Winter, property ownership, and modern health care

It is cold here. It's not as cold as it is for my country mouse friend in Booger Freeze, AK, but it's cold enough to make outdoor time a means to an end instead of the enjoyable experience it usually is for me, Doodlebug, and Shmoo each morning and afternoon. We're bundled in lots of layers, and because of the volume of snow that fell upon a similar volume of slush that was all followed by a deep freeze, we're avoiding some very slick patches of snow-and-ice-packed sidewalk. This means that often, we trek, head down against the cold, over the snow on people's lawns. And to think I considered not bothering with buying Shmoo snow pants this winter!

Last Thursday, the three of us were heading home from school when we saw, up ahead, someone trying to manoevre along the sidewalk on crutches. That patch of sidewalk, the next up from our house, has not been shoveled, salted, or otherwise attended by the owners of the house against which it sits. He was wearing a backpack and clearly having trouble. As we crossed a main intersection to reach our corner, I was watching my girls and lost site of the crutched pedestrian ahead, so when I looked up and didn't see him, I assumed he had gone into one of the houses. As we approached our porch, though, I saw that he had fallen. He was on his knees in the snow and using a fire hydrant to pull himself up.

With Shmoo in the sling and Doodlebug close behind me, I ran to him and found that he was young -- maybe 20 -- and clearly in terrible pain. He could barely hold himself up on his crutches, and the damaged leg/foot was wrapped in ace bandages and ended with a dangling sock, soaking wet and freezing from being dragged in the snow. He is a student and has no family here. I asked him if I could call a taxi for him, and he said that he had been waiting at the hospital for a taxi for more than an hour and a half before he was told he had to leave. The hospital staff who had told him to leave had told him that his destination was only three blocks away.

It was at least eight. And did I mention that this person was on crutches in the snow? After some phone calls and attempts to get this poor kid a ride from someone without two children, I finally saw a taxi in the street (not a common site in residential Evanston). I flagged it down and bribed the driver to take this kid home.

Two days later, I was in the car with Doodlebug and her best friend, on our way home from a birthday party, when we saw an old woman on a street corner, waving a silver cane at all passing cars. I rolled down my window and asked if she was ok. She said, "Look at this! I can't get across this! I'm trapped!" Sure enough, the path from the sidewalk down into the street was flooded with an ankle-deep puddle on one side, and on the other side, a path roughly the width of my foot was the only route through. This woman simply could not navigate it. I locked the car, put on the blinkers, and got out to help this woman over the mound of snow and into the street. Then I discovered that she was on her way from a pharmacy in our neighborhood back to her neighborhood, roughly half a mile away. She had come this way, I gathered as I drove her home, because the pharmacy in our neighborhood was slightly cheaper. Then she got stuck.

So, two lessons I learned:

1. Urban dwellers, please shovel your sidewalks.

2. Read more about national health care, health care advocacy, and what can be done in my own neighborhood about the hospital and its policies about patient release.

I mean, really, what the heck?!!?!