Inside the Clinic: The Blind Kindness Edition
Each week, our Executive Director, Anne-Lise Quinn, sends out a Clinic Update to the staff. In an effort to keep our wider community updated about the happenings inside Culmore Clinic, we will be posting an annotated version of this update to our blog each week under the Inside the Clinic tag.
Good Morning Friends!
Did you see the sunrise this morning? It lit up my house with the most incredibly rosy hue! The loveliest start to the day!
There was another happy thought in my head as I headed to make my coffee: we launched our onsite operations this week and it was a success!
As you know, our kind host, First Christian Church, approved reopening to onsite primary care appointments one day a week and the last few weeks have been spent readying and reengineering the Clinic space to increase safety to staff and patients, as well as the facility. The creation of a “patient pod” into which nurse and provider staff go back and forth, minimizes the area to which potential infection can occur; and the use of an iPad in the pod means an interpreter can join remotely thus minimizing the staff needed to be onsite at any one time. It sure feels like Culmore Clinic has entered a new technological era of primary care!! Many, many thanks to the team – Barbara Weingold, Lisa Hornstein, Dr. Sneiderman, Caroline Hillkirk, Emily Parker, and YooJin Kwon – not to mention James Williams, the Sexton at FCC, for making it happen and right on schedule!!
Speaking of thanks, can you remember the last thing you did for another human being knowing and, more specifically, expecting that you will not be thanked directly by that human being? Many of our amazing supporters contribute to the operations of Culmore Clinic knowing they may never see the faces of the patients you have been cared for with those gifts; and those patients may never know or get a chance to thank the neighbors who have made their healthcare possible. And yet people still give, and others still receive with thankfulness in their hearts and that in itself truly makes the world a better place.
There is one person out there in the world who received the most incredible gift recently from a stranger and who is probably not going to live a day in his or her life without a spirit of thankfulness for this man he or she will never know. This man is not a stranger to us, though. This dear, kind, compassionate man is our very own Fr. Tuck Grinnell. Fr. Tuck, for our newbies who don’t know, was pastor at St. Anthony’s when Terry and Ann brought Culmore Clinic into being and he continues to serve on the Advisory Board.
You can read the more detailed story here , but the long and short of it is that Fr. Tuck recently decided to donate one of his perfectly healthy kidneys to another precious human who would die without it. Imagine!
While Fr. Tuck has made this sacrifice in a most humble way – indeed, even thankful that he could do this for another - I can’t help smiling at the thought that the dear human, who can now live a normal life, doesn’t just have any ol’ kidney, but the kidney of an incredible human who gave in love and with joy. That’s surely the very best kidney to get!
Stay safe out there!
Warmly,
Anne-Lise