in big cities. They feared that single-payor healthcare would lead to that.

     You know what? Their fears are something that we chauvinists on the east coast have to take into account. We don’t want the nasty system we have over here either. We want what they already have in Columbus, Ohio. And unless we can ensure that this would be the result of single-payor healthcare, we have no right to look down on the resistance we face in the middle of the country—not until we can prove that we can equal what they already have.

     Oh yeah. I’m still for single-payor. But, I want what I got in the middle of the country. And never again will I ever view the people there as uncaring simpletons. Quite the opposite. We east coasters have something to learn from the folks in the middle of the country. We need to learn to really see and hear people and really care about them. We need to learn to go the distance—not just once—but three times over and more—as long as it takes. Maybe then, the bad rep that New York has will go away.

     What the heck are we always rushing about for that we cannot stop to care about anybody else?

     I know not all New Yorkers are nasty and not all Ohioans are kind. But I’m just saying that we can all break the stereotypes and reach out to one another even though we see differences. It just might be that the differences can teach us things we never thought we would know.

     That was the first of what I suspect will be many lessons in my Disease of Meaning.