St. Jude Might Be The Happiest Hospital On EarthDecor Girl

My visit to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis was a humbling experience, eye opening and joyful all the the same time. Full of color, full of hope, full of life and full of smiles.No I’m not nuts, I wrote joyful and hospital in the same sentence. You know me, I’m not the fluff type either. If I don’t believe it, I don’t say it. This was an amazing place. No chemical hospital smells or cloud of doom hung overhead. St. Jude is a happy place.Photo courtesy of Brizo

This is not to say they sugar coated anything or dressed up the fact that St. Jude treats thousands of very sick children from pediatric AIDS to cancer, yes the “c” word. If you know someone who has a child with cancer, this is the place to be.

Important Facts about St. Jude

It costs $1.8 a day to run St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
St. Jude is privately funded by donations, your generous donation.
Last year they spent $28 million on drugs, why so low – they research and make the many of the drugs they need
No family ever pays St. Jude for anything.
On average, 7,800 active patients visit the hospital each year, most of whom are treated on an outpatient basis.
To date the St. Jude Dreamhome giveaway fundraiser has given away over 300 homes and raised over $262 million. All are build with volunteers & donations.

I was blown away by the simple fact that everyone from doctors, to staff, to volunteers, to patient families used the word cure, over and over again. St. Jude and their doctors put patient care at the top of their list and this means finding and working toward a cure, not viewing a patient as a dollar sign. To think when they started in 1962, the survival rate for a child diagnosed with cancer was very low. Today they have certain cancer survival rates upwards of 80% . Major wow! This happens though drive and determination, and cure being the goal.

Everything they do at St. Jude involves putting the patient and their family first. A doctor can admit a patient to the hospital, run all the necessary tests, conduct gene sequencing and have the treatment protocols ready to begin in days if not hours. No calls or endless paperwork begging some insurance company who views the patient as a statistic and callously determines their treatment.

At St. Jude, highly regarded doctors are in charge of patient care, not a desk jockey. Kinda like it should be everywhere, don’t ya think?

St. Jude is a happy place. Proof if you let people do their job and cut the political and profit-based bureaucracy, lives can be saved. Hmmm, this is an idea I can get behind. How about you?

Thank you for reading!

Our visit to St. Jude was part of the Blogger 19 program. As a participant in the Brizo Blogger 19 this post is written as a sponsored post in that Brizo provided our food, travel and entertainment related expenses for the Blogger 19 events. However, all content, ideas, and words are my own. Thanks for supporting these sponsors that allow us to create new and special content like this for Decor Girl Media.