There are a few angels in hell. For the most part at Bellevue Hospital we have been neglected by the system, many simply accept the horror and pain this causes... that we can spend billions to kill innocents abroad, jail millions, allow tha massing of great fortunes by "developers" who kill neighborhoods - drive up rents and do nothing charitable with their millions in return... but, spend much to little to heal.
At one point, after many small indignities, Genie is taken up to the fifteenth floor for pre-opperative examination. The student orderly does not know where to take her, and finally is directed to put her gurney in a room where a young woman is on a personal call. She only acknowelges us enough to tell me to go to the waiting room. I stand just outside the door for a few minutes listening to her gossip to a friend. Genie asks me to come back in... in a room full of chairs, I stand with my cane and leg in a brace bandage... Another call comes in and the young woman says to her caller, "I have another call..." and takes another personal call and gossips for twenty minutes. When she grows board with her teliphone visit, she gets off the call, goes over to Genie and finds she is in the wrong room.
Genie is taken to a hallway desk in front of an office. They begin to call other departments to try and find out what needs to be done for Genie. We keep asking them to call her competant, kind and overtaxed attending, Dr Huang, one of the angels of this hell. After twenty minutes of this, one of the RNs, sitting at a desk with a chair, asking questions of me as I stood next to Genie's gurney is on the phone calling one office after another. I hobble over and painfully lower myself into the chair by her desk. She looks shocked at me and says, "There are chairs in the waiting room accross the hall!" One of the numbers has acted like an equal around her and she is angry.
I get up to stand next to Genie, and I say to her, "another savage in this cruel, cold place. A passing doctor wheals around and looks at us. "Why are you here?" He asks. We begin to tell us. He shakes his head... He begins to help us. Another angel, Dr. Charles Ferman.Then he stops and says, "I know who you are, I have been to your theater." He turns to the woman who has been unkind to me. "I knd of know these people, they own Theatre 80!" He has made a human to us to the woman. She brings me a chair. Dr Ferman begans to move things with the hospital... getting us the tests we need, "... no we can do that here, get someone to do the EKG here..." When the tests are done he waits with us as a nurse calls to get transportation for Genie to be pushed to another wing. "What do you mean she has to get there on her own...?" he asks over the phone, she can't walk, she has a broken shoulder and broken ankle..." In fustration he anounces he will take her himself. Another angel an RN, Joanne Shaw says, "No doctor, I will take her..." They both take her.
More should be said, about the wrong... the angles, the brutal system in this nation which defames the Canadian health care system while spending endlessly on the few... but, Chris and La-keen of Coling Abulance, we hired to get Genie home, who like the other ambulance attendants and FDNY first responders at the scene, were kind, were confident and careful, they did their jobs as they should be done in a system which is not broken, but designed to break those already hurt by crime. I was told I was in shock because I was so calm the day of the attack. I told them, no growing up on the lower east side, to stay you had to accept trauma without being traumatized. Genie and I have been traumatized by the system far more than those three thugs who attacked us.
