Hospital Room

Blacksburg, Va. -- Caught between hope and dread, friends and relatives of the injured descended yesterday on a small community hospital in Blacksburg that had never seen anything like yesterday's flood of patients. Montgomery Regional Hospital, a 146-bed facility just miles from campus, treated students with gunshot injuries and others who suffered broken bones after they leapt from classroom windows to escape the approaching gunman. Seventeen victims, all of them students, were taken to the community hospital; one was dead on arrival.

KENNETT SQUARE, Pa.-- --Abright green sign hangs on the front gate guarding the entrance of the New Bolton Center. "Keep believing in miracles," it reads. Just a couple hundred yards inside, the world's most beloved hospital patient has lived for the past 54 days. The hope that Barbaro had inspired in so many was largely dashed yesterday, as doctors painted a dire prognosis for the Kentucky Derby champion. The parking lot of the hospital was packed with media vehicles. Atop nearly a dozen trucks were large satellite dishes.

Nothing or no one can prepare you for the moment your life will change forever. For me, that moment occurred May 10, 2004 ... about a week after I turned 31 ... a month before I was to be married. I had gone to the emergency room three days before. My gastrointestinal doctor had met me there. I had been having stomach pains, diarrhea and constipation and was throwing up. I'd lost weight and was anemic. I'd been having these symptoms off and on for about six months. My doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong.

Anita Pandey can't see the Christmas tree in the hallway outside her hospital room - but she likes knowing it is there. Her 2-year-old daughter, Sarika Pandey Kapadia, keeps taking ornaments off the lower branches to bring to her mother, who is pregnant and has been on bed rest since the end of last month. Pandey, who lives in Columbia, says she will not mind too much spending Christmas at Howard County General Hospital, which has taken a number of steps to brighten the spirits of patients who must spend the holidays away from home and in a setting that others might find depressing.

He ran out of gas in the Motor City. It was April 2001 and Richie Bancells -- long-time head athletic trainer of the Baltimore Orioles, the biomechanic who keeps the team in running order, but tends to push his own engine too hard -- was sitting inside the visitors' clubhouse at Comerica Park in Detroit, writing his post-game injury report. Thump. Bancells' heart hit a speed bump. Then another. This was worse than being caught in one of Cal Ripken's notorious bone-crusher bear hugs. "It felt like somebody had a corset around my chest and was tightening it," Bancells, 48, recalls.

IF YOU PAID any attention at all to Bill Clinton's recent bypass operation, you know that surgery for a former president is a whole different experience than it is for riff-raff like you and me. Let's face it: When you're the former Leader of the Free World, you don't worry about where you're having the surgery. Going in, you know it'll be one of the best hospitals in the country, period. You're not picking a hospital the way the rest of us do: Because your brother-in-law had his gall bladder removed there and he didn't die, so how bad could the place be?

When Christine Elizabeth Gagliardi's doctors diagnosed two rare cancers eight months ago, they told the college sophomore that she was only the 14th person in the country and the youngest ever to contract neurofibroma and angiosarcoma. "She cried for a while, but she never panicked," said her father, Dr. Joseph Gagliardi, a Howard County physician. "She said, `I won the cancer lottery. Let's go play the Maryland lottery.' There was no known treatment, and she knew all along her treatment would be guesswork, but she went along with it."

A woman receiving treatment for an infected leg at the University of Maryland Medical Center has alleged that she was sexually assaulted by another patient early Friday, said her husband and a hospital spokeswoman. The 47-year-old woman from Baltimore said that a man staying in a room across the hall entered her room, unfastened her clothes and touched her, her husband said. Ellen Beth Levitt, a hospital spokeswoman, confirmed the husband's report of his wife's assault. "To my knowledge this has never happened before," she added.

A Westminster woman whose mother died last summer after a fall from a reclining chair in her room at Carroll County General Hospital has filed a lawsuit against the facility in Carroll Circuit Court. June Mohr, 84, died at the hospital in Westminster on Aug. 11 after fracturing her nose during a fall from the recliner, according to the lawsuit filed Thursday by her daughter, Carol Rider. The lawsuit claims negligence by the hospital for having defective equipment and for continuing to use the malfunctioning chair after Rider notified the staff about it. The suit alleges wrongful death, and pain and suffering before death, and seeks damages of $500,000.

THREE FAMILIES in Ellicott City are struggling to care for their seriously ill children. A generation ago, no one could have imagined the problems they face -- not just with medical treatment, but with structuring their lives to meet their children's needs. Anna Marie DeWitt, 2, had brain surgery for cancer as her older sister, Kelsey, 5, started kindergarten at Resurrection St. Paul School in Ellicott City. Their parents, Trish and Brian DeWitt, live in Ellicott City and seldom discussed their family's situation with others.