If you enter Erlanger Hospital from the Blackford Street side, over next to the Health Department near the Emergency Room entrance, you’ll be overwhelmed by the urge to immediately wash your hands. It, along with several other areas of the decaying medical center, is undeniably filthy.

The reason I bring this up is because I watched from a distance as “my hospital” had a fun and lively picnic for its employees earlier this week. The management wanted to salute those who make the hospital so great despite its glaring flaws as the nation celebrated "Hospital Week."

As I studied the picnic from afar, I was overwhelmed once again – this time by the fact those who work there, not to mention the thousands who go there for treatment, deserve a whole lot more than they are now getting.

I believe in Erlanger Hospital. I know that if you are really sick, or hurt very badly, you have no choice but to use our area’s only category-one medical center. Go anywhere else for trauma and you’ll do just as well going to Moccasin Bend Mental Hospital because crazy decisions have killed a lot of people.

I am not dumping on good hospitals like Memorial or Parkridge, which are fine if you got to have your tonsils taken out or your foot X-rayed, but when seconds are precious at 3 a.m., there is but only one place you’d better go.

During the past month I have gone to Erlanger every day for I.V. medicine, and I can say, under oath, there are no finer health-care people in the country than the nurses and the pharmacists and the clerks who were so diligent towards to me. I can also say, rather emphatically, that they deserve better.

For instance, Sherry and her nurses who work in the infusion center are absolutely “angels of mercy” but they work in a dungeon of a place, down in a windowless basement where some of our city’s most forlorn must go each day for chemotherapy and the like. They deserve better.

Go out the back door of the infusion center and you’ll go up some very dirty steps where there is further filth in an area the hospital has designated for those who smoke cigarettes. I believe a man with a steam jenny could pressure-wash the area once a day and everyone would be much happier, but my bigger point is directed at those who pass there each day. They deserve better.

Not long ago the employees were sent an attachment with their checks, asking them to give money to Children’s Hospital. Nothing was the matter with that, but the method that was used caused a huge uproar because everybody who got one thought they were being fired. They deserve better.

When the chief executives gave themselves hefty raises earlier this year, the reason that was given to the Erlanger board was that some company in the Midwest said it was necessary. The rank-and-file employees wondered why the Midwest company didn’t include them and were told the company only handled executives. So the Midwest company got paid and the executives got the raises, while the nurses and pharmacists and clerks got nothing. They deserve better.

Recently some of the hospital elevators were done in a copper-and-black scheme that would have been far more fitting in some Mexican brothel. While one off-handed theory is the new décor was bought dirt-cheap because no one else wanted it, the point is that a hospital elevator should be clean, warm and inviting. Not only that, no one can recall a day or a time when every elevator worked properly. They deserve better.

Sadly, many of the things that need fixing aren’t expensive and can be summed up in a collection of four-letter words; soap, work, care, nice, kind. The employees are the first to notice the dying plants in reception areas, the homeless wandering the halls, the gross lack-of-attention to daily detail. They deserve better.

As with almost any army, the employees can also readily identify the “thieves” in their midst. These are those who take a pay check and give back little, almost nothing in return. Some are playing the “race” card, others that of “long service” but, to many who are forced to watch, such abuse is disheartening. They deserve better.

Finally, when you enter the Blackford Street entrance where many of the hospital’s employees come and go, you’ll notice the empty planters, the missing grout in the tiles, the overall grime and the dank surroundings because of poor lighting. This is also where the public walks. They deserve better.

The city and the county and the federal governments each appropriate money to Erlanger that comes from taxes. This money comes from you. You, just like they, deserve better.

royexum@aol.com