Over the course of the past few years I’ve had three friends get in bad motorcycle accidents, several friends suffer from terminal illnesses, several others deal with non-life threatening surgeries, and I myself crashed my car on the 405. What that means is I’ve been in a fair number of hospitals, and so I speak (write) with at least anecdotal or experiential authority when I give Providence Holy Cross a thumb’s-up. Last month I had a routine but major surgery (what a friend’s French-speaking mother, in one of my favorite malaprop moments, mistakenly called a “here’s-the-rest-of- me”).

Being in Holy Cross meant I could recover in a private room (almost all of their rooms are private–yay to not waking another patient with my snoring and being able to read without a TV in the background). At least as important, the nurses were both attentive and kind. Oddly, morphine gives me insomnia, and the night nurse checked in on me a few times to see if she could get me anything. I’ve visited enough friends in the hospital to know what a rare gift that is.

Holy Cross has a place on their website where friends can send you a card, and the patient relations person comes by to deliver them. They even bring you a little care package with things like ear plugs, hand sanitizer, and suduko and crossword puzzles. At the risk of raising a firestorm of blog comments, I’ll say it shows that Holy Cross is a Catholic Hospital and they consider care their mission. [An aside: They did check on my spiritual well-being at one point during my stay--I'd written "atheist" on the intake forms--but they left me alone when I told them I had a spiritual program.]

I think it was getting the little care package with its eyeshade and lotion that made me think LA hospitals could easily market themselves as spa-alternatives. Think about it–colon cleansing, laying on a specialized bed with little leg massager thingies on, the specialized diet and weight loss… All they need is lavendar-infused something or other and I think they could pass. What do you all think–any hospitals you’d recommend or others you’d steer clear of?

(Yellow food photo taken by me, in sheer celebration of solid foods, tater tots notwithstanding.)

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1. I’m Not Dead Yet – Holy Grail at the Nuart!
2. King-Harbor to lose all federal funding
3. Remember That Homeless Guy That Hospital Dumped?
4. Holy Rollin’
5. Holy Crap! They’re making Crank 2.