“Hi. You are off all week and will be paid under the WARN Act. If anything changes, you will be notified.”

It took just three sentences in a text message sent on Monday to advise a longtime Carney Hospital health care worker that – as of that morning – her services would no longer be needed. That’s the Steward way, apparently.

The woman on the receiving end of this cold-hearted communication doesn’t want her name used in the paper. Obviously, she’s sad for herself and her family. She doesn’t know what the WARN Act is or what it means for her bank account. She has no idea if she’ll get a severance package or back pay for the time off that she has accrued over 44 years.

Mostly, though, she’s worried about her neighbors and how they are already less safe because a mix of corporate robber barons and state bean-counters masquerading as public servants have decided to let this hospital wither and die.

“We feel like we’ve been on house arrest, because no one can tell you what’s going on— and nobody has told us we should move on, either,” she confided. “Nobody is telling us anything.”

Before she was summarily laid off via text, this longtime Dorchester resident played a key role in admitting patients to the intensive care unit – and tracking their progress or decline. But now there are no more admissions and the once full-floors that kept very sick people alive through the ravages of Covid have become ghost towns.

What will this mean come Sunday morning when tens of thousands of people in Dorchester and Mattapan wake up to what is suddenly a health care desert? What will it mean for the single mom on Old Morton Street with an asthmatic toddler facing an additional 30-minutes of scrambling during a breathing crisis?

What will it mean for the next stabbing victim on the platform at Ashmont or Shawmut or in Town Field? What about the 80-year-old diabetic from the Lower Mills Apartments who has been walking or taking the bus one stop to Carney for her weekly dialysis treatment?

How about the stroke or cardiac patients— like my own father, who made Carney his first stop when he was stricken by a heart attack several years ago?

The answer, for now, from the Healey administration and their lawyers: You’re out of time and out of luck, stuck in the wrong zip code in a part of the city that matters to them only when they happen to be on the ballot.

Someday soon— and many of us fear that we’re talking hours and days, not weeks or months – we’ll be publishing stories about tragedies that would have been prevented had the powers-that-be at the Commonwealth of Massachusetts arrived at a different conclusion.

Outcomes that would have been different if the governor and her team of advisors hadn’t allowed a far-off judge in a Houston courtroom to decide the fate of the Massachusetts health care system while deep-pocketed lawyers played a ruthless game of Texas Hold-Em with our hospitals and if power brokers in our own state hadn’t turned a blind eye and deaf ear to the many warnings of the life-and-death consequences of their indifference.

The Carney will close on Saturday. And, in some respects, it has already shuttered as, one-by-one, men and women who’ve devoted their lives to saving others get 14-word layoff notices sent to their phones, followed by the promise that “if anything changes, you will be notified.”

We won’t hold our breath. But we won’t forget this assault on our neighbors and loved ones, either.