I'm not a hero. But in the last fourteen years of my life I've touched people's lives. I turned 28 in October 2004, and since I was fourteen, I embraced Islam, fell in love, repaired relations with my family, gone went to college, and voted in presidential elections. The life I'm living now was saved at the San Jose Hospital when I was 14, but now the owners of the hospital are trying to take it away. The life taken is not from me, but from other fourteen-year-olds going through what I went through at that age. San Jose Hospital, located in the little village called downtown San Jose between 13th and 18th, is closing down. The owners of the hospital, Nashville-based HCA Healthcare, says that it's not as profitable as they would like. The hospital serves mainly low-income people from downtown and Eastside San Jose. Every community has its pillars, the supports that hold up the structure, and outside the Albertson's Grocery store on Santa Clara, the hospital has been our downtown community's main pillar. Without that pillar to fall back on, our downtown community may fall -- we may individually and collectively collapse. It is not in anyone's best interest for downtown to fall apart, but if you look at where downtown redevelopment is headed, our community's interest is not part of the plan. When I was fourteen I went manic (hyper, drunk-on-life, EXTREMELY impulsive) and then depressive (soul-sick, sleeping-all-the-time, crying-for-no-reason, suicidal). The thing that saved me from my madness was being put in a psychiatric ward in the San Jose Hospital. Kids like me had nowhere else to go. The community centers were closed. Our parents blame us. No one at school wanted to be our friend, because our impulses were socially unacceptable, and isolation just made our illness worse. Even the teenage safe haven of sitting in your room and listening to your favorite song no longer worked, because when you're manic, you imagine you can detect all these hidden meanings in it. If it rocks, swings, or thrashes, then the music becomes overpoweringly intense for you. Your enemy is yourself. What else but round-the-clock, locked-up supervision can save you from, say, getting shot by a cop because you sneak out barefoot at night and run like crazy the second you see one, as I did? My experience is that the therapy groups, blocked time, and yes, the mind-drugs they prescribed for me at San Jose Hospital, were a giant-robot-sized stabilizing force in my life. I have grown and experienced a lot since I was fourteen, but this was only possible because of the existence of the downtown San Jose Hospital. There will still be the sick kids, the suicidal, the third-generation thirteen-year-old alcoholics, the anorexic girls. There will still be the people of downtown and San Jose at large -- there just won't be anyone waiting to catch them when they fall. Without that airbag, those kids will die a lifetime early, just like I would've died fourteen years ago. |
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