Hospital (1 of 4): The hospital, in general.

A few weeks ago I went into the hospital for some precautionary biopsies to check up on stuff that runs in my family, and b/c I'm on the cheapest version of the mid-level Affordable Care Act insurance, I could only find one specialist in city limits who'd take it, and he only does procedures out of this one hospital to the south/southwest of me tucked away in this bad neighborhood that's decently hard to get to by public transportation.

I already knew the neighborhood from barhopping and actually had already known where the hospital was, on this street that had closed up businesses from Eastern European immigrants and their kids, in a rundown neighborhood that was mostly African-American but starts to get Mexican the farther west you go, on the edge of this big, glorious park with rivers and bridges and soccer fields and flowering trees in the summer.

Additionally, I had read that a church near there regularly holds prayer vigils for the beatification of this Eastern European immigrant foundress of a Roman Catholic religious order.

When I walked into the hospital, people in the in-patient services area were *all* black, and the hospital was clean but a little bit on the rundown and worn-out side like nothing had been changed since the early 1960s, and it made me think of the huge difference between there and the big shiny university hospital skyscraper downtown where I used to get precautionary tests back when I had different and better insurance.

There, when I'd get out of the elevator, I'd walk over to the floor-to-ceiling window and had this glorious bird's eye view of downtown, and could see rooftop pools and luxury apartments and everything.

Anyhow, when I got up to the 2nd floor and the in-take for outpatient surgery, I noticed these pictures of a (white) nun, one of them with a framed sheet of paper with dense writing next to it, and I went up to it and it turns out that it was a picture of the Eastern European immigrant foundress and a description of her life, since her order moved into hospitals at one point and they had actually started the hospital I was in.

I thought a lot about that, about how she started the hospital for people of her own ethnicity and about how it outlived them and was now mostly helping all the African-Americans who now lived in that neighborhood, and about how she had never probably ever anticipated a future for her charitable works like the one that was happening now.