Memorial Bench Symbol of Trauma and Joy at Shaken Hospital

It’s funny what bothers people most in a crisis. What bothered Carol Jellison after the Northridge quake hit the Sepulveda VA hospital was the sight of a small concrete bench overturned in a patch of roses.

To put that in perspective, you have to understand what the quake did to the stately, red-brick federal hospital complex where Jellison, a friendly, diminutive woman with steel-gray hair, has worked for 15 years.

The damage was massive, its effects terrifying. In the central hospital, nurses used hand-pumped ventilator bags to keep several patients alive because there was no electricity. Water poured from shattered pipes, turning hallways into sluiceways. Operating rooms were wrecked.

Braving aftershocks that swayed the six-story building as if it was rubber, employees half-dragged bedridden patients down a dark stairwell as they clung desperately to mattresses. By the end of the day, 331 veterans had been evacuated to other VA facilities.

For a time afterward, some employees worked in tents in the chill winter weather. Others doubled or tripled up in undamaged offices. Even at other VA hospitals, many thought the Sepulveda complex had been destroyed, though its 22 buildings remained standing.

But amid the destruction and dislocation, Jellison, Sepulveda’s assistant personnel chief, zeroed in on that bench.

Why? The bench was installed as a memorial to Diana L. Johnson, a personnel clerk who had been friends with Jellison. At age 39, Johnson died of lung cancer. Jellison remembers her as a quiet, unobtrusive woman who lived with her mother and always smiled no matter how much work was dropped on her.

When Jellison saw the bench, knocked over by the quake, it hit her harder, in some difficult-to-explain way, than all the other wreckage around her. She wanted it fixed, and fast.

“The bench made me cry,” she said. “It’s humanity. It’s what keeps you connected. . . . It recalled all the things we had been through together.”

These are emotional times at the Sepulveda VA. Many of its 1,800 employees have worked there for years, even decades, and they are deeply attached to their co-workers, patients and Sepulveda’s serene, college-like environs.

VA hospitals have a lousy reputation, and there are veterans at Sepulveda who will give you an earful about its shortcomings. But Sepulveda employees, many of whom are vets themselves, often speak of their patients as if they were family. Some vets even allow that the hospital isn’t all that bad; hell, sometimes it’s pretty good.

Many Sepulveda employees worked heroically to get the institution up and running again. A number of its pre-quake clinics are open again, including those for kidney dialysis, spinal cord injuries and methadone treatment. There are new urgent-care and women’s health centers.

But the quake and its ensuing dislocations changed Sepulveda, in ways as obvious as a cracked wall and as subtle as a nurse pausing to catch his breath.

Quake damage closed the central hospital, Building 3; the VA is replacing it with a $65-million outpatient center. Meanwhile, more than 500 Sepulveda workers were transferred to the big West Los Angeles VA hospital and other facilities to care for evacuated patients.

Predictably, many veterans were angered at losing in-patient services at Sepulveda. And many employees shared those feelings.

After Building 3 was shuttered, employees gathered outside for an impromptu “memorial service.” A nurse laughingly told how she had “trained” a doctor in his first days on the job. A man said he’d worked in the building for 30 years.

Many workers are upset at being uprooted to West L. A., 15 miles away over the often congested San Diego Freeway. They don’t like working in a much bigger hospital where they have no friends and don’t know the ropes.

Dollie Whitehead, Sepulveda’s assistant director, recalled seeing some doctors and nurses picnicking on a lawn one day. They were Sepulveda employees who had been transferred to West L. A. and wanted to see each other again--on their day off.

“This was how they were dealing with the grief and trauma,” she said.

With Building 3 closed, the plan called for Sepulveda patients who needed hospitalization to be sent by ambulance to West L. A.

But some Sepulveda doctors don’t like that. In the past, they only had to take their patients over to Building 3 and admit them. Now they have to turn them over to another doctor at a different site.

“That interrupts the continuity of care. I don’t think it’s the best model,” said Dr. Dennis Cope, who heads Sepulveda’s managed-care program.

As a result, Sepulveda doctors are admitting their sickest patients to nearby Granada Hills Community Hospital and Olive View. But that, of course, costs the government more money.

Despite everything, though, Sepulveda slowly rebuilds. Its 120-bed nursing home is still closed, but renovations are under way. Except for a few nooks and crannies, the whole complex has heat and hot water again.

And, thanks to Carol Jellison’s request, Diana Johnson’s bench is upright again. Jellison saw it when she came in to work about three weeks ago.

“I was all by myself and I remember saying out loud, ‘The bench is fixed!’ ”

“I was just so happy.”