I was visiting my father in the hospital one day when I heard a woman screaming. I went to see what was wrong and found a woman who was close to ninety years old. She was crying. She said, “I’m dying and I don’t want to die alone, please don’t leave me!” I stayed and [...]
I never heard of Huntington’s Disease until I met an tiny, elderly lady who had this horrible disease. It is a degenerative brain disorder that affects a person’s ability to walk, talk and think. Victims shake uncontrollably.
She was given a turkey for the holidays, but she didn’t have a stove. She really wanted to have a Christmas dinner, so she wrapped the turkey in foil and cooked it for twenty two hours on her space heater.
I received a call from Adult Protective Services in a neighboring county. “I know you don’t serve our county, but we have an elderly lady who is starving to death. There is no one else to take care of her. I’ll understand if you can’t help.”
In our first year at Friends for Life, we were asked to be the legal guardian for a man who had been found unconscious on a railroad track. He was living in a shed about the size of my office (which was pretty tiny).
I sent dozens of girls from a sorority at Baylor University to a nursing home one day to deliver stuffed animals to the ladies and balloons to the men. Later that day, I received a call from the social worker at the nursing home. She said, “Inez, I have to tell you something that happened after the girls left.”
About a month before our first Mother’s Day at Friends for Life, I got a call from a nursing home. Could we provide corsages for all the female residents? Well, I had no money and didn’t even know how to make a corsage.
I got a call one day from the activity director at a nursing home. She said, “There is a man here who is going to die, I think, if you can’t help him.”