My Memories of Long ISland College Hospital

From Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Now that LICH is closed, regardless of when or in what form it will eventually reopen, it’s time to reflect on the past.

I first heard of it when I moved from my basement apartment in a two-family house in the Bronx to an Art Deco apartment house in Midwood, Brooklyn. At the time, I was suffering from serious asthma. That was why I moved out of the two-family house – my place was next to an open boiler, and I believed it was exacerbating my condition.

Once in Brooklyn, I started to look around for a new doctor. My previous doctor was a well-known pulmonary specialist at a prestigious Bronx hospital, but it was clear he was doing nothing for me – I was still going to the emergency room frequently and wheezing and getting out of breath constantly. I decided to try an allergist, and found an allergy practice in Brooklyn Heights. I knew very little about the Heights at the time, but I reasoned that it was about halfway between my new home and my job in Midtown Manhattan. The doctor was affiliated with what was for me a new hospital – Long Island College Hospital.

For the first time since childhood, I found myself taking allergy injections on a regular basis. No offense, but these allergists didn’t really help my condition, and I was actually admitted to the hospital a few times. After changing jobs to what is now the Brooklyn Eagle, my health plan changed and I had to find another doctor. My new doctor was also a LICH-affiliated physician with an office in the Heights. He stopped the injections, and put me on the road to recovery, a road that improved as new medications were added to my regimen. Even though I soon got married and moved to Manhattan, I kept my Brooklyn doctor for a few years.

Along the way, I had two operations at LICH. The first was to take out nasal polyps. My doctor exclaimed that they were growing at such a rate that they not only endangered my breathing, they would push into my brain area. The operation was a success. The second operation was also a success, but the aftermath was extremely painful.

There was also the time that I was taken to the LICH emergency room from the Eagle’s old office on 30 Henry St. after I attempted to open a Snapple bottle, only to have the bottle break and cause a wide gash in my wrist. The Eagle’s production manager at the time filmed the whole thing with his digital camera and suggested that I sue Snapple. I did, but my lawyer gave up after Snapple kept insisting on more and more documentation.

Even before LICH’s recent financial crisis, we wrote stories about the hospital. I once wrote a feature on the Lamm Institute, a division that provided services to developmentally disabled children. The building has since been sold. I also interviewed a new high-powered chef at LICH whose goal it was to bring gourmet food to the hospital cafeteria. Sadly, it couldn’t last. On a third occasion, I interviewed a group of doctors who were introducing a new machine to detect osteoporosis. They tried it out on me, and to shock, it turned out that I had a mild case of the disease. They told me that years of taking asthma-related steroids had taken their toll.

At any rate, these are some of my memories of LICH.