Just Don't Leave the Mountains, Ever

Last week, I had to be out of the office to attend to one of my kids who was unexpectedly hospitalized, (many

thanks to the staff here for taking up my slack) and, due to the circumstances surrounding the situation, my family was forced to leave the High Country and go to Winston-Salem. Something we looked at with a lot of dread, not only because our child was very sick (and I mean very, very sick), but because we had to go off-mountain, and that is never good.

Before I get going and forget, I want to express my appreciation to Ashe Memorial Hospital, Watauga Medical Center and Watauga Medics Transport folks, they all provided our child with professional, compassionate, prompt and attentive care.

She is an adult child, who is having an awfully complicated and high-risk pregnancy. She was scared already, before the complications of last week, and we are just parents who could really only worry for all the good we are in medical situations.

Now she turned out alright, and the situation was taken care of at Forsyth Medical Center in Winston, where the staff is very competent and they have all kinds of high-tech gadgets to work with. And I am grateful that the staff is as competent as they are; but so help me, unless it is life or death, I don't ever want to go there again.

Now maybe I am looking from it as a parent who wants people to be nice to his kid when she's sick, or maybe I am looking from it as someone who hates seeing people treated like file numbers and not people.

The contrast between how people are treated here as opposed to there is like night and day. The staffs in Ashe and Watauga were concerned about her and the concern was genuine. In Winston-Salem they barely remembered her name and didn't seem too worried about it. Here she was checked on several times per hour; there, she was left waiting, not permitted to even have water for seven hours waiting for a test result although, based on information given to us from other staff, I beleive the "on-call" doctor had received the results an hour after the test, (at that time doctors had her restricted from anything by mouth for three days, it isn't like she just missed lunch-three days, no food). Why? Just too busy I guess, we were never told.

It finally took my wife, speaking to them as only a mother can, to get things moving and get some answers.

As I said it all turned out well and she is home again and doing much better, but the whole experience was another example to me that if you live here, you should just never leave the mountains.

From the people in the hospital to the people in the hotels and restaurants and convenience stores, none were friendly.

Look, the bottom line is we all are here in the High Country because we want to be here. Whether you came here from some place else fleeing the social degeneration of the towns and cities off mountain, or you were lucky enough to be born here, what keeps you here is the lifestyle and the people.

I know I take it for granted all the time, how things are here, how people smile at you and are glad to see you and appreciate your business, all the things the off-mountain people don't understand or forgot about.

We live in a wonderful place, but most of us get too busy to appreciate it as we should.

So I have a little request of you. I want all of you to follow me in one thing, no matter if you like me or not. Take a little time over the next two weeks and really look around at things. We live in a special place full of real people, and that is something that is getting harder to find.

Yes, the outside world is squeezing us a bit, but it is still better up here than down there.

So thank you, all of you who make this very special place home, and Merry Christmas, High Country, and please remember, unless you absolutely have to, don't leave the mountains.