Gregg A. Granger

The Helen DeVos Children's Hospital, Grand Rapids, Michigan

I am currently writing my second book, this book about medical tourism in Thailand. I returned home about two months ago following  six weeks, three surgeries, and a half dozen diagnostic procedures performed there. My first book is Sailing Faith: The Long Way Home.

My son Gregg returned home this past Saturday after eleven days in the care of American health care professionals. Should any hope be kindled in the reader to have me find fault with American professionals, the para-professionals, and the guy or girl who mops the floor and empties the waste receptacles in the room where treatment is administered: such fault will not be found by me.

My own childhood hospitalizations occurred in a day when visiting hours at the hospital were enforced. When I was three years old, I spent the night alone following a surgery to re-align my eyes; not more than five or six years later, it was to have my tonsils removed. Other than the never-ending stream of popsicles, neither stay was pleasant. I don’t remember much, probably because I choose not to remember much, but both stays were undoubtedly quite terrifying. Granted, this was during a time when all that touchy-feely crap took a back seat to the mechanized precision of society during the height of the Cold War and the Space Race. Fathers were key to that mechanized precision and neither desired nor were allowed in delivery rooms. It was a different time governed by different norms.

“Don’t cry, I’ll come again tomorrow,” and I’d lay in the children’s ward curled up in my loneliness trying not to hear the sniffling crybabies all around me, until I too succumbed to the sniffling. Then the popsicles nurse would come to distribute popsicles and pills and the ward would pretty much silence itself for the night.

Here we sit a half-century later, and my own son got sick. Appendicitis. I am glad for his sake that our priorities have shifted in the years between my childhood hospitalizations and his own this past couple of weeks. The best knowledge our parental diagnosis could muster was constipation, and we treated it as such for thirty-some hours before taking him to the emergency room. We arrived at the Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital Emergency entrance where we were given a valet parking stub and instructed to leave the keys in the car. Parking in downtown Grand Rapids has never been too difficult, but it is still parking in a city—this is one concern we were immediately relieved of.

We were motioned to the nearly empty waiting room, which according to the receptionist, was filled only hours before. Soon, Gregg’s name was called and we were escorted to the room where the diagnosis was to occur. One x-ray, one blood test, one diet of drinking dye for one CT scan, and five hours later the diagnosis was formed and the verdict delivered. We brought Gregg in for a stubborn case of constipation and he ended up living on the seventh floor of the Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital for the next eleven days, undergoing a treatment for a ruptured appendix.

A surgical team was called, and the wheels of intervention and healing were beginning to spin.

I called Lorrie, who skipped work for the day and joined us in Gregg’s emergency room. A surgeon or a representative of the surgical team or a spokeswoman thereof came to speak to us. She delivered the news that surgery in his condition was not the best approach at this time; his infection would be treated with antibiotics and a drain would be installed in his person to allow the abscess a means of escape. At least I think that’s what she could have said.

Knowledge is a wonderfully dangerous possession, and the knowledge I possessed about appendixes and appendicitis, and ruptured appendixes was the knowledge of prepping the patient for a nearly instantaneous appendectomy. I’m quite certain this woman told me something similar to what I related above, but since it fell so distant from my knowledge base, it didn’t register. Here it is, now over two weeks after his visit to the emergency room, Gregg is home and still has his appendix; I continue to wrestle with allocating space in my file system to allow for this new information.

Waiting is an area in which neither Lorrie nor I have developed abundant skill, but over the course of the next week and a half, we were given considerable practice. Gregg’s bed became a float in the parade of hospital transport personnel and family members destined for what would become his home for the next eleven days—the seventh floor room overlooking the north side of Grand Rapids.

After being situated in Gregg’s room, two nurses entered and introduced themselves—an RN and an assistant. They started right off trying to give us stuff, food and drinks from the nutrition room, warm blankets, and the like. I asked, “how much does this stuff cost?” Prior knowledge, gained from a visit some twenty years ago to our local hospital forced the question. Following our daughter’s 28 day stay, $1,500 or so of ‘personal use’ items, not paid for by our insurance, appeared on the bill. A tiny tube of toothpaste was $7.00; toothbrushes, blankets, and just about everything else that the nurses so pleasantly offered to make our stay more comfortable was priced a half-dozen times as much as what could have been purchased at the K-Mart a couple of blocks away. “Oh no!” they proclaimed on hearing this, “nothing we provide you with is going to cost anything. We don’t even keep track of blankets or toothpaste or any of that stuff.” And then,  “they charged you what?!!”

A typical patient room at the Helen DeVos Children's Hospital

The Helen DeVos Childrens Hospital is located on the main campus of Spectrum Health. Having never gone in search of health services, we never knew what wonders of health care were located so close to our home. We read on signs throughout the Spectrum hospitals how Spectrum was among the top ten health systems in the United States—Wow! And this is where our kid is being treated.

The Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital is an oval shaped, glass skinned building complimenting the architectural lines and components of the other hospitals on the Spectrum Campus. In a round or oval building, rooms are pie-shaped, the walls spreading as they approach the outside wall. The ceiling was ten feet, maybe twelve, at the outside wall, lowering as it came toward the corridor side of the room. The space above the lowered ceiling accommodates the heating, ventilation, air conditioning, electrical, plumbing, communications lines, and medical gases, or whatever other supplies are required to cause the rooms to function for their designed purposes.

With their backs to the exterior glass wall sat one recliner and a love-seat that folded into a double sized hide-a-bed for family members to spend the night. We were informed that visiting hours were until 9:00PM, but like the pirates’ code in Pirates of the Caribbean, these were ‘guidelines, not rules,’ and so long as the party didn’t get too out of hand, these guidelines were ignored completely.

On Gregg’s first day, players from the West Michigan Whitecaps baseball team came to visit. That evening, some special dogs, including a Newfoundland, were pranced around the floor. The folks that organized these visits by dogs and baseball players belonged to a department called ‘Child Life.’  Child Life also staffed the activities room on the eleventh floor, distributed games and painting supplies and other activities to patients’ rooms, and generally got out of bed every morning to spend their working day playing games with kids. What a life. A library was on the first floor.

Housekeeping arrived at Gregg’s room once, maybe twice a day and asked permission to clean the room. On leaving, when the cleaning was finished, housekeeping personnel would say, to me if I happened to be there, “I hope you have a wonderful day,” in a bright, cheerful, and sincere tone. Sometimes that’s all it takes to brighten one’s day.

Food service arrived in Gregg’s room, and the staff delivering the food carried with them the same bright attitudes.

Gregg spent eleven days in the hospital, and was visited by a member of the nursing staff every two hours through this period. Between my wife and I and Gregg’s two college-aged sisters, he never spent a minute in the hospital without a family member by his side. Every time he was visited by nursing staff, on leaving she or he would look at Gregg and ask, “Is there anything else I can do for you?” Gregg’s answer was generally “no” but there were times when he’d ask for a glass of water or a soda. Then, after asking Gregg, this person would look at whoever was staying with him and ask the same thing to us. “Is there anything I can do [get] for you?”

Many of the features distinguishing the Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital from other hospitals I have experienced were  designed with us in mind. Families come in myriad varieties and our family has the ability and the priority of not once leaving our child alone there. I believe all parents will state that priority, and a large majority will truly mean it, but the chemistry of life and distance and work and circumstances cause many parents to simply not enjoy the ability to make it so. The Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital intentionally addresses the loneliness and fears that arise when family members cannot be present; caring and  gifted staff carry out this mission.

Gregg came home this past Saturday, and will be seeing his surgeon in another week or so to schedule an appendectomy. He is doing better than well, and we have the entire staff at the Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital to thank for that. What a wonderful resource to have located so close to home.