Lancaster General Hospital is hemorrhaging employees, and it should scare you.

Let me start at the beginning.

Because of Penn Medicine’s irresponsible mandate that violates a primary principle of medical ethics—that no one should be coerced to receive a medical procedure—Lancaster General Hospital is bleeding employees. Let me help my fellow Lancaster County residents visualize how much worse it’s going to get if our community doesn’t speak up and convince them to back off this foolish malarky. You need to make noise to get them to listen.

I’ll start.

Hey Penn Medicine leadership: your mandate is going to destroy the hometown hospital we’ve relied on for generations.

Courtesy of the nonprofit Wayback Machine, here’s a comparison of open positions in a few categories at LG Health, plus the total, showing 13 weeks before their mandate (February 2021) and 13 weeks after the mandate (today).

Overall, the organization had 423 positions listed in June. And now they have 785.

That’s 85% more openings.

Employees are stampeding to get out of this place.

By percentage:

Will it be a nurse or an “open position” you need when your father hits the call button on 8 West?

Will it be a tech or an “open position” you need to start CPR when your brother codes in the ED?

Will it be a physician or an “open position” you need to read your daughter’s chest X-ray?

Do Linked In ads answer phones? Do sign-on bonuses deliver meals? Will that classified listing clean the floor, change the sheets, fix the elevator, or fill your prescription?

Almost 30,000 Lancastrians read my last post, and almost 7,000 interacted with it on Facebook. I got so many, many kind words, but… it was also made *somewhat* clear you’re not all fans of what you think I’m saying.

So let me say it again, louder for the people in the back:

“I am not arguing for or against any medical procedure. I am not “refusing” anything, nor am I keeping anyone else from having something they want or need. But whether or not I agree, or you agree, that healthcare workers should have bodily autonomy isn’t the issue. The bottom line is that there are hundreds of LGH employees who have already left over this mandate, and hundreds more are due up to be fired in three weeks. And THAT matters to all the corporeal beings of Lancaster County. ”

If you live in Lancaster, you need to be scared. You need to shame these foolish leaders who are choosing politics over patient care.

The job postings sting as pathetic; they’re begging so hard to get people to work in this place. And yet, there are ever-growing hundreds of qualified, trained, experienced professionals who want to continue serving patients, but they’re being fired, pressured, coerced, bullied, manipulated, and laughed out the door.

Lancaster, let your healthcare heroes keep working the jobs they love.

This is a life-sapping ‘your kind of help not wanted’ catastrophe.

Your hospital is hemorrhaging employees, and it’s getting worse.

To the Board of Trustees: your employees are people, not pawns. Stop the bleeding!

Lancaster’s dedicated veterans who have had their exemption requests refused with the most offensive of language are still sticking it out. You have a chance to help them. These people aren’t organizing walk-outs. They aren’t leaving when your mom’s colostomy bag ruptures. They are still holding your sister’s hand when she hears the cancer diagnosis. They are answering their pager at 3:14 am.

You see, unlike the ivory-tower leadership who hides behind Zoom screens and smartphones, the women and men on the front lines have dry hands, tired backs, mask rashes, and headaches from their safety goggles.

These healthcare heroes love their patients, and they’re going to be there—taking blood pressures, transporting patients, making meals, and changing lightbulbs—until security escorts them out in three weeks. That’s when we’ll see if LGH’s leadership’s choice is really to have empty hallways and unattended call-bells… if they’re really willing to destroy the generations-long legacy of this hospital.

If your neighbors don’t speak up and get LGH’s embarrassingly silent leaders to refuse this Penn Medicine policy, it’s you and your family that are going to suffer. When you need a thriving hospital, you will instead pull up to a half-empty, half-hearted shell of what LGH once was.

Lancaster, let Penn Medicine know that our community deserves better.

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If you want to donate to the legal defense fund for the healthcare heroes who are standing up to this mandate, you can do that here.

P.S. Someone *realskies* politely told me the bonuses I mentioned last time were not real, so here are some handy-dandy links so you can check yourself:

All sign on bonuses (53 at publish date)

$10,000 sign on bonus (1 at publish date)

$5,000 sign on bonus (18 at publish date)

$4,000 sign on bonus (7 at publish date)

LG Leaders Contact Info

Alex Jorgensen, Chief of Human Resources
alexandra.jorgensen@pennmedicine.upenn.edu | 717-544-1210

John Lines, PR Director
john.lines@pennmedicine.upenn.edu | 717-544-5054

Mike Ripchinski, Chief Clinical Officer
michael.ripchinski@pennmedicine.upenn.edu | 717-544-5817

Stacey Youcis, Chief of Hospital Operations
stacey.youcis@pennmedicine.upenn.edu | 717-544-5007

here's why it matters to you that people like my husband are getting fired from l.g.h. on september 1

Here’s why Penn Medicine’s mandate matters to you.

I’m going to paint you a picture. Let’s say your local hospital decides to fire everyone in one month if they had a letter X in their name. I know what we’re facing is more serious than this, but hang with me.

Not a lot of people have X in their name. Sure, there’s Alex the ER nurse, but, honestly, he was always kind of weird, right? Let him go. One person out of thousands is no big deal.

But the problem is, you forgot about the gastroenterologist Max and Felix the pharmacist. You feel kind of bad, but again, it’s a big place and there are always good people looking for jobs.

Unfortunately, Sarah the surgeon is married to Alex, and Jack from Facilities Management is Felix’s brother. So even though they don’t have the X, they’re leaving too. They’re shocked that the organization they dedicated their lives to serving suddenly views them as expendable.

Good thing we’re only down five people in a hospital of thousands.

We’re fine.

But wait, you forgot about Daxton from HR and Roxanne, the administrative manager for pediatrics. Suddenly, it’s seeming like more people. And then, you find out that when the cardiologist Xiao got his pink slip, his whole department quit in protest. All of a sudden, it isn’t just 8 or 9 people.

It’s dozens.

Then it’s hundreds.

…what if it’s a thousand?

Lancaster General Hospital’s last publicly announced numbers said up to 30% of their staff was saying NO to this mandate.

Your hospital is about to get flooded by temporary, transient employees. When does the patient care level of the hospital get affected? Do you want to show up at an ER and get treated by 30% of staff who were in Poughkeepsie last month and will disappear to Scranton by October?

Do you?

This is why it should matter to you. It shouldn’t matter because you do or do not think the people fighting are stupid or crazy or irrelevant. It should matter to you because this matters enough to them that they’re going to lose their jobs over this. And when they do—you’re stuck sending your injured child to a hospital where 30% of the staff doesn’t know where the bathroom is.

Gosh, I hope the temp staff they’re hiring can find the AED when they need it.

Employee morale is currently so bad they’re offering massive sign-on bonuses and unheard-of shift differentials just to get bodies to take shifts. They’ve moved to a rolling hiring process for positions they’ve never had trouble filling. And the nation was already in a nursing shortage.

Gosh, I hope the wildly overworked veterans who stay can keep their exhausted eyes open when they start your mom’s IV.

It needs to matter to you that your local hospital leadership is making a decision that is going to negatively impact patient care by leading to massive employee turnover at a time when all we need is our healthcare heroes. Let your hard-working neighbors keep their jobs!

Tell Penn Medicine this mandate is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea.

And tell Lancaster Newspapers and WGAL to do their only job and report objectively.

If you’re a human person with a physical body and you live in Lancaster, this matters to you.

And if you don’t live in Lancaster, they are coming to divide and destroy your hometown hospital next.

how to demo that bathroom you're about to DIY

Metallic. Naked. Baby Angels. Oh my goodness. You never know what you are going to discover with home demolition — we’re found mouse graveyards galore — but this wallpaper takes the cake. The funniest part is how this is ALMOST so hideous that it’s really cute again. In fact, I posted it on my personal FB wall and a bunch of friends said they loved it.

We did a quick mini-reno of this bathroom when we bought the house and took down metallic flowered wallpaper from the exposed walls, but behind the mirror was this glorious previous iteration:

I asked my husband (at the end of the project) if the previous homeowner was as excited about her angel butts as I am about my trendy blues and whites, ad he said yes. So future generations can think I have hilarious taste, congrats. You’ll probably knock down my blue and white subway tiles to hang up olive green hyena footprints or something.

Whatever. I hope you love it, future homeowner.

Our process was:

• Rent a dumpster

• Put down floor protection (really cannot emphasize how critical this is — tiles get stuck into your shoes and will DESTROY your flooring)

• Knock off the tiles and carry them to the dumpster

• Still knocking off tiles

• Still carrying more tiles

• How are we not done yet?

• Why are there so many tiles?

• Take down the mirror

• Peel off the remaining (hilarious) wallpaper

• Discover that the mirror was hung over large, unfilled holes in the wall from an old medicine cabinet and soap dishes/toothbrush holders

• Remove the vanity

• Remove the tub and plumbing

• Pull up the flooring

• Remove the toilet

Step One: Prep

Protect. Your. Floor. if you’re carrying demo-ed materials through your house. It’s the best $30 you’ll spend. We used sticky plastic down the steps and thick parchment paper stuck on the floor with painter’s tape. Make sure your 8yo draws a winky smiley face on it to bring you good luck. This is a critical step.

Step Two: Kill the Old Tile

Demolition begins with knocking down tiles one at a time with a hammer and chisel, then moves on to the removal of furniture and appliances, then the ripping up of the floor. Do it slowly so you don’t damage anything (especially plumbing). If the wall is in good shape, avoid making holes that you’ll have to repair later.

Step Three: Remove the Large Items

Disconnect the plumbing and pull out the vanity. Discover more tiles. Cry briefly.

Step Four: Remove the Tub

After disconnecting the plumbing, we solicited neighbor help and lifted out this behemoth. The house has three full baths with a tub upstairs, so we didn’t need a tub here. We are converting to a shower stall. Unfortunately, the tub was chipping so it wasn’t really salvageable.

Step Five: Remove the Toilet

Again, disconnect the plumbing and remove the toilet. PLUG THE HOLE, PLUG THE HOLE, PLUG THE HOLE. That smell. Stick a towel in that the moment you pull it. I did not take a picture of this. (You’re welcome.)

Mini Step

Our ceiling was ok, so we added the guts for an awesome light and vent fan (done at this stage because it would help clear out smells from our work). We also removed the wall heater at this point. More on the heater later.

Step Six: Scrape the gunk off the wall until your fingers cramp into giant clams forever

Ok, maybe not forever, but we did include the kids in this process since it was so labor-intensive. Surface prep is critical. You want the tiles to adhere effectively and you want the paint to look smooth. Our oldest is 11 years old and a really dedicated worker and likes spending time with Hubs. Notice the ear protection, and of course his eyes are covered by his glasses. Hubs’ are on his head. (D’oh.)

Step Seven: Pull up the Flooring

We’re almost to a blank canvas! We knew this floor was lightly glued linoleum, because we’d laid it ourselves in a stopgap mini-renovation a few years before. But the top layer of subfloor had to come out, too, to ensure it was a flat and non-squeaky surface to tile.

This was a HUGE part of the process. It took a really long time, but this is one of the boring, unsexy steps that can take your bathroom from ‘oh you upgraded your bathroom’ to ‘I’m sorry, you did this yoUrSelVEs?’ Surface prep, can’t stress it enough. You can’t just put lipstick on a pig. All the tutorials that say ‘paint your XYZ with zero prep’ are just fast ways to hate what you’ve done a month later. Do it right or pay the price.

Demo done!

One the floor is out, we’re officially at the end of demolition in my book, because things (mostly) stopped LEAVING the room and started coming INTO the room.

Next step — see where we started with the actual construction.

how to renovate that bathroom yourself and not hate it afterwards

You might already know we documented the step-by-step renovation of our upstairs bathroom last year. This spring, we tackled the downstairs bathroom. The pink bathroom. Oye. Very glad to see this gone!

When we bought the house, it had wall-to-wall fuscia carpet in the entire first floor, which included this bathroom. That came out right away, and we replaced it with very cheap, quick linoleum which has remained for about 8 years. We also peeled down patterned wallpaper above chair-rail level to add some solid grey and replaced the light fixture. The dark shower curtain also helped tone down the color. A bit.

Here’s a good overview of the before issues:

• Pink.

• Vanity was too big and didn’t match the shelf (different shades of wood).

• Heater was old and difficult to clean.

• We have three full bathrooms, including a tub upstairs, so we didn’t need a second bathtub.

• The kids had pulled off the built-in towel rack so we were using a suction cup one.

• The toilet was too long and your knees bumped the shower when you sat down, even though it was a smaller, round toilet bowl.

• Did I mention it was pink?

The first hands-on step (after careful planning) in any construction project, DIY or otherwise, is demolition. Keep reading to see if we can demo a project (the right way) with two elementary schoolers, a toddler, and a dog in the house — plus a flight of stairs to the dumpster.

I was his mommy once.

Real mom. Biological mom. Birth mom.

Foster mom. Resource mom. Adoptive mom.

We put labels on people like me. Over the last eleven years, I have been a mother to eight children, but only three children live in my house with me at the present time. What does it mean to be “mom” temporarily? Or to share the title “mom” with someone else? It’s complicated.

Well-meaning foster care supervisors will often tell foster parents to let a child pick what they want to call you. “Mom” or “dad” can be a loaded term, after all; best to let the child do what feels safe. But while that’s fine for a second grader or a tenth grader, that doesn’t really fit the bill for a child living in your house from 33 hours old until 33 months old, hearing other children call you “mommy” the whole time.

I remember specifically the first time a child who was not destined to be with me forever called out for me by that precious name. “Mommy!” I remember because I burst into tears. I was keenly aware of all she (his first mom) was missing. How heart-wrenching that she didn’t get to witness his initial yell of “mommy” – and how strange that it wasn’t for her.

How was I so lucky to be the object of this child’s love? To be the bearer of his trust?

One of the best quotes I’ve heard related to foster or adoptive parenting comes from Jody Landers, the author of Love What Matters. She writes, “A child from another woman calls me mommy. The magnitude of that tragedy and the depth of that privilege are not lost on me.”

Being a mom is about more than praying for a child, helping with homework, wiping noses, bath time, laundry, meals, and kissing boo-boos. Those are the actions of motherhood, but to be Mommy is about heart. And that first mother’s heart has not failed in any case I’ve seen: not in the cases where a child has been reunited with a first mother, and not in the case where I have become forever mommy. Despite circumstances, despite overwhelming challenges, despite difficulties I cannot imagine—it has been a privilege to share being mommy with these women.

The mother of a special guy who was with us for quite a long time has brought him back to visit us several times. My heart is full to see their thriving family. She has always been his mommy, and I’m just Kelley now. But I was his mommy once, too.

book review: the four winds

Kristin Hannah is rapidly rising on my list of favorite authors. The Four Winds was another masterpiece, just like The Great Alone. (Although I still liked The Great Alone more and even though she wrote The Nightingale that I didn’t like.)

My sister-in-law (who is my primary book dealer) dropped it off without a dust jacket so I literally had NO idea what I was reading. I opened the book at 9:11 and thought, “Let’s see what this is about,” and the next time I looked up it was 12:04 am.

If you want more proof that her writing is compelling, the story itself is actually sad — even slow-moving at the beginning — but that’s not what you’re here for. It isn’t about action and a sweeping fast pace… it’s getting to know these characters. And there is MUCH character to be known.

Unmarriagely six-foot-tall Elsa gets pregnant and disowned by her family. The barely 18-yo (who marries her at 25 to “do the right thing”) means well, but it is his parents, particularly his mother, who are instrumental in shaping Elsa’s life. The book’s quick prologue comes back in a surprising way as a speech later in the book, a very lyrical glimpse into the life of women at a transformational point of history. The family farm is dead, the animals are literally dying, the topsoil is disappearing in horrifically electrical windstorms, no one can breathe, everyone is foreclosing, and there’s no way out. You can’t walk in the desert and you can’t get gas to drive without money, and you can’t get money without crops, water, food…

I learned that I knew very little of the Dust Bowl, with most of my reading of the 20s/30s centered on cities with mention of suffering farmers in the Midwest. Wow. I obviously need to read The Grapes of Wrath. The storms, the government’s lack of response, the shocking classism/regionalism/refugee-ism (you can’t say racism in this context so blend those pieces together and you’ll get my concept)… the pieces all work together to really make you feel for the family. I appreciated that, while the son is a plot device to make the reader sense death is always moments away, mother-daughter conflict is a central focus.

Learning to accept yourself instead of basing your self-image on other people’s opinions is strongly emphasized as well. There’s a great deal of self-discovery plus blossoming inner strength. The story is compelling and believable.

A few warnings: part of the protag’s self-image centers on her parents always telling her she’s weak and unattractive, so her relationships with men are focused on at certain points. There are (very mild) descriptions of a few sexual encounters.