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.
