The Other Magic Kingdom

Bill Cushing

Walt Disney World. Universal Studios. Sea World. Church Street Station. And to the east, the Kennedy Space Center, and further east still, Daytona Beach. Whenever the name Orlando comes up, those are the places that come to mind whether one talks to a Floridian or a Slav, an American or a Kiwi.

But a half-century ago, the city that sits almost at the exact center point of the state of Florida was little more than a collection of small businesses and a few farms scattered between acres of marsh. Then came October 1965 when Walt Disney Studios paid over five million dollars to secure a deal with Orange County to purchase and develop 27,443 acres of swampland interrupted only by patches of pine scrub. With that sale, Central Florida witnessed a period of growth and development so exponential that area roads and highways couldn't accommodate the demands placed on them by the area's population until some major projects in the late 1980s.

Yet, for nearly a century, the principal medical facility for the area has been where it still sits about one mile south of the center of downtown Orlando. Now named Orlando Regional Medical Center, it began in 1920 as Orange Memorial Hospital.

We had returned to Florida from Puerto Rico after Ana discovered that cancer had returned to riddle her body with oncogenes. We joined some other couples from the area for care and treatment against the disease. The medical center had joined as an extension of Houston’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center a year earlier. The Orlando Cancer Center had operated for some time in conjunction with the initial Anderson center of Texas, which had the distinction of being one of the country's first health facilities to attain the federal government’s designation as a Comprehensive Cancer Center.

An approach the Anderson Orlando Center employed that many major medical facilities now use was a multidisciplinary combination of prevention, care, and treatment in an interesting, if confusing set up, made all the more impressive since this juggling act was being done in the years that the internet was a fledgling system known only by knowledgeable computer users and the military. Yet, while the Anderson Center might be called the centerpiece of research, one part of the facility still associated directly with the Orlando Regional Health Care System represented a last line of defense for people diagnosed with the most advanced stages of the disease. It resided within the confines of the hospital structure itself on the second floor, the southern wing of the Orlando Regional Medical Center.

Ana and I lived in section 2C for more than a month, entertaining guests, living our lives as best as we could, and learning exactly how the staff worked. Decorated in lighter shades of purple—almost lavender and mauve, 2C is staffed by registered nurses, doctors, aides, and auxiliary professionals.

These people—especially the nurses and aides—combined competence with compassion in both demeanor and performance. This even included the nurse with ironclad bedside manner who I labeled "Tugboat Annie" for her appearance as much as her behavior. Tugboat Annie was strange: squat, muscular, redheaded, in her late fifties. She said little to the patients outside of what seemed absolutely necessary, yet late one evening, I saw her feeding the fish in a large tank sitting against the wall to the right of the entrance of the floor's dining and lounge area.

Unaware of my presence, she sprinkled flakes over the surface of the water, and cooed and chatted with the tank's residents, asking them how they were that evening. She truly seemed to love those fish, and probably, in her own way, she cared as much for the patients on the wing as well. Perhaps she applied tough love to people to prevent her own pain, imposing the distance between herself and them.

The staff ranged in age from 19 to 60 and included people like Mary, a tall brunette with a well-chiseled face of angular beauty framed by a practical haircut. Her professional demeanor in attending to her job subtly reinforced the concern and consideration she held for her patients during her rounds. In fact, Mary made one feel that they were people, not part of a round.

However, few would argue that the wing’s best human resource at the time was Dee Dee.

“You're not going to hurt me, are you?” Ana asked when Dee Dee came in for one of the regularly scheduled blood samples ordered by Dr. Katta. “I’ve been pinched so many times.”

“Don’t you worry,” this nurse said in soft-spoken comfort. “I never miss a vein.”

And she didn’t. This was no easy feat. Ana had shed over 30 pounds by now, and her skin hung over her bones like a shawl.

Had Dee Dee Nemerovsky not decided upon a career in nursing, one could easily imagine her as a counselor or teacher or perhaps even a bartender were it not for her strict religious beliefs. With her honeyed hair pulled back and pinned up as she worked, she spoke to her patients in a softened Southern accent missing the commonly heard sharp twang that many have. This was because Dee Dee’s particular dialect blended her Midwestern roots with her current Southern status and sounded as sincere as it did hospitable. Sincerity was her standard, and she had the habit of stopping by the room even when a patient was not assigned to her that day, just to “check in and see if everything’s all right.”

Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Dee Dee moved to Orlando in her teens. She received her Bachelor of Science in nursing from the University of Central Florida. Her choice of study was a decision she had made years before when she lost a step-grandmother to leukemia. She spent years after that incident “angry at the whole medical field” because nothing could be done to save the woman.

She seemed to be the floor’s human relations expert and was frequently called in to soothe ruffled or agitated patients. In addition, she was a technological wizard, consulted when equipment, whether it was something as simple as an implanted catheter or as complex as an uncooperative microwave oven, gave trouble to a patient, a visitor, or another staff member. Apparently, she knew hardware as well as she knew human nature.

Later on, her grandfather suffered from cancer in which, according to Dee Dee, everything that could happen to him, did.

Yet throughout the ordeal, she recalls how he retained a sweetness and humanity that outshone all of the hardware and implants he was subjected to. Although he became, by all outward appearances, nothing more than ‘a specimen of modern technology,” Dee Dee maintained that “his was a heart of pure, priceless gold.”

Once officially a nurse, there was little question which area of the medical profession she wanted to work. According to her own personal standards, she wanted “to give all the love to patients that those nurses couldn’t give to my grandfather—not only with my mind and hands but also with my heart and soul.”

That attitude demonstrated the direction cancer care moved, especially in the numerous oncological wards of the United States such as the one at Orlando Regional Medical Center. By the time many of the patients have been assigned to such a ward, they were—much like Ana was—facing the terminal aspects of the disease.

“Sometimes I think they should be angry," Dee Dee noted of the majority of her patients, people she helped to find some peace as they prepared for the inevitable. That attitude reflects how she viewed the treatment of cancer as an active and aggressive treatment that must be done, but done without her former belligerence toward the disease and the people treating those with it.

“I knew I was always drawn to where there was the saddest outcome,” she explained. “As long as there’s a will, and as long as the patient wants to live, I help them to keep fighting.”

It isn’t magic, but sometimes it works.

Bill Cushing lived in numerous states, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico before moving to California where he now resides with his wife and their son. As an undergrad at UCF, he was called the “blue collar” writer because of his time in the Navy and as a shipyard electrician. Earning an MFA, he retired in 2020 after teaching college for 23 years. His prose has appeared in print and online. Bill has three poetry books available, most recently . . .this just in. . .  from Cyberwit. Bill’s current project is a memoir focused on his years aboard ships.