Anonymous Patient

A healing hospital is about loving service to others. And, where loving service is needed the most, it is often the most challenging service to deliver.

Take the 30-year old patient with a long history of drug abuse. She’s back in the hospital for sepsis, her blood toxic from her life on the streets. She’d been discharged from the hospital clean earlier. She was supposed to continue antibiotic therapy, but a relapse landed her back in the emergency room. This time she needed in-hospital care until she could be released to her mother who lived out-of-state and a drug rehabilitation center there.

Chaplain Jerald Smith was a regular visitor and now part of the care plan. “Mom,” who was already in custody of our patient’s child, was unable to visit until she traveled to Florida to reconnect with her daughter upon discharge. “Being alone in hospital is a difficult situation,” said Jerald. “Over the course of a couple of weeks with this patient in our care, I noticed Jeanine Tomlinson, a Registered Nurse with the Infusion Center. She went above and beyond her duties to visit and encourage this patient.”

Jerald said that Jeanine had even printed out pictures of the patient’s family that the mom had sent, and posted them so that she could easily see and be comforted by them. She let her use her iPad to video-call the child she hadn’t seen in years. Jeanine picked up some toiletries and clothes at the mother’s request. A CNA on the floor also donated clothes. Our patient didn’t have much of her own. To this day, Jeanine and the family keep in touch, hoping that this woman – our patient, someone’s beloved daughter and a mother herself, continues to improve.

“This was good spiritual care,” added Jerald. It might have been easy to judge; but that’s not the Parrish way—our mission, as Jeanine and the care team demonstrated so beautifully is to provide healing experiences for everyone all the time®.