Here's What I Know About Immigrants

Fifteen years ago this week, I was lying in a Manhattan hospital recovering from a back surgery that almost killed me. Yes, the brilliant doctor who straightened my crooked spine and changed my life was white. But the people who got me through the day-to-day did not speak English as their first language. And to a one, they were superb. Julio, was my very own ICU recovery nurse who brought me ice chips and spoke words of comfort and reassurance when I woke up intubated and with the realization that all had not gone well.

Once I was on a regular unit, a pair of Eastern European sisters were my night nurses. They would come in to release me from my compression stockings so that I could struggle out of bed to the bathroom. (Which was often, due to the medications.) They were the kindest women—always apologizing when it took a while for one of them to get to me. The day I left, they both hugged me and told me “I was just the best patient.”

An older Hispanic gentleman cleaned my room each day and was happy to make small talk. There was a patient on the floor at the time who yelled and screamed at everyone who came in her room. One day the gentleman came to clean, and I said something about the crazy lady down the hall. He looked at me and said, “That lady completely loco. I not go in there anymore ‘til they give her some drugs, man” and we both laughed (which didn’t happen too often for me that week.)

A young nurse’s aide would help me bathe in the morning. As I stood at the sink, staring at my post-op face in the mirror, she said to me, “Don’t worry, Senora. You still beautiful. You have a good man and he still love you. This get better soon.”

I will never, ever forget the kindness of those wonderful humans. I will never forget lying in my room at night listening to the music of different languages emanating from the staff in the hallway, sometimes whispering, often yelling (and probably swearing.) The charge nurse, a formidable black woman with a Caribbean accent took no prisoners when it came to patient care. I remember thinking to myself, “Honey, you’re not in York County anymore. This is like being on the streets of Manhattan. This is America.” And those people took care of this white woman as one of their own. Of course it was their job and they were paid to do it, but they went above and beyond to make what was the scariest and most painful experience of my life bearable.

I am furious at what we’ve chosen in this country. I am heartsick at raids carried out against innocent people staged for the optics of proving a political point. The idea that people like the man who cleaned my hospital room now have to keep a birth certificate with them to avoid being swept into a van or handcuffed in a military plane without access to a bathroom is unfathomable. All in deference to a monstrous President drunk on his own power who lied and promised the world to voters so he could stay out of jail and make more money for billionaires.

This is not America. America was what I experienced in the surgical unit of a hospital in lower Manhattan in 2010, and we cannot allow that America to be destroyed.