Sometimes, where we are isn’t really where we’re supposed to be

By Stephanie Salter
THE TRIBUNE STAR (TERRE HAUTE, Ind.)

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. March 25, 2008 02:35 pm

— As vacation souvenirs go, it is an odd one: a black, cotton tote bag with blood-red letters that say, “It’s As Real As It Gets — San Francisco General Hospital.”

I had not intended to spend one minute of my two weeks in California in General or any other hospital. Far from it. I had plans, big plans. They included a silent, monastic retreat, a dozen dinners and lunches with old friends and colleagues, a couple of museum visits and at least a full day of clearing runaway vines and bushes from my badly neglected backyard.

Woven in and out of all those happy activities, I’d also reserved lots of time for just walking around a city in which I lived for three decades and which I love as deeply and passionately as any man I’ve ever called my own.

Instead, my two weeks in San Francisco became the embodiment of an old joke. You want to make God laugh? Tell him your plans.

On the third day of vacation, my cell phone rang with the news that an elderly but vivacious dear friend from my former parish had fallen in her garage. Paramedics had taken her to the Emergency Room of S.F. General, the city’s huge county hospital.

With her closest blood relative in Seattle, and most of her kin on the East Coast, my friend suddenly was in need of the extended family she had built over a half-century in California — people like me and the other parish women who belonged to our coffee-and-wine social group, the U.C.W.’s.

(It stands for “Uppity Catholic Women.” Even the bona fide nuns among us dwell in the liberal-feminist wing of our mother church.)

My crowded agenda became like one of those Magic Slates from the 1950s; the plastic page was lifted and everything written on it vanished. In and out of consciousness, my injured friend came first. All else was negotiable.

During the hours and days I spent shuttling in and out of General, mostly with another U.C.W., my pal Carolyn, I got to know dozens of women and men on the front lines of the “health care industry.”

I put that phrase in quotes because it symbolizes for me how stupid we have become as a nation about what used to be called “medicine.”

Maximizing profits off the backs of sick and hurting human beings is as bad for a long-range, stable economy as it is immoral for a society. Even folks who are reaping the immediate returns of this loathsome philosophy know it is eating our collective soul.

We all know it. We’ve all got stories of frustration and horror to contribute. Michael Moore made “SiCKO,” lest we forget. So far, though, what we mostly do is grumble, listen to the promises of politicians and allow the eating to go on.

When someone we love has a heart attack, gets hit by a car or falls down in her own garage and fractures her skull, we enter the world of people who live “the health care industry,” day in and out, people whose vocation is to tend, heal, cure or — if all else fails — make as comfortable as possible.

Almost invariably, as we watch them go about their duties, we wonder how they manage to do it. If we are believers, we thank God for them and see them on a level approaching the saints.

It does not hurt to be a believer when you are sitting in a hospital ICU, watching someone’s vital signs ebb and flow. For most folks, I suspect, the consolation comes in thinking your prayers are landing someplace other than the bin labeled “Needles, Sharps, Syringes.”

For me, though, the peace lies in identifying with the people (women, mostly) who planted themselves at the foot of the cross to be with Christ. Even when I doubt the existence of God — and I do from time to time — I never disconnect from the mysterious gift that was and is Jesus. Two thousand years after the New Testament tells us he walked the earth, the stories of his life, death and ongoing resurrection grow deeper, richer and more relevant for me.

His early followers prove to me that our human brokenness is 100-percent shared. Their irrational and creative resilience is often my answer to “Now, what?”

To sit and watch a person suffer or struggle — a person you have known in laughter and tears, joy and the depth of despair — and to be able to do nothing to help is the apex of impotence. In our can-do culture, it is torture.

The longer I live, the more frequently I find myself with no option but to sit and watch. Each time, eventually, I get around to recalling those witnesses who remained, illogically, at the scene of suffering because their only alternative was worse — to abandon the victim they loved. Their fidelity strengthens me.

As it turned out, blessing after blessing was rained upon me the entire time I was in San Francisco. I managed several achingly sweet visits with friends who accommodated my Magic Slate schedule. Over and over, they affirmed the quality of the extended family that I, too, had constructed in my adopted city.

When I did get to walk around, I fell in love all over again. The weather was spectacular, the city never more beautiful. As I have said before, San Francisco will always be my home, just as Terre Haute always was and will be. Yes, two homes. Such bounty.

On my last day in the city, I even got to my backyard. With a hacksaw and dull pruning shears, I attacked a fragrant pink climbing rose bush and an orange clematis that had grown like atomic mutants since I planted them in 2000. All the energy I could not use to help my friend, I turned for two hours on the monster plants.

But for a lovely pot of vanilla tea, delivered quietly by the current tenants of my house (my niece and her boyfriend), I was left alone with my fury. When I’d finished, my hands and arms were bleeding from rose thorns, and my breastbone was bruised from two bad slips of the pruning shears. It was the best I’d felt in two weeks.

Back in Indiana, my vigil is less intense, but sustained by phone calls from my friend’s sister, who made it in from Florida, and from U.C.W. Carolyn. Some days, they tell me, it seems as though our dear girl will recover, other days the odds look way too high.

At her bedside or seven states away, our primary charge remains the same. Without power to affect the outcome, we are meant to love her … and to wait. It’s as tough, and as real, as it gets.



Stephanie Salter writes for The Tribune Star in Tere Haute, Ind. She can be reached stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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