Carney Hospital is in the Dorchester section of Boston. I first heard about Carney from Felicia, who was one of the first people I met when starting college. We had clicked immediately, like an instant couple. From the get-go Felicia called me Dougie, and I adored her.
Felicia was very smart, very pretty, and very Roman Catholic. I can still easily bring her Boston-accented voice to mind. Felicia was from Boston’s Roslindale neighborhood, and with the intention of becoming a nurse she was a volunteer at Carney. Back then the girls who volunteered were called “Candy Stripers” because of their distinctive uniforms. Felicia was gifted at learning languages, and she was reasonably fluent in Spanish, which made her especially useful as a volunteer.
At night we’d walk to a park near campus, sit on the swing sets, and talk. Felicia would joke about getting married to a handsome, rich doctor, and I’d say, “For now you’ll have to settle for me.” I had two roommates in my all-male dorm, but Felicia had a single room in her all-female dorm. After our evening walks we’d go to her room to do less talking. (The dorms went co-ed by senior year, when my roommates and I were living in an apartment.)
I heard a lot about Carney Hospital from Felicia. She was going to continue volunteering there during Christmas break, and I was hoping she’d return to campus with a photo of herself wearing her cute candy striper uniform. Felicia did return to Carney Hospital, but not as a volunteer.
During Christmas break I had an extremely bad experience with the abusive stepfather of my girlfriend back home. I couldn’t deal with him anymore, I walked out, and that was that. As I told her decades later, “Technically, I didn’t walk out on you, I walked out on your stepfather.” I convinced myself it was for the best, because I’d be seeing Felicia again. But Felicia didn’t return to campus.
At the start of second semester, freshman year, over the hallway PA I was told there was a call for me in the dorm mother’s office. (No room phones in those days and, yes, there was a “dorm mother.”) It was Felicia’s mother, who said she was pleased to speak with me, because Felicia had been talking about me non-stop since getting home. She wanted me to know, however, that Felicia was a patient at Carney Hospital.
Over Christmas, during a snowstorm Felicia had been in a serious car accident. She was lucky to be alive, and she would likely be in the hospital for months. I was devastated, and I started looking into getting to Boston to see her. Then I received a letter from Felicia, saying she had a long road to recovery ahead of her, her life was on hold, and whatever it was we had hoped to have together, it was no longer a realistic possibility. What was I going to do? For the second time in a month I decided to convince myself that letting go was “for the best.” There are movies with stories like this one.
A couple of years before retiring, I finally visited Carney Hospital. I thought of Felicia each time I was at Carney to do some work in the hospital’s data center. When I knew Felicia, Carney was an independent Catholic hospital. It later became part of the Caritas Christi Health Care system. When Caritas ran into financial trouble a private equity firm took it over, and created Steward Health Care. Steward is a customer of my former employer, in which I continue to hold a financial stake that is sizeable only on a personal basis.
That’s my very long introduction to this item from last night’s CBS Evening News, where you will see a brief view of Carney, which is now a nursing home.
Felicia did become a nurse. She left Boston proper and lives a couple of towns away. Instead of marrying a doctor, she married a state trooper.