Eight Feet Deep

It’s amaz­ing how a trip back to Beau­mont from Hous­ton, all of 90 miles or so, wears me out. Or maybe it was all the sit­ting around I did at the DeBakey Vet­er­ans Affairs Hos­pi­tal this morn­ing in Hous­ton? Or maybe com­bine all that with the 15 min­utes I spent find­ing a place to park at the VA hospital?

Well, one thing about it, you could never mis­take going to the VA hos­pi­tal with fun.

I would have never known that they added 160 park­ing spaces in Feb­ru­ary at the DeBakey hos­pi­tal. But that’s what their press release says.

“We know park­ing at the DeBakey VA is a seri­ous con­cern for Vet­er­ans seek­ing health care,” said Adam C. Wal­mus, the hospital’s direc­tor. “The cur­rent sit­u­a­tion is unac­cept­able and we are tak­ing imme­di­ate action to alle­vi­ate the problem.”

I tell you what Mr. Direc­tor, I don’t think the 160 extra spaces were a drop in the bucket at least when it came to my dri­ving around try­ing to find a spot this morn­ing and finally park­ing more or less per­pen­dic­u­lar to the VA Regional Office which is a lot closer to Hol­combe Avenue than is the hos­pi­tal. What I am say­ing is it was a good hike. Great for some­one whose major prob­lems include feet pain from walk­ing for extended peri­ods of time. In other words, the sit­u­a­tion is still unacceptable.

Now I am sure the hos­pi­tal folks would say: “But we have free valet park­ing.” True but one would spend as much time wait­ing to pull your car up to the hos­pi­tal entrance, not to men­tion the wait­ing time for your car to be retrieved, as it takes to park your vehi­cle out in that mess that’s known as vis­i­tor parking.

The VA plans to increase park­ing spaces by the sum­mer by 500. But that and the spotty enforce­ment seems like plug­ging up a hole in a boat made of Swiss cheese. One of the main prob­lems cited by the Hous­ton VA is that, since park­ing is free for vis­i­tors, this has led to jack­ing spaces by those who work else­where in the Texas Med­ical Cen­ter. Those employ­ees sim­ply park and hop on a bus or ride a bike over to the other hos­pi­tals. The VA has had its police check­ing to see if some of those cars actu­ally belong there but that just seems fruitless.

My solu­tion is to shoot these scofflaws who steal park­ing spaces from America’s vet­er­ans! I guess that’s a lit­tle harsh but I don’t even know if the total 1,200 spaces they hope to add at DeBakey when they build by 2016 some kind of struc­ture over one of the exist­ing park­ing lots will do much good.

There must be some kind of solu­tion to the prob­lem other than merely reshuf­fle the exist­ing spaces. The task is pro­vid­ing park­ing, not brain surgery. I real­ize that is an over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, espe­cially since the gov­ern­ment is involved. You add the frus­tra­tion that you get try­ing to park with the frus­tra­tion you have sit­ting around for hours on end wait­ing on appoint­ments plus the frus­tra­tion when you have to deal on occa­sion with one of the asses who needs to be work­ing in some­thing other than in con­tact with the pub­lic and you got your­self a real s**t storm. Seri­ously, it is sur­pris­ing you don’t hear about more vio­lent episodes than you do at the nation’s VA hos­pi­tals. It’s not just Houston’s.

It seems like if the Depart­ment of Vet­er­ans Affairs are seri­ous about want­ing to pro­vide the best care pos­si­ble, they could start when you park your car. The approach that is being taken is just too lit­tle too late.