Every place you live, work, visit is imbued with racism and other forms of bigotry. They are entrenched and have not gone away in spite of the many lives which have been sacrificed to change things.

We stayed away from the medical/health industry for years, but were recently forced to get involved.

What I saw as a child in the deep south is being re-enacted in the Greater Boston area. Racism is alive and well and functioning throughout the health care system. The difference? No one comments or analyzes or tries to change things – from what we could tell.

We recently interacted with two hospitals – Beth Israel and Massachusetts General. The experiences were so different I thought I was in different countries. One was horrific and one was unbelievably good.

Our first interaction was with Beth Israel and we barely survived.

We entered Beth Israel through the Emergency Department. That was a horrifying experience. We were directed by the Primary Care Physician to the wrong Beth Israel. We were directed to a suburb of Boston It did not have what was needed to deal with the problem we presented. It was quite some time – with a serious problem – that we stayed in the waiting room and at first had to endure ugly treatment until one of us complained and then everybody started smiling at us. We were then moved by ambulance to the Beth Israel in the downtown Boston area.

When we arrived we were brought to the examining area. A room with a curtain across the front and lots of equipment. That was time spent for a couple days seeing nobody – waiting for something which didn’t happen – watching what was happening outside this examining room.

There were people stacked all around the hallways in hospital beds which apparently brought them to the hospital. Along every wall – every turn of the corridor, people sick enough to have come to the hospital were all over the place – not in private rooms, not in examining rooms, not in any space which could even remotely be called a room, but in the hallways almost stacked one on top of another.

One of us started walking around the hallways and stopped periodically to try to deal with the shock to our system. At one stop in the middle of the hallway a nurse was vicious accusing us of violating the patients confidentiality by having stopped to catch our breath. My face must have shown the shock I was in, but she was just ripping me apart for this violation of her patients confidentiality. How was that done? When I stopped, in the middle of the hallway, she was in the process of talking to a patient asking questions about that patients health and background. I wasn’t aware of any of that I was just looking around at the horribleness of what was in front of me. I wasn’t even aware of the patient – who was in the hallway, on a hospital bed – apparently rolled there from an ambulance and left barely covered with all kinds of people all around.

I stuttered to the nurse that I wasn’t violating any patients confidentiality I was simply walking down the hall trying to cope with the shock I was feeling. The nurse continued to just rip me apart and demanded that I leave the area. Since we were in the examining room just on the other side of the hallway to the patient who was against what wasn’t even a wall, but a desk. Someone was working at the desk, not family nor medical person involved with this, and was clearly closer to the patient whose rights I supposedly violated and was being ignored by the nurse as someone also possibly violating this patients right to privacy. I don’t know where the nurse expected me to go.

That was just the tip of the iceberg. I was also in shock and reacting to the fact that there was a “bull pen” in the middle of this very large room filled with rows of desks and people working, talking, relaxing, joking in this “bull pen”. What I was shocked about was not all of the above, but by the fact that everyone in that bull pen – the professionals in that part of the hospital, were white. Not black, not brown, not colored, not asian, not any of those things – traditional white northern european types working and communicating back and forth about the patient and hospital business. They were, from what we saw, the closest to the top of the pyramid in that hospital.

As I took in that scene I looked around this very large room and blacks – mostly black women were seated around the periphery of this group, working. They looked as though they were the receptionist for the group, but they were not doing receptionists work.

And other minorities? Blacks occasionally came to the floor working, but they always carried a pail, mop, broom, etc. because they came to clean the examining rooms when a patient left and before another patient arrived.

What was striking was that most of those blacks had Caribbean accents and clearly came from another country.

TO BE CONTINUED

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