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I Discovered a Shrine in the Least Likely of Places
I never expected it
Until my mother spent 11 days in the ICU with pneumonia in January of 2023, my experience with hospitals was, thankfully, extremely limited. The births of my two daughters, a hernia operation, and visiting an uncle after his heart attack were pretty much the only extended hospital trips that I can recall before mom’s illness. Over the past month, however, my stepdad has made three separate trips to the hospital, with the most recent lasting five days (he’s out and doing a little better now).
Those earlier hospital experiences all happened at institutions that were founded by various Christian denominations — Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist — but had lost any affiliation with those denominations as they were all gobbled up by corporate healthcare behemoths. The hospital my dad was in, Christus Trinity Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler, Texas, has definitely not lost its affiliation with the Catholic Church or the nun whose name it bears. And while I should have assumed that simply by the name, it took this in his room to finally get my attention:
