Three Cast Iron Crosses On The Right Side Of The Highway

At 2:10 AM Wednesday morning I crossed the Tennessee/NC state line back into my home state. I've been a lot of places in the last few years, and every time I finish a long, out-of-state assignment, the exhilaration of "crossing the line" to come home never changes.

At 6:30 AM, I pulled into my own driveway for the first time in six months.

Over the last few months, I've alluded to being away, but I've been reluctant to identify where I was working . . . for a myriad of the (very good) reasons many doctor-bloggers have for remaining anonymous. It's about fear. But this assignment is over and done now, and I feel a great sense of professional and personal accomplishment. And the whole point of blogging under my own name is to banish the fear that crippled me for years.

People in my profession have got to stop being afraid and start speaking out.

My assignment was at LeBonheur Children's Medical Center in Memphis, Tennessee. It is the major teaching hospital and Pediatric trauma center for the region, and also has a healthy cooperative relationship with St. Jude's. LeBonheur runs one of the busiest Pediatric Emergency Departments in the nation. It is so busy that the Department uses Pediatricians to help-out the "PEM's" (Pediatric Emergency Medicine Physicians) handle the huge volume of patients that come through the door.

At one point, a lifetime ago, I considered doing a Pediatric Emergency fellowship, but I decided to come home to Asheboro instead. And what happened in Asheboro . . . particularly the way my "without-cause" termination was handled . . . and the vicious & petty (not to mention criminal) way Randolph Hospital administrators behaved afterwards . . . pretty much put the skids on my chances of getting a fellowship (at least at a point in time where I was still young enough to do one).

You see, Bob Morrison and Steve Eblin, in their zeal to silence the troublesome lady Pediatrician . . . who wouldn't just look the other way then their Chief of OB was playing extramarital footsie with a LDRP nurse . . . who couldn't just say "bygones" when circumcisions were botched or care was compromised/dumped on her to clean up . . . and who certainly could not roll over and go back to sleep when their nurses called her in the middle of the night and told her a baby was dying . . . did not give a second thought to the irreparable harm their BEYOND DIRTY tactics caused. They just had to get Dr. Mary Johnson to shut up and "just go away". Contrary to their current advertising slogan, the LAST thing they wanted was for ANYONE to "Take a Closer Look!".

Of course, NC DHHS and the NC Medical Board and the NC State Bar didn't give a rat's tail about a lowly doctor in public service . . . for all of their meaningless blather about serving the underserved, protecting patients and everyone being equal in a court of law.

I hear Ben Holder is finding out how the Bar plays that game. And the Rhino has been invited to Court (as Sam correctly points out, those depositions should be FUN).

It's one of the many reasons, people telling me to "just get over it" and "move forward" in spite of the things I endured/reported and later uncovered/reported again strike me as fundamentally clueless as to how limited my professional options became and remained for a long time. The practice I spent three years building was gutted over the six-month period Randolph Hospital's executive kept me in limbo (all the while taking cover from their "honorable" Board members who flat-out lied to the community about what was actually going on). Linda Miles and the Greensboro City Council are rank amateurs compared to the folks running Randolph Hospital. Moreover, I was locally black-balled, and quite literally radioactive in the immediate area. Likewise, without good references (as opposed to "neutral" ones Randolph Medical Associates "generously" offered), I was at a distinct disadvantage in terms of landing a fellowship. Backed into a corner, with my only option to "just go away", I fought back.

It is too late to do a fellowship now. I'm far too old and jaded to spend three years being a peon again. And as things are in medicine, I'm not sure that the grass is (or would be) any greener as a PEM doc.

It has been my great fortune to work at LeBonheur on several occasions over the years . . . and also my great honor to work with their wonderful/very dedicated doctors and nurses. It has always been my choice/preference to help staff the night and weekend shifts (all the cool stuff happens at night . . . there's more thinking on your feet . . . and there's less politics). When I do an assignment in Memphis, it's very much like doing a "mini-residency" . . . you are among the brightest and the best . . . as well as the young, newly-minted & idealistic (who I love to "corrupt" with my tales of the real world beyond academia's walls).

In the high-acuity environment, diagnostic and technical skills are re-honed. The spirit is re-charged, as one is reminded by the enthusiasm and dedication of others (who have not been burned by badness) why one went into medicine in the first place. And when I go to Memphis, I go to work . . . usually averaging around 22 scheduled nine hour shifts a month. So I didn't really have "a life" except at work.

This time I didn't even visit Graceland.

I love LeBonheur. They gave me a chance, and they've always been very, very good to me. If my more selfish prayers are ever answered and I hit that Powerball, the hospital will get a big donation. I wish it were not so far from "home".

Such as home is.

Mama (who still hopes her way-faring daughter will settle down in private practice somewhere nearby) shakes her head and says it's my ED "fix". My Ya-Ya's bemoan the prolonged absence of their "Queen". So (as I told one of the residents this week), while I love coming to LeBonheur, I also love leaving. The ED environment (and all that comes with it) is something I have learned to take in measured doses.

Professionally, this summer and fall, I worked my butt of. Also, from a personal standpoint, I accomplished a great deal (a lot of the butt came off). But that is subject matter for another post. Indeed, I've already gone through six months of second & third class mail, and it seems I have a myriad of subjects to blog on (in the month I plan to take off before taking another assignment).

For instance, I can talk all day about the way my hometown hospital treats "heroes".

Anyway, on to the subject of this post. While working at LeBonheur (which is downtown, only a short distance from the Mississippi River), I actually stayed at an apartment in Cordova/Germantown (a burb about twenty minutes east of Memphis - off the Interstate). At the Appling Road exit is a HUGE Baptist church called Bellevue. And at that exit (which I usually took to go to work) stand three enormous cast-iron white crosses. You can see them for quite a way on the Interstate . . . from both directions. Of course, the crosses are lighted at night, and in the early morning hours (when I usually got off work), they are eerily beautiful . . . as the dew and a haze of billions of swarming bugs give the crosses an ethereal, other-worldly glow . . . from a viewing distance, the perfect melding of man's art and God's Hand.

Although I visted their bookstore on several occasions, I never set foot in Bellevue for a service. The sheer size of the place was always a little daunting to me (the first time I came to Memphis, I naively wondered if it was a small airport). Police had to guide traffic into and out of services. Besides, I always worked the graveyard on Saturday nights, and was usually too wiped out & sleepy after a shift to go to Sunday services.

But whatever the day, the crosses were always a reminder for me to say a little prayer on the way to work . . . to protect my cats & meager belongings at the apartment while I was gone . . . to send angels to ride shotgun on the way to and from work . . . to do a good job by my patients . . . and for the night not to suck.

Sometimes the night sucked anyway. But I have come to understand that the Lord works in mysterious ways. Whenever I took the exit to go "home" after a shift, I was always prompted by the crosses to thank Him for getting me through another night.

Randy Travis sings a song about "Three Wooden Crosses" on the right side of the highway. When one makes one's living on the road, one sees a lot of those crosses. With that in mind, my last stop in Memphis . . . with the car wobbly and loaded beyond any reasonable capacity and the cats unhappily settling in their carrier . . . right after I visited Bellevue's bookstore for the last time (to buy Mama a silver cross) . . . and right before I got on I-40 . . . I stopped under those crosses and asked God to send those angels to ride shotgun one more time.

With Dad's railroad hat perched in the back window, and George Jones' "Bradley Barn Sessions" cranked up on the CD, me and those angels hit the road. It was a remarkably uneventful and pleasant ride. Fourteen hours later I was home . . . back with family and friends who were/are ecstatic that I am home. Amazingly, although I was prepared for disaster, the kitties did not pee or poop during the entire trip.

Those angels work miracles;)

Now I am stuffed with turkey . . . and back to sleeping in my own bed for a little while . . . until I set off on a new adventure.

I am thankful tonight for LeBonheur. And I am thankful for those three cast-iron crosses on the right side of the highway. And although I never attended a service at Bellevue (a church whose ministry has faced significant challenges over the years), I can testify to the church's ministry to this one beleaguered believer simply by putting those crosses up. All I had to do was look up.

At the beginning and end of my shift, and now safely home, I could/can see the Promised Land.

Happy Thanksgiving.

*Author's note: This post has been addended a few times since original publication. I'm positively bleary-eyed. And as thoughts come to me, I add them.