I've received a lot of messages about my post concerning how to be useful when you have a loved one in a hospital. One point I didn't make explicitly because I thought it was kinda obvious is this: Your main value to them is to try and take concern and worry off their heads.
It can be very scary to be in a hospital, especially if you're in for something that could be life-threatening. You're surrounded by and dependent on a constantly-shifting cast of strangers who do not always impress you with their confidence and rarely with their responsiveness. Lying there, you can't help but wonder if they're doing the right things for you. It can be very helpful — even healing — for them to feel that someone who loves them is keeping an eye on all that.
My mother was a longtime member of the Kaiser Health Plan and one of their most frequent customers. At one point when Kaiser transferred their paper records to computer, an administrator there told my mother she had the largest file in the history of the Kaiser's Southern California operation. Judging from the size of it when it was on paper, that seemed quite possible. It made the Encyclopedia Americana look like a pamphlet. Kaiser operates its own hospitals — pretty good ones, based on my observation — and my mother was a frequent resident at the one they run down on Cadillac near La Cienega.
We knew everyone there and that's where her records were…so when I had to take her into an Emergency Room, that's where I took her. When she had to go in and I couldn't get there fast enough — or if she was too sick to walk — 911 would be called and an ambulance would take her. In the last ten years of her life, she averaged one such trip a year.
I suppose it works this way everywhere. Someone in the ambulance crew calls some sort of central dispatcher who tells them which is the closest hospital that is "open," meaning it has the resources available at that moment to accept patients. If I was there when the decision was being made as to where to take her, I'd try to persuade the paramedics to take her to Kaiser. "She's going to wind up there eventually, anyway," I'd argue. It's cheaper for Kaiser to treat her in its own hospital than to pay for another hospital to tend to her. So when she was taken somewhere else, Kaiser would immediately start asking, "How soon can she be transported here?"
If Kaiser was closed to new admissions at that moment, I'd quickly phone a doctor I knew there and if I could reach him, he'd agree to squeeze her in. If I couldn't reach him or if the decision of where to take her was made before I arrived, she'd usually go to either U.C.L.A. or Cedars-Sinai. One time though, I arrived at her house at 4:45 AM and the firemen who were transporting her said, "The only place we can take her right now is Century City Doctors Hospital."
"I've never heard of Century City Doctors Hospital," I said, because I hadn't. One paramedic told me, "Oh, she's going to like it there" and another said, "It's where really rich and famous people go." It turned out they were right. It was a small, boutique hospital occupying one or two floors of a big medical building in Century City. It was very clean and very attractive and very secretive. My mother had a lovely room and from little things the nurses said, we both figured out that Someone Very Famous was in the next room over. Who? That, I was never able to find out…but boy, I tried. I was curious and my mother was more interested in that than she was in her own condition.
At other hospitals when I walked in to see her, the first thing she'd say was, "Go find my nurse and see what you can find out about how I am." At Century City Doctors Hospital, the first thing she said to me was, "Go find my nurse and see what you can find out about who's in the next room." To that end, I quizzed a very friendly nurse…
"Male or female?"
"I'm not allowed to say."
"Someone who'd be on the front page of the Enquirer if they found out he or she was here?"
"I think it's safe to say yes."
"Someone who's won an Academy Award?"
"Yes. Maybe more than one. And that's all I'm going to say."
And I still don't know. The closest thing I got to a clue was that I shared an elevator once with Steve Martin and I think he went in to see whoever it was. But maybe not.
My mother liked it there because of the intrigue and also because of the cuisine. Century City Doctors Hospital had a Wolfgang Puck Kitchen. I don't know quite what that means but patients received a nice-looking menu with tasty-sounding items. Then again, compared to the food at Kaiser, a Burger King Kitchen would have seemed like a step up. My mother took a copy of the Puck menu with her and when she next saw her Kaiser doctor, who was a high-ranking executive with that hospital, she gave it to him and said, "Take the hint."
He looked at it and said, "Hmm…I'll have to try this place for lunch some time."
So that's why she liked the Century City Doctors Hospital. I liked things about it, too. Here's what I posted here at the time, omitting mention of which hospital it was or who was in it…
No, I'm not back in the hospital. I'm visiting somebody who is…and in a hospital so fancy that every room has a high-speed Internet connection and the meals are prepared by a Wolfgang Puck kitchen. That is not a joke. It's a private hospital and one that, like the most exclusive of restaurants, you can't get into unless you know somebody…or unless an ambulance brings you here because it's the closest emergency room when you're in trouble. Which is how the person I'm visiting wound up here…in a room so nice, it almost makes you want to be sick. Notice the "almost."
I've stayed in Courtyards by Marriott that weren't as plush as this place. I have some time to kill while tests are being conducted so I couldn't resist trying to blog from the in-room Internet hook-up. (It's a clever little device — an LCD screen and keyboard on a swivel arm so it can be moved into position for someone in the bed or swung over to a nearby chair for a visitor. The screen toggles back and forth between the World Wide Web and a full line-up of cable TV stations, plus you can listen to XM satellite radio, plus it's also a telephone. Wish I had one of these for my house…though I'm not sure the web is ready for me blogging from bed.)
And, oh yeah — they seem to have doctors and nurses who know what they're doing and who aren't overburdened with too many patients. I guess that's impressive, too.
I should have mentioned something I didn't like: The parking fees. It was eighteen bucks to go see my mother. I guess that's how they were able to buy those swivel-arm things over the bed. We weren't paying for my mother to be there but it makes you wonder what it would have cost if we were. I guess that's why Steve Martin's friends all have to get twenty million bucks per movie.
And I further guess that either they aren't working much or they aren't getting sick much because Century City Doctors Hospital closed down a few years ago.
Or maybe wealthier folks just wised up. My mother was only there two days before Kaiser snatched her back into its own system but it sure didn't strike me that she got any better medical care in the fancy place. The room was nicer, the attention seemed more personal, and of course Mr. Puck himself was down in the kitchen making the low-sodium chicken soup. But it was the same drugs, same equipment and same treatment. It was just packaged nicer.