City Desk: Acts of Mercy

A BLOCK from my door is a dialysis outpatient facility run by one of the local hospitals. I live on an island of health care. The hospitals line the East River like battleships; the sign of one glows outside my window at night, just under moonrise. Thanks to a century and more of money, charity, and Jewish doctors, our hospitals can treat anything from ocular pediatric cancer to knife wounds on a Saturday night. You would hardly know the neighborhood dialysis unit is where it is. It inhabits an ordinary office building, the entrance sitting behind a Szechuan restaurant; no big marquee proclaims it. The only signs that it is there are the occasional presence in the street of vans unloading patients, and the almost continuous presence on the sidewalk of nurses and technicians, coming and going, taking the air and taking breaks.

Diabetes is a chronic condition, so you don’t see flashing ambulances bringing victims of kidney failure, as you would at an emergency room. The vehicles on my street are the routine transport of regular customers who come for their three-or five-times-a-week appointments with salvation. The plenitude of diseases in the world makes you grateful that you do not have all of them, and mindful that the systems that produce color and nebulae should also be so fecund when it comes to humiliation and suffering.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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A BLOCK from my door is a dialysis outpatient facility run by one of the local hospitals. I live on an island of health care. The hospitals line the East River like battleships; the sign of one glows outside my window at night, just under moonrise. Thanks to a century and more of money, charity, and Jewish doctors, our hospitals can treat anything from ocular pediatric cancer to knife wounds on a Saturday night. You would hardly know the neighborhood dialysis unit is where it is. It inhabits an ordinary office building, the entrance sitting behind a Szechuan restaurant; no big marquee proclaims it. The only signs that it is there are the occasional presence in the street of vans unloading patients, and the almost continuous presence on the sidewalk of nurses and technicians, coming and going, taking the air and taking breaks.

Diabetes is a chronic condition, so you don’t see flashing ambulances bringing victims of kidney failure, as you would at an emergency room. The vehicles on my street are the routine transport of regular customers who come for their three-or five-times-a-week appointments with salvation. The plenitude of diseases in the world makes you grateful that you do not have all of them, and mindful that the systems that produce color and nebulae should also be so fecund when it comes to humiliation and suffering.