Peggy Wilkins ought to have a broken heart. Over the past few years, she has been hospitalized at Saint Francis a dozen times or so. Peggy isn't really sure about the number of admissions.

She stopped counting. There has been bypass surgery - twice - and myriad cardiac procedures and programs: angiograms and angioplasty and rehabilitation. But because of her complex medical condition, including underlying heart disease, Peggy Wilkins has neither been cured nor restored to physical health.

“The plumbing solutions do not work for me,” she says simply.

Despite the fact that a cure has eluded her, Peggy has been healed at Saint Francis. And that, she says, is why she is far from broken-hearted. “It is important as you go through life to fully appreciate the fact that a cure is not a healing,” she muses. “It isn't. A cure is a description of a medical outcome. It's very difficult for patients to hear that a surgical intervention doesn't always work.”

Peggy Wilkins believes both medical providers and patients ought to understand the distinction between curing and healing. In fact, she is so passionate about the matter that in November 1998, the West Hartford resident wrote to Dr. David D'Eramo, president and CEO of Saint Francis, to tell him about her experiences during her multiple hospitalizations at the Hospital.

“Fortunately for me, one can be healed without a cure,” she explained in the four-page letter that took her several months to write. “The story of my personal healing was the result of an atmosphere where employees (including volunteers) are sensitive to spiritual issues that occur when body, mind and soul are broken. My hospitalizations became spiritual journeys that have helped me see my journey as a time of faith and renewal.”

For Peggy Wilkins, that trip has been a long and difficult one. In June 1997, a massive heart attack sent her to the Emergency/Trauma Center at Saint Francis. It was hardly the place she expected to find herself just two days before her daughter Elizabeth's wedding. Peggy vividly recalls the scene and her shocked realization that all of her good intentions, resolve and efforts could not change the reality of the situation. Crying, she kept saying to her family,

 “I tried to make it until Monday.” But she was in fact stricken and utterly debilitated. Finally, she gave in: “Lying in the ER, I said to myself, 'Well, Peggy, this is a defining moment. And this is the point at which you now have to take heart disease seriously.'”

Remembering how vulnerable she and her family felt during that admission and her subsequent hospitalizations, Peggy maintains that the caring and humanity of Saint Francis people have been instrumental in her healing.

“The staff at Saint Francis, from parking attendants to medical personnel, have helped me with the perpetual journey towards health of the body, mind and spirit,” she says. “Someone does a kindness when you are in such need and you never forget it.”

She recalls her daughter's wedding day in particular. One of the nursing assistants taped white sheets to the floor near the hospital bed where Peggy lay and draped the doorways in white fabric. There were dozens of floral bouquets decorating her room. Someone softly sang “Here Comes the Bride” when the bride and groom arrived to exchange their vows in Peggy's presence.

“My daughter is proud that her wedding certificate lists the place of wedding as Saint Francis Hospital and Grace Church, Hartford,” she says with a smile and a nod.

Peggy Wilkins, in fact, smiles quite a bit. She smiles about the teddy bear her family took to the hospital, which she propped behind her head for support following angioplasty. Calling her sessions “Peggy's Adventures in Rehab,” she shakes her head and smiles at the memory of being briskly outpaced in cardiac rehabilitation by a woman a quarter-century her elder. And she smiles about the night of her daughter's wedding reception, when Peggy waited in bed at Saint Francis for the surgical procedure scheduled for the next day.

What cheer could there be in such dismal circumstances? It was the way that her nurse, Joan Wadsworth, came into the room, sat down and talked about the scheduled procedure “with a quietness about her that was wonderful,” remembers Peggy. “It reminded me of how my grandparents would visit on the Sabbath.”

And it was, Peggy also remembers, the way Joan listened to her closely and compassionately while she spoke of the denial that had kept her from reporting the heart attack she'd had 18 months earlier. “She did not tell me to cheer up. She made no judgments about how I felt,” Peggy recounts. Their quiet conversation about the upcoming procedure and its possible outcomes, as well as about Peggy's own fears and regrets, helped her remain calm. “I slept peacefully that night,” she says.

Those demonstrations of genuine, person-to-person concern for Peggy and her family are part of a larger story she tells about the kindness she has experienced at Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center. There was the parking garage attendant who greeted her with a smile when she left after her regularly scheduled cardiac rehabilitation session and cheerily told her, “See you on Wednesday!” And the cardiac intensive care unit nurse who changed her shift to be with Peggy when she came out of the operating room. And the nurse who, hearing that Peggy is a Monday Night Football fan, stopped by to talk sports. And the volunteer who kept the Wilkins family supplied both with coffee and with information. All have been among the Saint Francis people who “treat patients not as numbers or diagnoses, but as people you smile at and say hello to and share jokes with,” according to Peggy. “That's what happened to me.

“I realized that I had been spiritually deepened by the people I ran into, who were saying - by responding to me and smiling - 'There are other things in the world besides being sick. Your body might be sick, but you're still good for a lot of other stuff.' And I needed to know that, because I was really facing the fact that I had not been cured.”

Her journey through illness has been of the utmost importance to Peggy, who talks in a thoughtful, reflective way about spirituality and her interior life. She believes Saint Francis, with a century of history as a Catholic hospital always evolving to meet its patients' needs, has a climate that honors the role of spirit in curing and in healing. “Here's a place where you can be cared for and, if you wish to talk about the spiritual ramifications of it, you may do so,” Peggy explains. “I could talk about, spiritually, what it means to be ill.”

And what has her experience with Saint Francis done for Peggy Wilkins? It has given her a gift of time, she says, and a sweet sense of the importance of living in the moment. Sitting in a sunny spot in the West Hartford home she shares with her husband, Tom, she speaks about her life with joy and confidence.

“I was so lucky that I had the support of the hospital for the time that I did,” Peggy says. “And Saint Francis is still there. We're going to knock on wood that I don't have to go in too soon in the future.”

Then Peggy Wilkins smiles again, like someone who knows a secret - and perhaps she does. It has something to do with the wonder of being very much alive in every respect.

“Fortunately for me, one can be healed without a cure...”

She recalls her daughter's wedding day in particular. One of the nursing assistants taped white sheets to the floor near the hospital bed where Peggy lay and draped the doorways in white fabric. There were dozens of floral bouquets decorating her room. Someone softly sang “Here Comes the Bride” when the bride and groom arrived to exchange their vows in Peggy's presence.

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