My long history with Lutheran Hospital

As a Wheat Ridge native, I grew up with Lutheran Hospital. I remember masking up to visit my friend's father in quarantine for tuberculosis in a garret somewhere, the last TB patient, we were told. I remember when the administrator's house was moved to Dudley and have a vague memory of being told Dr. Friedrich was the grandfather of one of my classmates at Emmaus Lutheran School. Another classmate sold Denver Posts to patients going door to door, and I substituted for her when she was on vacation. I always thought of Lutheran Hospital as my church's hospital because so many men from my church served on the board. Herman Feucht, whose name is honored by a plaque in the chapel, was the bass in my Dad's barbershop quartet. Since we built a house in 1961 less than a mile away, the hospital was always a convenient reassurance.

When I grew up, I bought a house even closer to the hospital, and in 1988 gave birth to my daughter there. I had a knee replaced there and a benign tumor removed from my brain there. My husband spent many days there with ruptured disks in his back. And the two heart attacks. We assured the kids we didn't need to move to an old folks joint because the emergency room was less than 3 minutes away.

Now we're angry and have lots of questions and are in no mood to take surveys until I see information about why this hospital is being moved far away from us. Why close a 400-bed hospital and build a 200-bed hospital? What are the nuns (aka, SCL) going to do with the wonderful facility that has served us so well?