A Sweetish Hospital

I did volunteer driving for seniors for years, which took me to a lot of doctors’ appointments and a lot of hospitals. But I was only there as an onlooker. I hadn’t been to any hospital on my own behalf since I’d had my tonsils out when I was six years old. The prospect of being looked at rather than just looking made me freeze in terror.

I realized how cheap it was to give comforting advice, how easy to be optimistic - when it wasn’t me on the examining table. How annoyingly facile my consolations must have been to all those in the past who had really been facing the cold steel gaze of various hospital apparatuses. If anyone had accompanied me to this hospital appointment and had reeled off a rote “Don’t worry. Everything will be all right,” I knew I would have looked for the nearest custard pie to smoosh in her face. I realized that’s probably how the victims of my volunteer consolation must have felt.

But I soon saw there was a big difference between most of the hospitals I’d been to by proxy, and this very real and personal visitation. Most of the hospitals I’d visited vicariously had been large downtown complexes, spanning and sprawling over multiple wings, multiple high-rise parking facilities, and multiple “Centers” named after donors. In most cases, I could expect to have to leverage my charge in a wheelchair between distant outposts, sometimes even braving the outdoors in the process. We had to plot appointed meeting spots where I would pick her up again after her day’s rigors and after my rigors fetching my car from the 10^th level of whatever garage I’d used. These different parking levels were usually distinguished only by some forgettable color coding and by the kind of Muzak that filtered out from their audio speakers. As a result of all these precarious, protracted forays, I still smell antiseptic whenever I hear Johnny Mathis singing “Chances Are…”

I assumed this was the kind of experience I’d again face when my family doctor sent me to have some outpatient hospital tests. But my experience turned out to be the opposite of the ones I’d ushered my friends through in the large, prestigious downtown hospitals of Chicago. My PPO plan had me assigned to a smaller neighborhood hospital, cozily embedded in residential city streets.

Swedish Covenant Hospital did have its own parking facility, but I avoided the $4 a day parking fee by leaving my car several blocks away on a tree-lined side street. Walking back to the Hospital under blossoming linden trees, past front yards with gurgling fountains – was a lot nicer than the harrowing downtown traffic snarls I’d faced in my earlier experience of hospitals.

I was in for a further pleasant surprise when I got into the Hospital itself. Rather than the scattered acreage of different departments, I found that the variety of tests I had to take were all sequestered in the same “Patient Testing” nook which was itself just a few yards to the right of the Hospital’s one-and-only entrance. I had blood drawn, then stepped a few feet over to have X-rays, then a few more feet brought me to the ultrasound room. This togetherness was like a delightful throwback to the days of the one-room school house. There was no need for making expeditions down long, forbidding corridors whose fluorescent lights eerily lit up as you approached, and then shut off after you’d passed – reminding you of the darkness of your mortality. There was no navigating across bridges to other buildings, other specialists. There was no need to go in search of wheelchairs, no need to be shuttled up and down elevators between distant terminals.

I did see that there were some other out-buildings connected with the hospital, in one case by a bridge. But I assumed those distances would only have to be traversed by people with some really unusual, specific needs. The average patient such as myself could find everything right there, at her fingertips.

This cozy warren of adjacent testing rooms was presided over by friendly staff that beckoned me forward almost the moment I arrived. Four barbers – no waiting! I had to go to the Hospital on several successive days because one set of tests required strict fasting while another set required that I down a gallon of water. (Well, it seemed like a gallon.) On these successive visits, I got to be almost chummy with one of the men at the “Testing” reception desk. By the time of my third visit, we greeted each other with all the eager curiosity of twins who’d been separated at birth.

I saw that the Hospital’s clientele was an enlivening mix of nationalities. During my brief waits on one of the couches outside the test labs, I saw a colorful parade of people wearing everything from turbans to dashikis to dirndls to serapes. So although this Hospital’s neighborhood had once consisted more strictly of immigrants from Scandinavia, the area had apparently blossomed into being a veritable international house. In keeping with this world-wide welcoming, there is a sculpting of a globe outside the Hospital’s revolving door entrance, showing the efforts of people on all the different continents to improve the environment. This all-embracing aspect of the Hospital adds a touching grace note to its appeal.

 

                                    

I was surprised and disappointed to read some of the very negative reviews that Swedish Covenant Hospital got on the Internet’s “Yelp.” But most of these reviews applied to its Emergency Room, so I felt as long as I could steer clear of that extremis, I could maintain my happy impression of the place’s friendly, efficient, pouched approach.

It wasn’t long before I coincidentally ran across another reference to the Hospital. Northeastern University is nearby. On one of my visits back to that school, my alma mater, I picked up the latest copy of the school newspaper and saw an article reporting a health fair to take place at the Hospital. Except - the student reporter who’d written this article seemingly wasn’t on a proper first-name basis with different parts of the community, and in all seriousness, she had written that the fair was to take place at the “Sweetish Covenant Hospital.”

I had also noticed that a smaller sign near the Hospital’s entrance makes a further culinary offering of the facility. The sign is missing a letter - so the place announces itself as “SW * DISH COVENANT HOSPITAL.”

                                     

In a world that increasingly centers on mega-stores and mega-medical centers, many of Chicago’s smaller neighborhood hospitals have had to close. I’m glad this source of neighborly health care has so far managed to hold-out against this tide of massive consolidation. Maybe the errors and dropped letters connected with its name aren’t really such misprints. The place is sort of a tasty “Sweetish Dish” after all.