It happened a long time ago. Thirty years, I’d guess. I was attending a Board meeting in Silicon Valley, back in the days when Silicon Valley was the center of the universe. The meeting room was on the second floor of a bank building in Sunnyvale. The directors were all officers of leading semiconductor equipment suppliers, and we all knew each other well and looked forward to the chance to swap stories about life in what was then the fast lane.
One of the directors had to leave the meeting early for another appointment. His name was Sam, and he was the oldest member of the group. He said his goodbyes and walked down the stairs to exit the building.
He should have walked out the door, but instead Sam walked into a floor-to-ceiling glass panel adjacent to the door. It shattered, and Sam was badly cut. Somehow he made it back to the meeting room, his leg bleeding profusely. While the one lady present looked the other way, we dropped Sam’s pants to assess the damage, and we quickly concluded that a trip to a hospital was called for. I volunteered to drive, and a director named Mike, who lived in the Valley, offered to navigate.
As we drove to the hospital with our wounded colleague, Mike and I chatted about the quality of medical care in the Valley.
“The hospital we are headed for is one of the best in the world,” said Mike. “Every bit as good as Mass. General or anything else you have in Boston.” I nodded. It was good to know that Sam would be in the best of hands.
Sam was quickly admitted, and Mike and I sat in a very large room just inside the main entrance, waiting for our friend to be repaired. While we waited, Mike kept praising the hospital’s medical staff and its worldwide reputation. As a native Bostonian, I recognized the pattern. In Dallas, for instance, a Texan might say something like, “So you’re from Boston? Well, they say that our symphony orchestra here in Dallas is on a par with Boston’s.” Or someone from Phoenix might compare that city’s art museum favorably with Boston’s. It was an old story: new cities striving to equal the old. Today the subject was hospitals.
Then, from a pair of swinging doors to our left, a patient was wheeled into this large room. He was apparently being discharged from the hospital. The orderly who wheeled him in then walked over to the front desk to deal with the paperwork.
But he did not set the brake on his patient’s wheelchair, and the hard floor in the room was apparently not level. So, while Mike and I and the others in the room gasped in astonishment, the wheelchair rolled across the room, heading for the hospital’s main entrance about 30 feet away. It crashed into the wall, and the patient was thrown from the wheelchair onto the floor. Blood was oozing from his mouth. He was gathered up and whisked back into the hospital.
After a while, Sam emerged with his leg stitched up, and the three us drove back to Sunnyvale in relative silence.
I am sure that the hospital in question was every bit as good as Mike said it was. Mistakes happen, even in the best places.
But the floors are more level in Boston, I think.
