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July 29, 2010

From Fly Creek: Hurray for Mother Bassett!

Jim Atwell

— Just back from my annual week at Lake George’s Silver Bay, in company with about 600 other Quakers. As always, it was a great time: Friends shared silence in the early morning by the lake and during the day in the big brown-shingled tabernacle. (Silver Bay is an old YMCA camp.)

Plenty of fine stringed music and singing in the evenings; lots of daytime rocking-chair stints on the deep veranda, facing across rolling lawns and lake to green mountains and skies of startling blue. Clouds moved majestically across the blue, south to north, like great parade floats. All that beats the tar out of TV, I’ll tell you.

Two big thunderstorms added drama to the week. They were real mountain storms, with strobe lightning and bone-rattling thunder claps.

Around seven on last Wednesday evening, while a half-dozen of us were gathered in front of the tabernacle’s stage for a meeting, a savage flash was followed instantly by a boom like a bomb: The building’s lightning rod had taken a direct hit. We all sat stunned into a fresh kind of Quaker silence. But the building’s lightning rod had done its job, and a gazillion volts or so roared down its thick copper cable and into the ground. All was well. Still, one felt very small.

The second monster storm took out all the lights in the area and left everyone who lived in other Silver Bay buildings crowded onto the Inn’s porches, blocked from their quarters by monsoon rains.

Those of us inside the Inn were suddenly inhabiting a rambling, four-story Haunted House.

Corridors and stairs were dimly lit an eerie jaundiced pink by emergency lights, and bedrooms were black as pitch. Lots of us had brought pen flashlights, but their thin beams crisscrossing in the halls made the place even spookier.

The kids loved it, of course. They stampeded through the halls and up and down the stairs in giggling herds, playing wild games of hide and- seek that seemed to have no rules.

I kept out of their way, watching the fun through the open bedroom door, wishing we could have harnessed the energy those kids were expending. We could have relit Silver Bay and all of the surrounding county.

During my rocking-chair times on the porch, I had leisure to think over the last couple of months, which Mother Bassett might well have called ``Anne-and-Jim Time.’’ We two almost wore the hospital doors off the hinges.

First came Anne’s diagnosis with breast cancer. She wants me to lay out what happened to her so that, first, you can be reminded of the urgent importance that women of every age have mammograms; and second, to remind us all of the stunning asset we have in Bassett.

On April 3, Anne’s routine mammogram at age 67 revealed a suspicious shadow that set the hospital’s breastcancer team into action. The very next day she was called back for a sonogram, and four days later for a biopsy.

That same day we sat down with a surgeon who gave us a  leisured, detailed explanationof what might lie ahead. When the biopsy proved positive, we were back for another careful, extended explanation by the radiation oncologist. We left those sessions shaken, but sure we had a superb team behind us.

And indeed we did. Anne’s lumpectomy was on April 22, less than three weeks after the mammogram. The removed cancer was localized, with no lymph-node involvement; her prognosis is excellent. But because of the lump’s size, Anne opted to have chemo followed by radiation. The chemo is now done, thank God, and she had the first of 30 radiation treatments on Tuesday of this week.

Through it all, Anne has soldiered along, bless her, with the amazing support of the Bassett staff. Nurses, doctors, technicians have all treated her with real human concern. They know her name, call her by it, listen to her intently.

I’ll say it again: Anyone who complains about Bassett simply doesn’t have a basis of comparison. And I’ll tell you why I think it’s come to be a model for evolving American medicine.

Decades ago, wise heads decided that Bassett should be staffed by doctors hired by the hospital itself and provided offices right in the hospital.

As Bassett has grown, it has meant that a medical community grew right with it, and inside it. And the collegial spirit that this has promoted seemed to have spread to every employee, every kind of service.

In Anne’s case, and in my recent Bassett stays, it’s meant that doctors weighing our cases can consult simply by walking down the hall, and that each of us could be referred to specialists, often right in the same clinic building.

More than a few docs have told me that they’ve stayed with Bassett exactly because of this collegial sense: the sense of an academic medical community that not only tends patients beautifully, but shares in teaching its own members through shared experience. Hurray for you, Mary Imogene! You’ve left us a treasure.

And hurray for all who work under your aegis, forwarding your ideal of patient-centered medicine.

READ JIM Atwell’s new book, From Fly Creek--Celebrating Life in Leatherstocking Country along with Anne Geddes-Atwell’s charming illustrations. Books are for sale at your local book seller. Anne’s prints from the book can be purchased by contacting her by phone or e-mail.

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