Hospital Patients

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. -- The woman who putters in the garden at the blue stucco house is bony and frail, with a soft handshake and wide blue eyes. She brings to mind a character from a Tennessee Williams play -- delicate, ethereal, immersed in a world of her own.Linda Schneider's mind is slipping away; a rare genetic disorder is eating at her brain. Her conversation is like water rolling across a tabletop -- elusive, hard to grasp. Her memory dances in and out of reality.Not so long ago, this 49-year-old woman was active and vibrant, a dental hygienist and part-time travel agent.

A dying patient wants to spend one last holiday with her family. A man puts beer in his feeding tube at home. A woman can't be discharged from the hospital because she is not a U.S. citizen.The problems vary widely but the people have one thing in common. All are patients facing difficulties that go well beyond the illnesses or accidents that brought them into hospitals.Coping with their needs is a group of hospital employees whose role has grown along with the pressure to discharge patients much more rapidly than in the past.

If you enter the hospital with pneumonia today, there's a good chance you'll be treated by a new kind of specialist - a hospitalist - instead of your family doctor. More than half of all large U.S. medical centers now use hospitalists, and new programs are springing up across the country. Fifteen years ago, the situation was far different: primary care doctors were in charge of treating many hospital patients. "It's a sea change in the nature of health care," says Dr. Bob Wachter, a hospitalist and researcher at the University of California at San Francisco.

Soon after Cecilia Green's face caught fire during minor surgery, a shaken Dr. Prakash Vaidyanathan walked out of the operating room to explain what had happened to Green's waiting friend. Later, the surgeon carefully dictated the details for Green's medical chart, explaining that he had already removed the small lesion on her forehead when a cauterizing tool he was using to stop the bleeding singed an eyebrow, touching off a blaze fed by Green's oxygen mask. "The whole face had caught on fire," he noted.

Willie Mae White began worrying how she'd pay the $36,224 bill from Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center a few weeks after having emergency brain surgery. She lived off Social Security and food stamps after decades working as a housekeeper. So she was thrilled when Bayview informed her in writing that her bill would be forgiven, at least in part. The hospital had little to lose, since it can recover its costs of free and unpaid care under a unique state program.

After a hospital patient was shot and seriously wounded in an apparent robbery Thursday evening, University of Maryland officials sought to assure students and staff that its campus is safe and pledged to step up patrols. Police confirmed Friday that the 45-year-old victim was a Frederick County man who, according to sources, was a patient at the University of Maryland Medical Center where he was receiving treatment after being stabbed in a home invasion in March. Officials declined to give a motive, but according to a copy of an incident report, the victim told a woman who found him suffering from gunshot wounds on the sixth level of an underground parking garage that he had been robbed and shot in the back.

A patient at the Clifton T. Perkins mental hospital in Jessup is being charged with murder after another patient was found dead in her room Sunday morning with a string tied around her neck, state police investigators said. Maryland State Police are expected to charge El Soundani El-Wahhabi, also known as Saladin Taylor, in the death of Susan Sachs, 45, also a patient at Perkins. Sachs was found face down in her bed about 8:30 a.m. by a nurse who went to check on her after she didn't show up for breakfast.

The dreary brown and white walls, bare floors and crowded corridors are giving way at Harbor Hospital Center to an environment administrators and patients believe is more conducive to healing.The 24-bed renal-pulmonary unit is the first of six areas to be converted to this "patient-centered care" concept. On Wednesday, 13 patients moved to the north wing of the redesigned unit.Patient focus groups and hospital staff helped determine the look of the unit, picking the color scheme and making other suggestions.

A man suspected of stalking a patient at Union Memorial Hospital was shot outside the medical facility Wednesday night by two members of a warrant task force who were staking out the institution after learning he was inside, according to a police spokesman. The man's name was not released; he was being treated at a different hospital for non-life-threatening injuries. Anthony Guglielmi, the spokesman, said a warrant was issued in mid-January charging the man with attempted murder after he stabbed a person outside a Royal Farm store in the 1000 block of W. 36th St. in Hampden.