The urban teen’s experience with hospitals was a recurring motif in the Streams anthologies. The large urban hospitals are where the science and morality of healing meet everyday with life and death situations.
In a 1986 Waterways publication, a student at the East Harlem Music School wrote about her brother’s hospitalization upon his return from a trip to Puerto Rico.
“Problems with the Hospital” by Constance
My brother went to Puerto Rico for three weeks and came back with an infection on his face. I took him to the emergency room at Manhattan Eye and Ear where he was admitted. Three days later the doctor informed him that he was going to be transferred to Bellevue or St. Vincent’s Hospital.
The doctor informed him that he had a bed ready for him at St. Vincent’s on the day he was to be transferred. But when he got to the hospital at 4:00 pm there was no bed waiting for him.
He asked the nurse in charge what was he going to do. She told him to wait in the emergency room until they could get him a bed.
This was about 4:10 pm on a Saturday. That night about 11:00 pm he called me, crying because he still didn’t have a bed. He was cold and hungry. They had given him a cold sandwich which he didn’t eat.
I got very angry at the doctor who told him he had a bed ready at that hospital. He lied to my brother and made him suffer. My brother was in pain.
There was nothing I could do at that time, but wait. Do you know that they didn’t have the bed ready until Sunday at 3:00 pm? All this time he was in the emergency room, cold, hungry and in pain.
Do you think this is fair?
Jeff’s “Personal History” in Streams 6 related his hospital experience after being shot.
It all started last year in May, running with my posse. I was what you would call a small-time drug dealer. I sold anything from an eighth of a key to five grams of cocaine.
I had loaned a so-called friend five grams and wanted my money back. He didn’t want to give me my money back; so we began fighting. I was getting the best of him. On May 18th, 1990, at one a.m. I pushed him into a fence. He rose from the fence and shot me in the abdomen.
It’s a tragedy for something like that to happen. My friends were horrified. I was going to die. My best friend, Fernando, cried with anger, “Jeff got shot.” And my other best friend was too shocked to say anything and cried.
After I got shot, I started to walk to my house. That made things worse. It resulted in hemorrhaging. The paramedics didn’t think I was going to make it.
I had been shot on a street called Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. I was taken to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. There they performed surgery on me for four hours; and had to stop because of loss of blood. They had to wait until my blood rebuilt. I had already lost four pints.
I endured a lot of pain from the original operation. When I woke up, I freaked out. It was like a trauma. I saw my intestines and all these staples in my stomach. I tried to tear the tubes out. They had to come and tie me down.
Well after they began the second surgery they proceeded with the colostomy. This was the result of the twenty two caliber slug going through the intestine and the colon. When the doctor told me the colostomy was only temporary, I calmed down.
My first stay in the hospital was one and a half months in which I didn’t eat anything. I lost a tremendous amount of weight. The day I got out I went to a beach party with my colostomy. I was drinking, got intoxicated and ended up going to the hospital that same night. The colon almost got infected because it was still on the outside sewed to my skin. I was throwing up every five or seven minutes because they didn’t drain the bile correctly. I stayed five days in the hospital and went back a couple of times again. The closure of the colostomy took place about three months later.
I calmed down a lot after the closure. But I was, for a little while, suspicious of everyone; I was always looking behind my back. I was kind of what you’d call paranoid. When I moved with my mother to the Regent Family Residence three months ago, I could relax as I was out of the neighborhood. I started thinking.
A different hospital experience was related in by Andrea in AN EXPERIENCE THAT CHANGED MY LIFE from Streams 7.
December 29, 1991 changed the whole focus of my life. My cousin, Latesha, was killed in City College, at a celebrity basketball game!!
The week before the incident, my friends and I were at a basketball game at City College. We heard on the radio that Heavy D and Puff Daddy were having a celebrity game. We were all planning on going because a lot of guys from different music groups were scheduled to play against each other. Like Michael Bivins from New Edition, Jodeci, Heavy D, etc. People were talking about this game all week. I had gotten in touch with my cousin and we agreed we were going to leave together.
But about four days before the game we got into a slight disagreement. We didn’t speak for two days. The day before the game, my friend and I went to pick up our tickets. We should have known something was wrong, because the girl at the store where we bought the tickets said that they sold 1000 tickets between that Thursday evening up to the time we purchased ours. But it didn’t dawn on us that anything was going to go wrong, so we got the tickets. After that I went to my cousin’s house to see what time we were going to leave. But when I saw her, she didn’t say anything to me. She just walked past me and proceeded to speak to the person I was with. So I left and went home. The next day (which was the day of the game) my girl-friend and I met and went to City College. By the time we got to the college, thousands and thousands of people were already there. It was ridiculous. We knew right then and there that we were not about to get in. So we stood around and mingled for a little while, then we left. My friend went home and I went to see another one of my friends. We were watching television and heard on the news that four people died in the college.
The next day my boyfriend came home from school. So I was a little excited about that. About an hour after he arrived my cousin Latesha’s best friend came to see if my cousin spent the night with me, because she hadn’t gone home after the game. When I told her no, we went outside to use the phone to see if she had stayed at her boyfriend’s house. When we called, his sister said that Tesha did not come there at all. So we began to worry.
We called E.M.S. and they gave us the number to Lincoln, Harlem and St. Luke’s hospitals. These were all the places that the victims from the college were taken. First we called Lincoln and they didn’t have anyone registered under her name. The same went for Harlem. But, Harlem gave us the number to the 26th Precinct. We called and an officer told us that they had an unidentified D.O.A. fitting Tesha’s description at St. Luke’s. Automatically my heart dropped. Tonya (my cousin’s friend) said she wasn’t going to view the body, but I had all intentions of going.
My boyfriend and I went to St. Luke’s. When we got there, we found out that the person they had there was a man. A feeling of relief fell over my body. I called the officer back at the precinct, and he informed me that he’d given me the wrong information, that the D.O.A. woman was at Harlem Hospital. By the time we got to the hospital it was about 5:30 p.m. We were asking some questions and a guard overheard and came to speak with us. He described the girl and her jewelry. I immediately fainted. When I awoke, I was crying and a lot of people were trying to calm me down. A detective from the 26th Precinct asked me a couple of questions and told me to come to the precinct in an hour to identify her clothing. I went and they showed me a picture; and sure enough it was her. I had to answer more questions. Then I left.
The hardest part was telling everyone. That was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do. I loved her so much! We were very close. She was like the sister I never had!
That experience made me realize how much I took life for granted. It also helped me to understand that you should always tell the people you love how much they mean to you, because you’ll never know when they will be gone! I always thought nothing like this could happen to me, but I’m living proof that it can!!!
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