For Wilshire Baptist Church
It’s amazing to me how our paths can cross more than once with other people in unexpected ways. It’s especially interesting in a city of more than a million people, where you’d think the chances of seeing the same person twice would be slim, and yet it happens. And sometimes when it does, it can help tie up a loose end that has been dangling and fraying.
I was watching the local TV news recently and was drawn to a report about a man who collapsed at Lovers Lane United Methodist Church. What caught my attention was the doctor who just happened to be there to revive him. He seemed very familiar. At first it was his voice, and then his eyes and gray beard. And then I heard his name — Dr. Gary Weinstein — and I remembered who he was.
Weinstein was the ICU doctor who watched over my father in the days before he died last July. He was kind and gentle and consoling as he tried everything he could to get my father off a respirator and then to awaken. He shared our hope for healing when there were signs of progress, and there was sincere dismay in his voice when nothing was working and he said, “This doesn’t look promising.”
Curious to know more about this man, I googled him and discovered he was the pulmonary specialist who took charge of the Ebola cases in Dallas in 2014. His patients included Thomas Eric Duncan, fiancé of Louise Troh, a member of our Wilshire Baptist Church. I watched the reports on the news as we all did back then, and of course we got inside details from our pastor who tended to the spiritual and emotional needs of the family as well. But I didn’t pay any attention to the names of doctors and nurses at the time, many of whom put their own lives at risk, including Weinstein.
Weinstein couldn’t save Duncan, and he couldn’t save my father. But he saved others in that Ebola ward, and he saved the man at Lovers Lane United Methodist Church, and no doubt he and his colleagues save people every day. That’s what they do.
This has come back to me in recent days as I’ve been helping a friend in a logistical way through some of the healthcare maze he has been trapped in since just about the same time my father died. He’s been in and out of hospitals and rehab facilities and feels more like a medical supply cart parked in a hospital hallway than a man who simply wants healing so he can go home. In his case, it’s clear that the insurance companies are running the show and he has little to say in what happens. Like so many of our institutions, there are problems in health care that need to be fixed. Nobody seems to have a good answer, or if they do, they get chewed up by opposing political parties focused more on power than progress.
But down in the trenches, individual doctors, nurses, technicians and social workers are still doing good work. Sometimes they save lives and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they bring swift relief and sometimes their hands are tied by the slow and plodding bureaucracy that controls what they can do.
Under those conditions, it’s no surprise that some medical personnel have had their capacity for compassion and empathy crushed. Thankfully, some have found a way to maintain their humanity. Weinstein still had it last summer and more recently at Lovers Lane United Methodist. And I saw it yesterday in a social worker who was working real hard to get my friend one step closer to home.