Over at the News Blog friends are pinch-hitting for Steve Gilliard, who’s just undergone open-heart surgery resulting from a dialysis-related heart-valve infection. This is one of the ever-present dangers of dialysis and the reason why I’ve been fighting it tooth and nail. All his friends and family and well-wishers from all over the world, and they are many, are united in hoping for his swift recovery. Let’s hope too he gets the kidney he needs soon, because the subject of donor kidneys in the US is a troubled one:
In the United States alone, more than 63,000 patients are waiting for a kidney, according to the National Kidney Foundation. The kidney waiting list of the United Network for Organ Sharing currently increases at a rate of 20 percent a year, and the list will be 100,000 to 150,000 patients long by the year 2010.
One of the excellent writers filling in at the News Blog is Lower Manhattanite, who I’ve always wished would start his own blog. Steves’ hospital stay got him thinking about hospitals, and veterans’ and military hospitals in particular, in light of Steve’s own interest in the topic:
[…]
That symmetry hit this weekend as I drove my kids to their Grandpa’s house for a visit. Grandpa lives not far from my folks in Southeastern Queens, and getting to his house takes you past an odd neighborhood called Addisleigh Park—a weird, little enclave in Jamaica where Black entertainers like Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie and James Brown all owned homes. And just across Linden Boulevard from Addisleigh, was the big V.A. hospital—a mean, imposing place where sullen men drifted in and out for treatment that always seemed to be—well, according to them, less than good. Driving past there, I remembered the old OTB parlor and the bars dotting Linden along that brief stretch near the hospital—funny how those places wound up so close by, and how those places always seemed to be overfull of, to the point of spilling out onto the streets, of angry, apparently ill-treated men. There was a comic-book store us kids frequented on that block, and on those sojourns you would always hear the men carping and ranting a litany of V.A. hospital horror stories—sometimes in front of the aforementioned sad haunts, but also in the luncheonette/comic book store we hung out at where they’d come in for ciggies and cheap cigars.
“I got better care in the middle of the f*cking jungle than ten minutes from my house” I remember one gaunt, afro-ed outpatient growling to a friend at the counter one day. I Briefly dated a girl who lived in Addisleigh, and I noted one day sitting on her porch that we only seemed to see the patients coming in and out of the place–never employees, and how I never saw the doctors out on the Boulevard.
“They ain’t crazy.”, the girlfriend pointed out. “They come in and go out the back way, otherwise some of those dudes’d jump ‘em. It’s a rough place, and they hold the doctors responsible. One got f*cked up at the bus stop a few years ago, and ever since then, they go out the back door—and get the bus a few stops back ithe other way.”
I hadn’t thought about that conversation until this (Sunday) morning. What kind of treatment would lead patients to wanna whip a doctor’s *ss? And move not one doctor , but drive ‘em all to use a crappy back door near a loading bay for entry and egresss? I shudder to think of what had so many of those olive-drab clad vagabonds who wandered up and down Linden so incensed about that hospital. Well, at least I used to shudder.
