Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 18, 1994 TAG: 9401190001
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Brian Kelley
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
When I've visited family or friends in one, it's always been with this unsettling, sinking feeling deep in my gut. I couldn't ever imagine working in one, much less being a patient.
Maybe it's because as a teen-ager, I got hit in the eye by an errant dirt clod and ended up spending a week in a military hospital in Germany, both eyes covered, with only a transistor radio and the Armed Forces Network as constant companions.
Or maybe it`s just your basic denial of mortality.
Whatever.
But in the last month, I got a chance to see a local hospital from two perspectives: as an outpatient just before Christmas and as an ``official visitor'' earlier this month.
I'm young, healthy and have worked hard for years (most of the time!) to stay that way. So it was a bit unsettling to find myself checking into Montgomery Regional Hospital last month for an ultrasound exam. I'd found a lump after suffering what I'd thought was a pulled muscle while running; the doctor wanted a better look.
So with foreboding I checked into the hospital through its year-old, spiffy new wing one can see while driving by on U.S. 460. I felt embarrassed and out of place to be in a hospital, much less shedding my coat and tie for a backless gown and robe.
I don't know what I expected from the radiologist and technician who examined me. Perhaps I thought they'd be only as personable as the high-tech gizmos they use. But they seemed to sense my discomfort and were kind and efficient.
And they also delivered good news: the lump was an inflammation, not anything more serious.
I left the hospital feeling like Jimmy Stewart at the end of ``It's a Wonderful Life.'' I had a second chance! Even the prospect of sitting through an hours-long government meeting seemed a marvel.
Obviously, I was delirious.
I returned to Montgomery Regional a few weeks later to take another look around, with patient representative Betty Jahn as a knowledgeable guide. She showed me the laboratories and the extended-care unit, where nurse manager Hilda Burnette and her staff help patients recover from extensive surgery or injuries and prepare to re-enter daily life.
With Virginia Tech out of session and snow on the ground, it was a slow morning in the 16-bed emergency room, so registered nurse Mary Ellen CotelleseCQ had the time to show us the spacious digs that are part of the 1992 addition. Dr. David LanderCQ, medical director for the ER, cheerfully reminded me that if I didn't drive carefully on the icy roads, I might end up staring up at him from a bed.
Tina Lee, a registered nurse, showed us the endoscopy room, which contains a forbidding-looking instrument used to see the insides of body organs. A patient had just been wheeled out and we got to see the video-screen image of a throat that had just lost a polyp.
Deborah HuffmanCQ, the manager of diagnostic imaging, took us for a walk through the assortment of machines, one of which showed an image of a partially blocked artery in a beating heart.
The diagnostic equipment is located in a renovated part of the hospital that once housed the emergency room. It's modern, centralized and convenient.
``We tried to design all this with the patient in mind,'' Huffman said.
Having been one, I have to say it worked.
My second visit took more than an hour and I only scratched the surface, even though Montgomery Regional, a HealthTrustCQ Inc. facility licensed for 146 beds, is a relatively small community hospital like its sister hospital in Pulaski and its CarilionCQ Health System competitor in Radford.
Hospitals still give me the jitters. But in the last month I've learned something by putting aside my customary reporter's cynicism: Hospitals aren't anything more than the hard shells around the human hearts who make them work.
by CNB