HEROES
Medical Personnel at Lakewood Hospital

Some years ago I read Heartsounds by Martha Weinman Lear. She wrote about her husband, a prominent urologist in New York who suffered a heart attack. In the hospital, he discovered to his great surprise that the most caring sensitive people were the nurses, dieticians, occupational and physical therapists, aides, orderlies, and janitors; and the most uncaring, insensitive, people were the physicians that attended him. Lear’s book was made into a TV movie starring Mary Tyler Moore and James Garner.

Recently I spent 12 days in Lakewood recovering from a nasty attack of bronchitis and a urinary tract infection that sent my temperature soaring to 103. I was so weak that EMS transported me to Lakewood Hospital’s Emergency Room. I thought I was well enough to leave after five days, but Dr. Jeff Galvin, my internist, said I was too weak and that I needed to build up my strength so that I would not be a burden to Anita when I went home. So he transferred me to the skilled nursing/rehab floor where I was given physical and occupational therapy twice a day for almost a week. I was not too happy with his decision, but it proved to be the correct one. Dr. Galvin is certainly not like the physicians who attended Dr. Lear of Heartsounds. He is both caring and highly professional. During a hospital stay, however, you ordinarily see your doctor only once a day. It is the nurses and other hospital personnel that can make your stay tolerable or unbearable.

Thank God the nurses, LPNs, therapists, dieticians, aides, and orderlies at Lakewood Hospital were caring and concerned like the medical personnel who ministered to Dr. Lear. For example, Nurse Mary Ann was under the impression I would be leaving on Wednesday. No one had told her that Dr. Galvin had said I could leave on Sunday. In checking my chart while preparing for my discharge Sunday morning, she found that one night my oxygen level had dropped quite low and she needed to do a procedure to see if this would happen again. Dr. Galvin was away over that weekend, so I couldn’t get his input. After checking with the doctor on call, Mary Ann and Pam, her assistant nurse, came in and delivered the bad news that I could not go home until I had a test to measure my oxygen level during an 8-hour sleeping period.

She said, “George, I could not live with myself if you went home and your oxygen level fell precipitously during the night. That could be fatal. I have to order that test for tonight.” I was very unhappy that I could not go home but agreed that the test was important. So on Sunday night I was hooked up to an O2 saturation monitor. The next morning Mary Ann and Pam and I were delighted to discover that my oxygen level was normal during the night. In record time I was dressed and ready to be discharged. Anita arrived with the car and ten minutes later I was home.

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