Ask disabled veterans what they think of VA
With rising pressure to privatize veterans’ health care, here’s what should happen: President Trump and his minions should ask what disabled veterans think.
As a qualified Korean War veteran happy with the care I get at the local VA facility, I have an answer. I don’t want to go anywhere else. I want to be treated with my fellow vets by caregivers accustomed to serving us. And I don’t think my fellow patients would disagree. Nor do I believe non-veterans would understand.
Now at an age where I must struggle my way across the parking lot with a walker to meet with my primary physician or report to the blood lab, once I enter the building a sense of well-being overcomes whatever pain or discomfort brings me there. I’ll sit in a waiting room with fellow vets. We may never have met, but (we are) not strangers. We make eye contact. We smile and say hello. We exchange greetings, break into conversation, kid, ask which branch, where served. “How ya’ doin’ today?” one of us might ask another with concern, then listen to the answer.
We include the few remaining WWII survivors, Korean War vets whose numbers are now thinning, the Vietnam vets whose ages now show, and all those youngsters who served thereafter. We are pushed in wheelchairs . We hobble in on walkers or with canes. Some of us have motorized scooters or carts. Some of us are frail. Some enter on crutches or in casts. Some amble in on their own. But we share a common bond tacitly felt. We do not feel like non-belongers; rather we are more like brothers and sisters. We are comfortable with each other. Something unites us, something hard for me to explain to non-veterans, even my wife, something I can only name in the abstract — kindness.
To one-another we offer it. We get it from the caregivers, whether nurses or techs or receptionists, many of whom are veterans themselves. I have never felt processed in the Albuquerque Medical Center, never hurried, never subordinate. For the most part we are not kept waiting long, with but few exceptions. During morning hours, a volunteer wheels a coffee cart around. Nurses chat while they weigh us and take our vitals. They make us feel welcome. They lighten our hearts. We are never rushed by the physicians, who get to know us and sit with us at a computer screen to review our charts and X-rays.
On my way out of the building after a visit I might sit in the lobby to rest a while before pushing my walker back out to the parking lot, where someone will help me get it into my car. But not until after I’ve joined a conversation with several others or start one with a fellow patient awaiting a ride. Some days there will be music in that lobby — a mariachi band, maybe, a country western group, a soloist. Sometimes a team of volunteers will make the rounds with petting dogs.
It all makes for an easy familiarity, in stark contrast with private-sector hospitals, lobbies, and waiting rooms where, it seems, only strangers gather and leave still strangers. And whenever I leave I feel better about the world, and about my service, how long ago, no matter where it took me. Others I have talked with feel the same. You can be sure, if they rob us of this facility we will feel betrayed. Please call your representatives and tell them that.