Hospital Has Its Moving-In Day

Four-fifteen Tuesday morning: Dawn begins to break through pale lavender clouds streaked across the eastern horizon. The Vineyard Haven harbor is still, the Nantucket Lightship tied up at Packer’s Wharf, her brick-red hull a bright contrast to the soft gray light of early morning. A bell buoy clangs in the distance. On National Public Radio, BBC News gives an update on World Cup soccer and a film review of the hot new summer movie Toy Story. Most of the Island still slumbers. But around the bend just over the Lagoon Pond Bridge at the new Martha’s Vineyard Hospital, no one is asleep. This is moving-in day, and a double staff of nurses, doctors and administrators have been on hand since three-thirty this morning to accomplish the job. The work going on inside the building is closed to the press, and two newspaper photographers stand in the parking lot, clicking away with their cameras as the sky turns from gray to crimson behind the two-story, fifty-two-million-dollar brick building. This is history, and the photographers are there to record the moment.

According to reports later from hospital administrators, all went according to plan. The emergency room was moved first, followed by acute care patients, maternity patients, and operating room staff.

And then, just before five a.m. an ambulance pulled up and the hospital emergency room had its first admittance, a person with chest pains.

It turned out to be a busy morning at the new E.R., even busier than usual for a Tuesday in late June.

But that’s the way things sometimes go at the hospital, and that is of course why members of the Vineyard community dug deep into their pocketbooks beginning five years ago collectively to contribute millions of dollars for this new facility, which houses an emergency room, acute care, two operating rooms, maternity, laboratory and X-ray facilities.

Because when you are having chest pains at four-thirty in the morning, you need to know that the hospital is there for you.

And it is, just as it has been since the first cottage hospital opened its doors more than eighty years ago.

Now all that’s left is to wait for the first baby to be born in the Vineyard’s new state-of-the-art hospital.

Which is supposed to be any day.