Stories of Healing: Health Commission Hearing

From Pamela Zilavy's chronical of her experience of the Hearing to Save St. Luke's
November 13 at the SF Health Commission......

........This was such a great microcosm of San Francisco, your typicalfolks who came in to speak from the heart. It was really a very deep experience.

There was the casually well-dressed Hispanic SF nativewho gave his very impressive credentials, something like Vice President of the Education Commission (??) or something like that,but he came to tell his personal story of his 92-year old grandmother, his last surviving grandmother, who was tired, and was giving up, and he had been told to start thinking about `the next step' and so on. She then broke her hip, ended up at St. Luke’s, was there two nights, and his simple story was so touching. She was treated, taken such good care of, and was healed in the most real sense. That was last year and she has been happy and vibrant and still living on her own since.

There was a woman who gave the appearance of possibly being homeless, who told her story of stumbling into St. Luke's, literally, having gotten off the bus after having been turned away at SFGH, she was full of purulent sores and was essentially given her life back by the incredible care she was given. This is a San Franciscan who, while not educated nor necessarily eloquent in the typical sense, told a supremely personal story that pulled on everyone's heart strings.

...Each speaker had about 2 minutes to speak. There were 3 women who talked about having their babies at St. Luke’s, one with her baby'scord wrapped around her neck 3 times, who was there bouncing happily in her arms, one who while she has PPO insurance chooses to go to St.Luke’s because they saved her roommate who attempted suicide and now that [Psychiatry] unit is closed, and so on....

You can read the whole story of the hearing on our Breaking News blog.