Need for new hospital inspires city’s poet laureate to pick up pen
A recent drive by the proposed site of Windsor’s new mega-hospital moved the city’s poet laureate to pen a heartfelt verse in support of the project.
Mary Ann Mulhern said she was driving on County Road 42 about a month ago when the idea came to her.
“I was looking over at the fields at the proposed location of the new hospital and I just had this almost overwhelming feeling of wanting to see shovels in the ground,” said Mulhern. “I thought about it, I came home, and I wrote about it. Because we need a new hospital, and we need it now.”
Mulhern said she hearkened back to the city’s history about a century ago, explained to her by her poet laureate predecessor Marty Gervais, when there was much debate in the city about building a new hospital.
“There were a lot of naysayers who said, ‘oh no, we don’t need another religious hospital in Windsor,’ and then along came the Spanish Flu in 1918,” Mulhern said. “There were signs that went up around Windsor that said ‘The Sick Can’t Wait.’
“I think that’s really powerful. And the people came together.”
Grace Hospital opened in 1920 in large part in response to the Spanish flu pandemic.
Mulhern said it’s time for the naysayers about the location to end their fight, noting that when Metropolitan Hospital was first built it was thought to be in the middle of nowhere.
“I think that certainly people are entitled to their opinion but it is really really time to put things aside and build this hospital,” Mulhern said.
“It’s not impossible. We have everything in place to build it.”
She said the time is now because the pandemic is creating so much uncertainty.
“The province now really is struggling with financial concerns and that money that was set aside, let’s hope that it’s still there,” said Mulhern.
“Because we are in a crisis. COVID isn’t going away. Windsor
has coped well, we do have a field hospital, and that’s creative thinking, but that’s not enough.”