I’m wondering if I can ask for a few names from our church to your prayer list: Nicolae, his daughter Laura and her family.

Laura is a lovely woman from Romania in our church. Her parents came from Romania to visit her for a few months after her second child was born. But the afternoon after the new baby was baptized, her father Nicolae began to have terrible neck pains. When he went to the hospital, they found he had major blockages in his arteries. They did emergency surgery, and though he was only given a 25% chance of surviving the surgery, he pulled through. However, he had a severe stroke while still in ICU, and is now totally paralyzed on his left side. He’s stable now, but disoriented, and needs a lot of care.

This situation has been really hard, of course, for his wife, his daughter and her family. But there’s an additional bureaucratic heart-breaker to this: the hospital is putting constant and heartless pressure on Laura to “have a plan” — meaning, take her father or put him in a nursing home, even though they haven’t got the money for either of those options. The hospital is, of course, just trying to manage their bottom line and free up the bed for another customer, but Nicolae’s situation as a non-citizen here on a visa doesn’t allow for any Medicare possibilities, and the hospital is being unbelievably harsh, accosting Laura or her mother whenever they come in. Hospital staff have even gone so far as to get a translator to ask her father “Wouldn’t you like to go home?” and when he says “Yes” (not knowing what they mean), they present Laura with that information in order to make her feel like she’s being obstructive. It’s really a terrible way to treat her and the whole family, and I’m at a loss to know what to do for her other than to pray.

So if you could, add Laura, her father Nicolae and her family to your prayers. (And by the way, if anyone out there knows of some help that’s out there for situations like this, please send me an e-mail.)

I’ll give updates on this. Thank you.