It’s a five-hour flight from Los Angeles to the tiny country of Belize with its tropical jungles, Mayan temples, barrier reef and jaguar reserve making tourism its main source of revenue.
Edward and Patricia Lord of Palmdale were just ending a trip there to attend Patricia’s 40th high school reunion last year, but before they flew home they would visit the only tertiary hospital in Belize City, far off the beaten path of tourists.
It is here local residents needing specialized care came for treatment. Edward, a plant operations supervisor at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills, wanted to see with his own eyes the deplorable conditions his childhood friends still living in Belize were telling him existed at the hospital.
Patricia stayed in the car while he went inside. She was terrified, she said, of what she might see. What she saw instead while waiting outside was the heartbreaking reality of being sick and poor in a country so rich in beauty.
The taxis pulling up to the hospital with mothers and sick babies and children inside. It was a luxury they couldn’t afford, but when your baby is sick and you’re miles away from help, you don’t have the time to walk. You scrape together every penny you can find to get there fast.
She saw buses from the rural regions outside the city arriving filled with more mothers and children, and elderly, sick people who had traveled 70 miles over bumpy, dirt roads to get here — breathing in the constant dust in the air that has caused so many Belizeans to suffer from severe asthma.
All this just to get to a hospital with deplorable conditions because there was little financial help from a revolving door government to adequately fund the only tertiary hospital in a country of 400,000.
Edward was shaken when he came back to the car. It was worse than he had imagined. All the defibrillators, monitors and stethoscopes were rusted or broken. Tables placed on cinder blocks doubled as beds. Nothing seemed to work.
Patients who had to be turned by nurses were kept in old recliners to make it easier for the nurses to turn them, but harder for the patients to escape the pain and find sleep.
There was no surgical lighting or any equipment available for an emergency C-section. If drugs were needed by a patient, a loved one or friend would have to go out and buy them at the pharmacy, and bring them back to the hospital.
“If those conditions existed in any hospital in the United States, that hospital would be shut down immediately,” Edward told Patricia. “It was that bad.”
They had gone to Belize for a high school reunion and returned home to Palmdale on a mission of mercy. Those mothers and children arriving in buses and taxis they couldn’t afford deserved so much more than deplorable conditions when they finally got to the hospital.
They deserved an angel waiting for them.
It arrived a few days ago, just in time for Easter — three, 53-foot tractor trailers loaded with everything needed to turn deplorable conditions into a clean, viable, health care environment.
Edward and Patricia Lord had gone hat-in-hand after they got home last year to make it happen.
The used medical and surgical equipment inside the old Tarzana Medical Center patient tower had done its job, and now it was time to lock the doors on this old hospital that had served the San Fernando Valley well for 50 years.
A state-of-the-art medical center with all new equipment was opening in its place right next door — Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center — and there was no need for all that used equipment in the old hospital anymore.
It would be sold on a second-hand market, and if there were no buyers, worst case scenario, it would be demolished and thrown away, said Nick Lymberopoulos, chief executive of Providence Cedar-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center.
Edward offered him a third choice and Nick said go for it — change those deplorable conditions. There would be no secondhand market or landfill. It’s all yours, Edward. Glendale Memorial Hospital also chipped in with 26 defibrillators.
Now, the only problem left was how to get it all to Belize. Driving three tractor trailers across the country to Miami and loading them on a freighter bound for Belize would cost well over $100,000.
Even with donations and volunteers standing by to pack up and load the equipment into the containers, there was no way the Lords could afford that.
Once again, that angel sitting on their shoulder stepped in.
Patricia spent months going back and forth with Belize government officials, begging them to fund the transportation. Everything being shipped was turnkey, she promised — just plug it in and go.
One day the government would say yes, the next day it would be no.
“I finally told Edward, this was going to be my last try,” Patricia said. “It was just too heartbreaking and disappointing to keep doing over and over again. I made one last call and the woman who answered recognized my name.
“I couldn’t believe it. We had been children together. She used to come over to my house to play. I told her the whole story, and she lobbied for us to get the funding.”
They couldn’t have done it, the Lords say, without the help of all the volunteers who spent weekends at the old Tarzana hospital cleaning out every room of equipment and supplies — all the beds, delivery tables, monitors, cables, scopes, down to the bottles of Lysol.
“We didn’t leave a trash can behind,” said Patricia, who can be reached at patricialord66@gmail.com.
This isn’t the end of the story, the Lords say, it’s only the beginning.
“We often take so much for granted, but hopefully we can look beyond our immediate communities to continue to make a difference in the lives of the most vulnerable in our world,” Edward said.
What better time to begin than Easter?
Dennis McCarthy’s column runs on Sunday. He can be reached at dmccarthynews@gmail.com.
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