Sparky

 

Something in the system was broken.  Doctors and nurses were stretched to wit’s end, patients lined the hallways waiting in varying degrees of pain for even the slightest attention, while one little boy sat on the floor, holding tight to his stuffed dog.  He was scared and nervous but knew, as long has he held tight to Sparky, it would all turn out okay.  

Doctors seemed to have stopped using complete sentences but were instead thinking several steps ahead of their current thought.  One exhausted nurse, who not only didn’t get her lunch but never had a chance to sit down for past two hours, noticed the small child holding tight to his dog.  She stopped rushing and just stood looking at the boy.  The sounds of the buzzing hallway blended in with the fluorescent hum and in that brief moment she caught her breath and could feel herself calming down.  This, somehow, was what she needed.  This was her lighthouse, a beacon of hope amidst the jagged, rocky shore of wheelchairs.

She smiled as the boy looked up at her, and she gave him a wink.  Then a loud, Code Blue, disrupted her moment and she was off, down the hall.  Little Charley didn’t know what that meant but closed his eyes and hugged Sparky a little tighter. 

 The broken aspect of the system was not within the hospital walls but across town, slithering without remorse at Kareless Insurance.  The people tasked with the financial responsibility of health care.  Proficiently skilled at raising their rates, while dictating to doctors to utilize the cheapest means available to achieve the minimum possible health. 

With high-gloss, full color, double-sided brochures advertising smiling actors who supposedly took advantage of Kareless Advantage policies and a bank of lawyers to insure their wording keeps them out of litigation, their CEO watched as the name CODE BLUE was painted on the back of his new yacht.