Sunday night, I did not want to be home by myself for Hurricane Ida. However, at the same time, I needed to be somewhere private because I needed to work on Monday.
My nursing role is being a Senior Prior Authorization nurse for our states largest Medicaid Managed company. We are still working from home from our work laptops. I cannot work in front of other people because I can not risk exposing our members PHI to anyone unauthorized to view it.
I got extremely lucky and found a room in Alexandria for Sunday night. I left home early Sun morning because I was not sure if the “evacuation traffic” on I 49 was still going to be heavy.
It wasn’t. It was very light and I was in Alex in less than an hour. So, I had a lot of time to kill until I could check in.
One of my stops was the old Huey P Long Hospital in Pineville.
When I was around 16 or 17, in 1987/88, I actually had surgery there. I was born with a “lazy eye”. An eye Dr told me that it was most likely caused by damage from the forceps that the doctor used to pull me out when I was delivered. I was told that my left side of my head/eye was bruised and swollen immediately after birth. This most likely caused optic nerve damage to my left eye.
We have a family friend that is a MD that worked in the charity system and she encouraged my parents to bring to see this new eye Dr that was practicing there.
One thing led to another and I ended up having surgery.
It was a big deal going there. I remember driving over the “big bridge and driving into what seemed like a very long driveway and going through those gates.
Everyone there was so great and nice to us. I remember being in the holding area waiting for them to come get me. My mom told me that they would be coming to get me in a wheelchair. I told her that I was not getting into a wheelchair and argued with her over it.
A few minutes later, a really cool looking orderly with a big beautiful smile walked in with a big pep in his step-without a wheelchair. He looked at me and said, “you ready”, let s go. I jumped out of my bed and he and I walked up to the operating room together 🙂
The surgery went well. I remember waking up from it and seeing my grandmother shaking a gigantic stuffed puppy in front of me. She had bought it for me to help me feel better after.
That was my first surgery and I learned the hard way that anesthesia makes me very nauseous. On our way back home, my mom stopped at a yogurt place to get me yogurt, thinking it may help settle my stomach. It didn’t work. After we got back on the road, she had to pull over because I got sick.
For a reason I cannot remember, they were not able to tie my stitches immediately after the surgery. So, they had to patch me up and send me home and I had to go back a day or 2 after for them to tie them. They tied them with me being awake–that was not one of my best moments in life.
Thankfully, I went on to heal from it all.
It s funny all the things I remembered standing there looking at that building. At the time, I never ever would have guessed that many years later, I d be standing on the other side of that locked gate, with a professional camera in hand, reminiscing about my experience there. It s crazy how life goes sometimes.
So the gate to get in was closed but I could have easily slipped in because there were lots of openings everywhere. It was obvious that a lot of people have been slipping in and out of there and it was so tempting to do it myself too. However, being a professional photographer means being a professional-so I didn’t. If there would have been a guard or cop around there, I would have asked permission to go in though.
I really hated to see that hospital boarded up and deteriorating. That place helped a lot of people and changed a lot of lives back in its day.
