Monthly Archives: February 2016

The Kindness of Strangers

I refused to turn the radio on as I followed the ambulance in a constant driving rain. I suspected there were tornadoes nearby; if there were, I didn’t want to know. It turns out I was right. And suddenly, after eyes glued to the back of an ambulance for 315 miles, I find myself in Meadville, Mississippi.

I feel like I had a primer on health care inadequacy after a week spent in ultimately futile battle with the inhumanity of Medicare regulations and the rampant cruelty and indifference of large hospital corporate administrators. My father had been released from his hospital five miles from his home and Mother to a facility 315 miles and five hours away.

The critical care ambulance drove nonstop from Birmingham to Meadville, Mississippi, and I followed behind. When we reached the small hospital in a steady drenching rain I was greeted with the news that the area we had driven through had been peppered with tornado watches, warnings, and a few actual touchdowns, just as I suspected.

I have spent plenty of time in Mississippi and briefly lived there on three separate occasions during the ‘70s and ‘90s but I had never heard of Meadville in southwestern Mississippi somewhere between Brookhaven and Natchez. It is a two-traffic light town with a small hospital that houses a unit specializing in weaning patients like my dad off ventilators.

From the outside, the one-story beige brick facility looks like a mid-20^th century elementary school. On the inside is a staff of caring and highly competent medical professionals, under the leadership of “Dr. Ben” Yarbrough, with the common goal of helping people.

My mother’s health problems prohibit her travel with Dad so I came along for the first week to meet his caregivers and make sure he gets settled in comfortably.

When I started the “Professional Southerner” journal in 2014, my goal was to use it as an escape and diversion – to use it as a way of forgetting my job and stresses. In the past nine months, however, that has become a challenge as my father’s health declined and he was continuously hospitalized starting in October. Distractions have become hard to come by.

Instead of focusing on Dad’s hospitalization and treatment, however, I want to write about that much-vaunted Mississippi hospitality; it has been visible in full force since I arrived here a few days ago, soaked and exhausted.

Shortly after we arrived, Mitzi, the ward clerk, asked if there were any special needs. I told her that my parents are life-long Baptists and that Dad likes to be prayed with. I wondered if she might put me in touch with a local Baptist minister so that I could invite him to visit with Dad. Within minutes, I had a name and an email address and the next day Bro. Marvin Howard of Mt. Zion Baptist showed up at Dad’s bedside to talk with him and pray for his healing and recovery. He asked for Mother’s number in Birmingham so that he could let her know he had seen Dad and promised to come by one or two times a week during Dad’s stay. He invited me to come out to his house if I needed a place to stay; he offered to have me out for a home-cooked meal with him and his wife.

Since the nearest commercial lodging to Meadville is a half hour away in either direction, I came prepared to stay in Dad’s room. The accommodations are tight and, despite several nurses’ best efforts to position my convertible chair/bed, I was awakened several times on the first night by nurses or nurses’ assistants climbing into the bed with me to position themselves to turn Dad.

On day two we switched to a recliner in another part of the room but every time I moved the recliner sort of folded up on me. The nurse was very concerned for my comfort but I assured her that it is about Dad’s comfort and well-being and not mine; I can fend for myself.

I usually don’t eat meals on a very regular schedule but, living in the hospital with not much distraction, I find that mealtimes at the small hospital cafeteria are how I gauge the day. The breakfast service includes an array of breakfast staples to choose from – grits, scrambled eggs, sausage and bacon, biscuits and gravy, a selection of breads, jams, and jellies.

Lunch service changes daily but there is a selection to choose from each day, and desserts – pies, cake, bread pudding – are generous and plentiful. It’s a small hospital and the cafeteria ladies quickly learn your face and tastes. Even so, eating in the cafeteria here conjures memories of a childhood of frequent moves with Dad’s work and the constant feeling of being the “new kid” — when lunch time was often the most awkward time of the day.

For supper, a box meal is prepared and waiting for patients’ guests who are staying at the hospital. If you snooze you lose since the boxes are only available for pick-up from 5:30 to 6:00. One of the cafeteria ladies gave me a container of vegetable soup last night to take with me and warm in the microwave if I got hungry later.

On the morning of day three, the ward clerk called me away from Dad’s room and said that the local Methodist church has a former pastorium a half mile from the hospital that is no longer being occupied. She said that she had heard I wasn’t getting much sleep in the hospital and asked if I would care to stay there so I might get a decent night’s sleep. It was like a weight had been lifted since I had already started dreading that night’s sleep in the crowded little hospital room.

I gratefully took the offer. Dr. Bo Gabbert, a retired physician from the area who is active in the Meadville Methodist Church, showed up at the hospital later to pray with Dad, take me to the house, and turn over the key.

As I was sitting in Dad’s room writing this post this morning (after a good night’s sleep), Dr. Gabbert reappeared in Dad’s room with a gift. It’s a prayer shawl knitted by ladies from the church. A card with the shawl contains a prayer for recovery on the front and the signature of all of the ladies who worked on it on the back. The shawl is specifically crimson for Dad’s beloved Alabama Crimson Tide.

This is Dad’s fourth day of treatment in Meadville and marked improvements have already occurred in his breathing and physical health. The treatment will take a while and I anticipate a number of trips back and forth to Meadville but Franklin County Memorial Hospital is giving me a lesson in what a difference a caring community and committed and caring medical professionals can make.

One of Mississippi’s many great writers, Tennessee Williams, penned that famous line about depending on “the kindness of strangers.” Dad and I came to Meadville as strangers among strangers but have quickly and lovingly been absorbed into a community of unmatched kindness and generosity.

It is a time for hope and giving thanks.

Note: My father, Grover E. Journey, passed away at Franklin County Memorial Hospital in Meadville at 9:35 p.m. on Monday, March 21. He was buried on Thursday, March 24, at Elmwood Cemetery in Birmingham. We will always remember the kindness of the people of Meadville.

A Serenade, an Unexpected New Community: Birmingham V.A. Medical Center

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My father, Grover Journey, has always been reticent about his military service. He served stateside in the U.S. Army during the Korean era. His older brother, Richard, was killed in combat in Korea and his younger brothers, Paul and Huey, served in the Army around the same time as Dad, shortly after Richard’s death. Dad was serving when I was born in Fort Benning and he was in the reserves for several years until his honorable discharge.

But Dad never seemed to want to talk about his active years in the Army. I always wondered if it had something to do with the fact that Richard was deployed to Korea and Dad’s service was all domestic. Richard died before Dad married Mother a few years before I was born but his loss seemed to silently hover over Dad and his family. My paternal grandfather – Dad’s father, Tod – was an angry and bitter man and I often wondered if that was triggered by the loss of his oldest son in combat. Dad never seemed to want to discuss it; Richard still smiles in the small photo on his tombstone at Elmwood Cemetery.

In recent years, however, it seemed that Dad was a little more willing to acknowledge his Army service. When I accompanied my parents to their church for a patriotic service honoring the military, Dad stood proudly when the time came for Army veterans to be recognized. He stood again and, in a faltering voice, spoke Richard’s name when the time came to honor those who had died in battle in various American wars.

Dad’s recent long-term illness and hospitalization (107 days and counting) has created a need in my family to reach out for various sources of help and support to navigate the nightmare that is American healthcare. We have found support and encouragement from a number of sources but our need became more urgent recently when the Birmingham facility where Dad is currently being treated called in another facility five and a half hours from Birmingham to evaluate Dad. Mother was informed at short notice that if the decision was made to release Dad to the other facility and she refuses the move his Medicare coverage could be terminated. Mother’s health is declining and she has not been able to travel long distances without complications for years so moving my father so far has the potential to be devastating to her – to all of us.

Some of the advocates who have supported and advised us have suggested turning to the Veterans Administration for help. When others failed to get V.A.response and action on Dad’s behalf, Mother took on the task and, after a lengthy meeting with a V.A. representative in Tuscaloosa, Dad was enrolled in the system for the veteran’s benefits he earned; Mother was given an appointment with a V.A. social worker at the Birmingham Veterans Administration Medical Center

Mother and I went to the Birmingham meeting on Wednesday, February 3, and met a bemused and kind social worker who wasn’t sure what support V.A. could provide but took copious notes and assured us she would see what might be done to assist my Dad. Her concern and sincerity were obvious; “She’s a nice lady,” Mother said as we walked down the hall after the appointment.

The Birmingham V.A. hospital is a large facility teeming with activity. Veterans of all ages and conditions are in the halls and offices and waiting rooms. The wait for elevators was ridiculously long and as Mother and I waited for an elevator to ground level we heard a harmonica down the hall playing “Anchors Aweigh.” Eventually, the source of the music, a veteran wearing a patriotic tee-shirt and Army cap, appeared around a corner of the elevator lobby, accompanying a Navy veteran in a wheelchair. They stopped to wait with us for an elevator and the man with the harmonica looked in our direction. “What branch did you serve in?” he asked.

“Her husband, my father, was in the Army,” I said.

“So was I,” he grinned and proceeded to serenade Mother with a rollicking version of “The Caissons Go Rolling Along.”

When he finished and Mother thanked him, he looked at an amputee in a wheelchair across the way, said “Hey, Jarhead!” and launched into “From the Halls of Montezuma.” “I hope that was okay,” he said. The Marine thanked him, saying “That sounded perfect to me.”

In fact, the harmonica player proceeded to play the song of every branch of the military before it was over (that’s how long it was taking for an elevator to arrive). Finally, after no elevator came, he looked at Mother and said, “Are you looking for an elevator that’s going down? Follow me.” He led a procession of several of us – walking, with canes, in wheelchairs – to another bank of elevators, chatting amiably the whole way.

At some point Mother mentioned that she is 81 and there was a chorus of disbelief from all of the veterans surrounding her. One called a buddy over and told him that “this lady is 81.” “No way are you 81,” said the buddy.

Mother has been quite sick recently and is exhausted by her regular vigils by my father’s hospital bed. Still, I thought I detected a slight hint of a spring in her step as she made her way out of the V.A., surrounded by admiring and complimentary vets.

I realized too that I had discovered a tight and supportive community that my father is a part of and that I never really experienced until yesterday, at a conference, trying to attend to Dad’s pressing health needs.

It gave me renewed hope and energy. It gave me a new perspective on those who serve.

(The photos at the beginning of the essay are, Left, my uncle, Richard Journey, and Right, my father, Grover Journey. They are teenagers and the photos were taken at their Grandmother and Grandfather Bodie’s farm in Mississippi.)