ROCHESTER, MN — Mayo Clinic, 10 p.m. At her mother’s urging, a pale eighteen-year-old girl lies perfectly still on an exam table. Her heart condition is so severe and complex that she and her mother flew in from Tel Aviv for surgery.
At Mayo Clinic, Chabad A Steady Presence For Patients and Families
ROCHESTER, MN — Mayo Clinic, 10 p.m. At her mother’s urging, a pale eighteen-year-old girl lies perfectly still on an exam table. Her heart condition is so severe and complex that she and her mother flew in from Tel Aviv for surgery.
“I am so relieved you are here,” the mother, also pale with jet lag and worry, said in Hebrew to Rabbi Dovid Greene. Without the Rochester’s Chabad representative, her communication with the doctor would falter inside a language gap. The nuances of her concerns would be lost without accurate translation into English and into the special speech ways only a native Minnesotan like Rabbi Greene could know.
As Rabbi Greene helped the Israeli patient and the doctor understand each other, his wife Chanie was cooking meals for patients hungering for a home-cooked meal, the only kosher food in a city where the nearest kosher restaurant is 75 miles away.
Late as it was, being out at 10 p.m. wasn’t unusual for the Greenes. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of late nights. It’s been this way since they began as Chabad representatives serving the Jewish community of Rochester and the Jewish patients at the Mayo Clinic, because, according to Mayo Clinic neurologist Dr. Michael Silber, the Greenes “go to extreme lengths to help others.”
Harvard Medical School’s Family Health Guide describes emotional well-being and mental health as “major health issues in their own right. But they can also greatly affect physical health.” Researchers have correlated positive emotional states and better surgical outcomes, stronger immune systems. In this sense, the Greenes’ work can be said to augment the care provided to 250,000 patients at the Mayo Clinic each year.
“Rabbi Greene is warm, affable, a real treasure,” Jim Zane, a former clinic patient told Lubavitch.com. Still edgy from his struggle with a serious, life-threatening condition, Zane consented to a brief interview only because “Rabbi Greene made me feel loved, needed and wanted. He made me comfortable.”
