A Donation Pays Tribute

In the last patient room as you pass the nurses' station, you can sit on the wide, comfy daybed by the window to watch and listen to the river of water slipping down the falls in the Healing Garden at Community Hospital. Having owned a retreat up in Strawberry, where he loved to hear the river rushing by, Bobby Clinton would have appreciated that, would have enjoyed the soothing sounds of water that would have made him feel at home.

His wife Gloria understood that, which is why she chose that particular room to be named for her husband through a donation that would enable her to pay tribute to the man she loved for nearly 47 years of marriage before losing him to cancer October 17, 2005.

Bobby knew about the room. In fact, the life?long residential developer was sitting on a daybed by a different window, enjoying the comforting sounds of construction that would result in that waterfall, when he and Gloria decided to break additional news to his radiation oncologist, Dr. Neal Glover.

"Dr. Glover was sitting by the bed, talking about WWII airplanes with Bobby as he often did," says Gloria, "when Bobby looked at me and said, 'Shall we tell him?' When we told him we were going to have a second one of these patient rooms named after him, his mouth just dropped open. It caught him completely off guard, and he had to go sit down. What tickled me the most was that my husband was able to see that."

The Clintons' decision to include Dr. Glover in their donation to the hospital and dedication of two patient rooms was a gesture of generosity laced with gratitude.

Shortly after Bobby's initial cancer surgery and follow?up treatment, he began having problems, which Gloria just knew didn't seem right. After weeks of inconclusive tests and observation, Gloria called Dr. Glover who, within four hours, had diagnosed and addressed blood clots.

"Bobby was diagnosed with cancer in January 2004," says Gloria, "and eventually had 17 months cancer free before he died. I have always felt, and Bobby also felt, that Dr. Glover gave him at least another year of life, of quality life. Dr. Glover always treated the whole body, not just the part that was ill, but the entire patient."

According to Gloria, it was Dr. Glover's vigilance and Bobby's special attachment to his physician that extended her husband's vitality. She and Bobby shared a pact that between them there could be no lies, and Dr. Glover became a part of that. In that this was a journey traveled by all three of them, the Clinton children have since convinced their mother to endow a third patient room to be named after her.

"If I can do anything for this hospital," she says, "I will."