Opinion | Goodbye to Prince Georges Hospital Center, my beacon on the hill
Caroline Langston is a regular contributor to Slant Books’ Close Reading blog and a founding contributor to “Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion’s Good Letters.” A winter of the Pushcart Prize, she has contributed to Sojourners’ God’s Politics blog and aired commentaries on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”
No matter where you live in the area, if you’ve bumped along New York Avenue in traffic on your way to catch a flight at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport, you’ve seen it perched over the Baltimore-Washingon Parkway, just past the red neon sign of the Pepsi-Cola brewing company: Prince George’s Hospital Center. Now it’s about to close.
Sometime on Saturday, the last patients at the old Prince George’s Hospital Center in Cheverly will depart for the new hospital in Largo.
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My husband and I moved to Cheverly with our baby son 15 years ago, and “PG Hospital” was old and patched-up even then. We both worked in public media, and our nonprofit salaries didn’t go very far in our Old Town Alexandria neighborhood — this was during the first big real estate bubble that preceded the 2008 meltdown. Friends recruited us to this neighborhood of little red-brick colonials that was diverse and, by D.C. standards, at least, affordable.
And Prince George’s Hospital became part of our lives. Our first year in our house, I heard the sounds of helicopters overhead descending to the hospital’s famous trauma center and joked I felt like I was in a Vietnam War movie.
Over time, our feelings grew fond. Whenever we came back at night from somewhere else in town, the hospital was a beacon of light telling us we were almost home. Each year that there’s been a big-enough snowstorm, all the neighborhood kids, armed with sleds and trash-can lids, have headed up to “Hospital Hill” to go sledding. My son is a teenager now, and, more than once, he and his friends have snuck up to the top of the parking garage to watch the sunset.
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We’ve also been users of the hospital’s services and found them fine — though we’d been warned by people, both in the neighborhood and out, to “just drive to Holy Cross.” Or Washington Hospital Center. Or even — believe it or not — Anne Arundel.
Some of these reactions have been because of racism. A lot of people, it seems, do not want to be minority White clients in an institution mostly filled with Black and brown people. That’s been true of some people within my neighborhood, but has also come from unexpected quarters. It wasn’t until I actually lived here that I started to hear the derisive dismissal of “PG” from some of my most progressive, Northwest D.C. friends.
But it’s also a matter of class and what writer David Brooks once called the “invisible fence” of real estate. I remember reading former Post reporter Gigi Anders’s 2005 memoir of being a Cuban refugee in which she tells of her doctor father gets admitting privileges at PGHC, in “uber-gauche Cheverly,” and my cheeks smarted in shame. (I would like to tell Anders to take a look at our real estate prices now, when even Cheverly is part of the new real estate bubble.)
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Yes, a charity hospital that relies mostly on payments from Medicaid will reflect the problems of the larger community — particularly a hospital with a trauma center that’s renowned for taking care of car accidents and gunshot wounds. Everyone in my neighborhood has a story about the cop cars following ambulances to the emergency room, their lights on and sirens blaring. Or the occasional psych patient who’s managed to check himself out and is walking along Landover Road wearing nothing but a hospital gown — or nothing at all.
But I can also tell you about the night that a whole phalanx of doctors and nurses from countries around the world tenderly took care of my 80-year-old mother who suffered from Alzheimer’s and had passed out from dehydration. And the cherry Popsicles a physician assistant gave to my son for being so patient as they glued the gash in his head after he’d fallen on the basement window frame while playing catch with my husband.
We live a nation that does not love its public resources, that wants to hide them behind the invisible fences of limitless choice, the empowerment of “concierge care” for those of us who can afford it. For the rest of us, I’m glad that now there will be a new, $543 million University of Maryland Medical Center right down the road that can fill the gaps in all the places the old PGHC fell short.
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But I will miss the nightly beacon from our landmark on the hill, and the message to which it’s pointed — that here, and always, I’m in Cheverly, and safely home.
Read more:
The Post’s View: The hospital Prince George’s deserves
The Post’s View: Prince George’s health care is finally on the mend
Letter to the editor: Doing good work at Prince George’s Hospital Center
Angela Alsobrooks: Prince George’s plan to build schools will help students and the community
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