HSHS Sacred Heart Hospital in Eau Claire will officially close March 22, 2024.

“Can you drive me to the hospital?”

In the middle of the night on April 27, 2023, my husband jiggled my shoulder and asked for a ride. He was pretty sure this severe chest pain was not indigestion. I drove him from our Eastside Hill bungalow down deserted Clairmont Avenue to the Sacred Heart ER door.

Our old red Chevy Prizm knew the way. All I did was apply my lead foot and try to keep up a comforting chatter as we sped like an ambulance to HSHS Sacred Heart Hospital. His aorta was leaking right in the high-pressure area where the blood pumps out of the heart.

He was in a lot of pain as we waited for a graft to be helicoptered to the hospital. His vascular surgeon and the surgery assistant joined us as Father Amal, the hospital chaplain, led us in the prayers of two sacraments, Communion and the Anointing of the Sick.

This ER felt like a sacred space to me. A place where Father Klimek, a beloved past chaplain, had usually appeared right when patients needed him. As a past staff member and later a supervisor of nurse practitioner students at Sacred Heart, I had frequently seen how the presence of priests and nuns had made Sacred Heart not just a healing place but a home for patients, their families, and staff. Sometimes, it was a place of miracles. Here are two I heard about from the staff.

This ER felt like a sacred space to me. A place where Father Klimek, a beloved past chaplain, had usually appeared right when patients needed him.

Two friends of mine, Donald and John – one an ER nurse and one a CCU nurse at Sacred Heart – told me stories of Father Klimek. Though the incidents were years apart, in both stories Father Klimek went into the room of a patient whose heart had flatlined and prayed. Then, right after his visit, the staff found that the patient had a normal heart rhythm.

After I sat for hours in the family waiting room for twice the time that the surgeon told me to expect my husband to be in surgery, I started to pace. My husband had been a volunteer in a Sacred Heart family waiting room to comfort and help families. But it was very different to be the one who needed comfort. Another patient’s family member began to try to comfort me, but it wasn’t until my parish priest, Father Francis, came and straightened out a few things so that I could get reports on what was happening in the operating room that I was OK.

Not just the ER but the halls, the floors, and the chapel had the poignant aura of sacred space as my husband and I walked through the building last week after his last HSHS appointment with his vascular surgeon, expressing our appreciation to her. My husband’s face was covered with tears as he took pictures of the chapel, the framed pictures of the nuns, and the outside of this place that felt like home to so many people whose lives were changed there – by the birth of a baby, or the kindness of the hospice team, and everything in between.

Thank you, staff of Sacred Heart, St. Joe’s, and Prevea. Thank you for making these spaces a Home Sweet Hospital for the People of the Chippewa Valley. We love you!

Dr. Ann Recine is a local writer whose essays on the theme of home will be coming out this year, published by the University of Wisconsin Teaching Press-Green Bay. She has been a patient, a nurse, a UW clinical professor supervising students at HSHS, a department director, and a chaplain at HSHS.