Page 584 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
We Also Worked, You Know; Well, at Least Some of the Time
During our years at Church Lane South, Kathy’s hospital—and, there- fore, her job—expanded at quite a rate. At one point, Beth Israel acquired Kings Highway Hospital, where my father had admitted his patients and where my first major knee operation and one other major procedure took place, but that paled in significance when compared with the acqui- sition by Beth Israel of St. Luke’s–Roosevelt, itself the product of a merger. (You might recall St. Luke’s interfering with my sleep when I had been at Columbia). That merger/acquisition led to the merger of Kathy’s Legal Department with that of the other hospital and put her in charge of eight other attorneys. Beth Israel had previously acquired Doctor’s Hospital, which became Beth Israel North, where I left my right knee; acquired New York Eye and Ear; and was later to acquire, and much later still, to disgorge, Long Island College Hospital.
Given all of these acquisitions, Beth Israel put its many hospitals under the umbrella of a “hospital system,” which, after the expenditure of a ton of money to find a name, it dubbed “Continuum Health Part- ners.” Kathy, who always had a car to use, courtesy of her employer, rose from Senior Vice President to Executive Vice President, making her effectively the fourth-ranking officer in an organization that employed more that sixteen thousand people and entitling her to get a better car every three years. She was a big deal and very busy with high-level mat- ters (no more phone calls in which she was asked to okay the withdrawal of services so that a patient could die with some degree of dignity when all hope was lost).
At first, Kathy and I commuted together by train from Scarsdale, a very nice arrangement that came to an end when, at some point in the spring of 1998 after the St. Luke’s–Roosevelt merger, the executive offices of Continuum were moved from Fierman Hall (remember that?) to 555 West 57th Street (another palindrome!) on the extreme west side of Manhattan (11th Avenue). Getting there from Grand Central would
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