Hometown touch makes the difference

link Karl Terry

Local columnist

Over the last couple of weeks, my dear wife has gone through the wringer one more time with a surgery, long hospital stay and now the beginning of rehab.

We’ve been through it a few other times and the thing that makes the biggest impression on you when you experience a sudden illness or trauma is how helpless and at the mercy of health professionals you become.

You immediately convert to the clock of the health care system. Nurses appear in the middle of the night to rouse you to take your vitals. The phlebotomy crowd shows up just before dawn like Dracula and you’re always guaranteed that one of your doctors makes his rounds a half hour before God gets up and the other one varies his schedule somehow so that you miss him every time.

Surgeries get delayed while test results come back and sometimes the 15-minute procedure lasts for two hours.

The hardest part during this trip back through the breech was waiting for those test results when I knew how my loved one was suffering.

The most amazing new device experienced during this hospital stay was an Air Pal — an air mattress that was inflated beneath my wife causing her to float somewhat like an air hockey puck, making it easier to transfer her from bed to chair.

The most amazing moment was when a team of local paramedics pulled traction on my wife’s broken leg and lined it up almost perfectly according to the second x-ray.

The most helpless moment was watching my bride lift off from a helo-pad without me, knowing it would probably be at least two hours before I could be back at her side.

Through it all the people have made the difference. From realizing that one of the radiology team locally was a member of our church and taking special care of us to the EMTs who knew me by name.

Even in the big Lubbock hospital, folks who really understood that the attitude in which they accomplished their jobs made all the difference in allaying our sense of helplessness when things were darkest cared us for.

Back home at Heartland in rehab we’re surrounded by even more caring folks that are dedicated to serving the patient. We even know quite a few of the residents staying there. I’ve seen that care on exhibit in visits to the facility in the past but you don’t realize how important that personal, hometown touch is until you’ve experienced it.

Through it all, I only met one guy I wanted to choke. There were far too many witnesses though and, after all, we were in a hospital, so some well-meaning person would have just revived him.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

[email protected]