March 13, 2007
MIND THE GAPS
This morning Gothamist.com pointed out a story that happens to be the rarest of occurences in The New York Times's reportoire: a piece about a caring mother, a sick infant, a giant insurance company, and an expensive Manhattan hospital . . . where absolutely no one is to blame for anything:
This is a small tale of the city, of a worried mother and of her new son, born ill. No one has done anything wrong in this story, not the doctors, not the nurses, not the hospital, not the insurance company.
Yet something is not quite right, and it has driven a fretful mother to extremes.
The story goes on to tell the tale of Nicole Carey, a Long Island woman who travelled 90 minutes to deliver her baby at the Lenox Hill Hospital on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Following the birth, there were complications: her son's lungs filled with fluid and Nicole developed blood clots in her uterus. After her blood clots were successfully dealt with, Nicole Carey was free to leave the hospital, but her son Preston had to remain in the perinatal intensive care unit. Is any parent really free to leave at that point?
Carey's insurance company had no reason to continue paying for her bed in an expensive private hospital––she was fine. Yet she wanted to remain close by to nurse her son every few hours and in case his condition took a turn for the worse, or the better.
For more than 115 consecutive hours, as of a 1:30 p.m. interview yesterday with this reporter, Mrs. Carey remained in the visitors’ waiting room on the sixth floor, pacing, reading and sleeping on a sofa between two soda machines and a snack machine.
Sympathetic doctors and nurses eventually let her shower in the hospital's staff facilities and after almost five days she took Preston home. That is about all The New York Times has to say about the subject, for once (and thankfully) failing to conflate it into some big-story trend. The story itself does raise the conundrum of parents with sick children in a hospital far from home.
It made me think of The Ronald McDonald House Charities, formed in 1974 to offer parents of sick children a place to stay close to the hospitals where their children were being treated––primarily in neo- and perinatal care facilities. It seems like one of those perfect societal-care roles that an organization can step in to fill, when the mission doesn't fall under the purview of government, insurance, or healthcare providers. Donations can be made to the Ronald McDonald House Charities here.
Posted by Lexiphane at March 13, 2007 5:59 PM
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