Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [37]
Payne Whitney was a city hospital, dingy and grimy and overlooking the red-striped smokestacks of Queens, and the roar of twenty-four-hour traffic from the FDR Drive. New York Hospital, Westchester Division, on the other hand, was adjacent to some of New York's wealthiest suburbs, and surrounded by acres and acres of well-kept lawns, graceful old trees and formal gardens. Compared to New York Hospital in Westchester, Payne Whitney was gloomy and badly maintained, with scuffed walls and old motel-type furniture. The public areas of the Westchester hospital were filled with lovely old upholstered chairs, glass-front armoires and grandfather clocks. The patients’ areas were furnished in a light, cheerful Scandinavian style.
The doctors at Payne Whitney wore white lab coats, which made the hospital feel remote and institutional. At New York Hospital, they wore street clothes. And while they were both teaching hospitals associated with Cornell University, here on Bloomingdale Road we somehow felt more in the hands of professionals who were trying to help us than as cases for students to practice on.
Still, we weren't grateful. We were angry. In the last weeks of her stay at Payne Whitney, our anguish at her harsh diagnosis and prognosis turned to rage at the messengers.
When I become angry, everyone knows it. I am mercurial, and my anger, like my happiness, is right out there for everyone to see: What had the hospital been thinking of, I raged, to put us in the hands of doctors as young and inexperienced as the ones we had been seeing? Maybe there were grown-ups working behind the scenes, making sure these youngsters didn't make mistakes— but why couldn't any of them have talked to us?
That young man, who turned out to be a resident in psychiatry, had told us to “face facts” in the same tone of voice he might have used to tell us he was breaking a dinner date with us. Did he know he was talking about our child, our child's future, our child's life, our child's fate? Did he know how parents felt when they heard news like that about their child?
They didn't care about Lori as a person, I concluded. They didn't care about us as a family. Payne Whitney was a hospital filled with a bunch of inexperienced students, and we were their guinea pigs.
Marvin, for his part, became even cooler, even more acerbic—and more demanding. The doctors told us to give up hope. We would not give up hope. They told us they couldn't get her well quickly. We wanted her well quickly. If Payne Whitney couldn't do it, then New York Hospital, Westchester Division, could. Even though New York Hospital offered long-term care, we wanted her out of there as fast as possible.
We took our anger from Payne Whitney, and dropped it right on the staff at New York Hospital.
We had plenty of opportunity to do so.
We had, as much as possible, avoided dealing with the social workers on the staff of Payne Whitney. They always wanted us to talk about our feelings, and the last thing we wanted to do was share our feelings with strangers.
Still, much more even than at Payne Whitney, the staff at New York Hospital focused on Marvin and me. Right from the start, the social worker assigned to our case, a middle-aged woman named Jody Shachnow, began suggesting that we get more involved in Lori's treatment. She suggested family meetings. One-on-one meetings. Meetings together with Lori. Meetings with our sons. Telephone consultations.
I dreaded answering the phone. More often than not it was Jody Shachnow or another of the hospital's social workers on the other end of the line.
It was a new experience for us. We had never had to deal with social workers before. Why should we have? Social workers were nice, well-intentioned people who counseled people whose families were in trouble. They didn't have anything to do with families like ours. But with Lori's illness came a change in our family status. Now we too were a family in trouble, and in need of their help. I cringed when I answered