Chapter 12

           Dad looked around the large room in Ireland, and took in the stone still faces of all of the members before him.  Then he looked back at his notes.  They were blurry.  His eyes were damp with tears, and the tears surprised him.  But he had told the hard part of the story, and had gotten through it. 

All eyes were on him.  The room was dead silent.  The audience rapt.  Collecting himself once more, he began to speak again:

“Folks probably got tired of my criticism of the treatment we received prior to arriving in Lincoln.”  He said.  “It was not so much that I was complaining about the care at any particular facility, but of the lack of a delivery system to treat the acute trauma patient in the rural setting. The statement in the ATLS manual ‘When I can provide better care in the field with limited resources than what my children and I received at the primary facility, there is something wrong with the system and the system has to be changed,’ emphasizes this observation. 

“Simply put, you have to train them before you can blame them.”

At the hospital and for the next year, dad did complain.  He felt very fortunate that all of us had come through, and were on a solid road to recovery.  Eventually we all would recover fully, beyond everybody’s expectations.  Even Rick.  At first and for a few months, he had seemed that he had suffered a severe brain disability.  He couldn’t speak, or dress himself, and things did not look good.  Then suddenly, just like that, he was fine.  It was as immediate a transformation as dad had ever seen.  It was like he just snapped out of it and was a kid again.

For his part, Rick has no memory of his life leading up to that moment, but he’d be okay from then on.  For that, and for all of us, dad was profoundly grateful.  But still, he couldn’t shake the problems he had encountered in Hebron.

He wasn’t even really sure exactly what he was complaining about, but the whole thing seemed so ridiculous.  And it was causing him great consternation.  He was trying not to be blameful of the hospital staff in Hebron, he was sure of that.  He’d personally known those people and many others like them around the state.  He had seen them work before and knew they were competent, caring people and professionals.  They weren’t bumpkins, and he felt bad that in the days after the crash he had given the impression to many people that they were.

Still, he felt angry and was having a very hard time getting over the closed ER doors he had encountered, but in reflecting on the events of that night he began to see the perceived errors he had seen and the whole fiasco they created as secondary.  It was only and indication, a symptom, of a much bigger problem. 

It was really about the delivery system.  It was so different from place to place.  That was really what was bugging him, he realized abruptly one day.

How could it be, he exclaimed to Ron Craig, that such disparity in simple emergency treatment can exist in the modern world?  He demanded, to no one in particular, that someone needed to do something.  Ron was intrigued by the problem as well and he and dad began to talk, casually at first, about how to prevent the experience from happening to anyone again, and if it was even possible. 

Ron and my dad were friends and colleagues and he had nothing but respect for dad, but he had gotten pretty sick of listening to dad go on and on about it.  He knew dad was right about the delivery system, but if he was serious, then there was going to be work to do.  A lot of work.

“Styner,” he said one day after listening to another of dad’s tirades.  “Quit you’re bitching and put your money where your mouth is!”

I imagine that the jolt that hit him at that moment was very similar to the one that hit me when Shelley pointed out that the truth of the accident was still out there.  These kinds of revelations happen in the simplest of moments, when everything lines up for a blip in time and a single word or phrase can change your entire outlook on life.  Some call it epiphany, or divine intervention, or any myriad of things, but it is really only a matter of having the blinders torn off, and seeing the world in a new, unfiltered way.