Getting out of Bad Debt

As an urban explorer and lover of abandoned places, I have compiled a large list of places to visit on my google maps account. Some of the places that I have compiled during research have formed some what of a bucket list. A top three would include St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington D.C., that I covered in a previous blog, the Naval Air Warfare Center in New Jersey, and a hospital known in the urban exploring community as "Bad Debt" which is located in rural Georgia.

The hospital known as Bad Debt Hospital by the urban exploring community, but known by its real name of Hancock Memorial Hospital, by the town that it sits abandoned in. Built in 1968, the hospital included an emergency department and intensive care unit. The hospital is one story throughout. In two instances during its open years, the hospital had to close due to extraordinarily high debt. The first due to a county-wide scandal in the 1970s and a second that forced it to shut its doors permanently in 2001. The debt in 2001 was upwards of a million dollars. The initial reactions from explorers who first got a look in the facility after it was abandoned, could best be described as apocalyptic or frozen in time. When I was exploring the facility in 2022, I was shocked I didn't come across a dead body from the days when it was an open facility with how much was left behind. After the facility closed in 2001, heart attack mortality rates sky rocketed for the county as high as ninety percent, because the next closest medical facility was a near forty minute drive.

While learning about the downfall of the hospital system in this rural Georgia community, after the first scandal shut the hospital facility down; the town formed an alliance through the government to set aside funds to reopen the facility. The alliance then looked for a management firm to help run the facility and take control of the finances. The management firm came, fired, replaced, and stole funds from the alliance's set aside funding. When the management firm first came into the picture, they restructured the debts, fired two of the popular doctors, and laid off 40 staff members in an effort to save thousands of dollars. The management firm was also spending the money of the reserve fund set aside by the county which ultimately led to the hospital closing its doors as they now owed about 1.4 million dollars in reserve funds that the management company stole. In rural America, getting out of serious debt is quite difficult.

When I drove through the town to get to the abandoned hospital, I noticed more abandoned structures than actual people in the town. Exploring in the South is a bit weird. It reminds me of exploring in Washington D.C. because oddly enough, no one seems to bat an eye. Exploring in the North is a lot different. I drove past the county police station and the town police station en route to this property and parked my car at a drug rehab center right next to the facility. I explored this hospital the day after Christmas in 2022. My family was in Atlanta visiting my mom's college roommate's family and they were going out to Top Golf the next day, and I was like "well I am so close to this abandoned hospital that I have on my bucket list, can I go and see it". As soon as I got into the structure, the first thing I noticed was how overwhelmingly dark the facility was. Every window on the exterior is boarded up, except for the window where the entrance is. I use a Lume Cube panel light and was able to quickly illuminate the rooms. Walking through the facility, it was eerie. I really felt like the staff just up and left the building to never return. The lack of graffiti and vandalism also threw me off. Sure there were things scattered around, but I think that had to do more with the decay than actual vandals. When I first saw pictures of the place from friends, there was one room I wanted to see for myself. I wanted to see that operating room that is shown in the first photo. I did not take the time that I should have in the building as I was committed to finding that room. I figured I will be able to return to it in the future. I wish I would have spent some time reading through the files that were left behind or even "X-Ray hunting" which would have been looking for old x-rays in the file room.

The insane amount of old hospital records in this facility blew me away. In my day job, I am a social worker, and I am constantly fighting against social injustices. This social injustice of just leaving these hospital records behind blew me away. It reminded me of a time two of my friends and I explored an abandoned juvenile detention center and we came across a room that was just boxes of records from the facility, including the box of records about how the facility eventually closed.

(Imagine about ten rooms with nothing but hospital patient records, like this one shown).

I would walk past rooms of records that were stacked from the floor to the ceiling. It was mind boggling. This was before the protection of files through PHI and five years after the signing of HIPAA law. Facilities just do not care. When we initially explored the aforementioned juvenile detention center and discovered all those files and records, we reached out to the state of Pennsylvania to share our discovery and they basically told us "oh we don't care about that". In an effort to protect those kids, we had gone back on several occasions to remove files and shred/burn them. Anytime I am walking through an abandoned place and find sensitive information, I am the first to pick it up and take it home to shred. I couldn't believe what I was seeing in this hospital. Once I did locate the room I was looking for, I walked down towards the entrance of the facility and browsed the main entrance a little. I made sure to take some photos of the bulletin boards on the walls, folders that were for sign-ins, and a binder that read "Hancock Memorial Hospital" before I made my way to the exit.

(from left to right: bulletin board on the wall, a binder full of sign-in sheets, one of the nurse's stations, an old x-ray machine, and a patient's hospital bed)

Self Reflection:

I was recently talking to a family member who is finishing up his Master's of Nursing program at a local college about desensitization. In our line of work, in an emergency room, we see all sorts of unimaginable things happen to people and over time, I feel like we just get numb to the events and almost like they aren't even real anymore. I cautioned him and his girlfriend (who is a RN) during my dad's stay in the hospital, although we see people all the time in the hospital setting, it is different when it is someone you know and someone so close to you. With my dad, earlier that morning before I got the call about him being in the hospital, I had been working at my hospital and had been involved in the aftermath of a tough situation where I had been consoling a family after they lost a loved one. I never knew that morning that my life as I knew it would change forever. When I first got the call, I was in total shock and disbelief, but my dad's best friend Tom was on the other end of the phone telling me that my dad was stable and breathing on his own (being supported by the ventilator). During the time my dad was in the hospital, as much as I wanted to be by his side during his time there, I just couldn't. I couldn't bring myself emotionally to see him like that. For me, I felt like I almost didn't know the person I was seeing. I didn't recognize him. He was always full of joy, smiling, and laughing about something. I couldn't see him like that. I knew that my family wanted me to spend time with him, so I did spend some moments with him in his last days.

From working in the hospital though: working traumas and cardiac arrests, it's never anyone I know. It's people who I meet that day for the first time that we experience this shock with them and then we in a way pick up and move on. It is taxing on us who work there to see that day in and day out. It is tough both mentally and emotionally. It is different when it is someone you know. When I first got the news about my dad's friend Tom, I went to see him in the hospital. He passed before I arrived, but seeing him in that bed and spending time with him for the few minutes I did, just brought back the memories I had with him. I remember calling loved ones and sharing with them that Tom had passed and everyone we talked to was speechless. Some shared sentiments of "oh my god" and "this is bad". Looking back the timeline, it really is something eerie. Two friends in life and now in death, although they left us behind, we have each other and someday we will be WITH them again. In spending time with family and friends, hearing the stories of both of these father figures in my life, it really reminds me of how truly blessed I was to have both of them in my life.

(this photo of my dad and Tom was taken the night my mom and dad met for the first time)