An eight-feet-high foundation
May. 31, 2011—She would get the remodel she always wanted. That’s the positive spin Sandra Davis-Carter, program coordinator for the Human Simulation Center, tried to put on things following last year’s flood, which left her house nearly underwater. She now has proof of the power of positive thinking. In the last week of December 2010, she and...
Excited to go home every day
May. 31, 2011—Kia Churchwell felt lucky to have found a contractor who could start rebuilding her Shelby Park home so quickly. Unfortunately, her good luck turned to bad luck when she realized that the work was substandard and that her reconstructed home would not pass code. She, her husband and four children alternately moved between a Ramada...
Glassford gains arts in health care honor
May. 31, 2011—Donna Glassford, executive director of cultural enrichment at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, has been named a Distinguished Fellow of the Society for the Arts in Healthcare. The appointment recognizes longtime members who have made significant and influential contributions to the arts in healthcare field. Glassford joins 19 other fellows who were announced at the organization’s...
Back home with the angels
May. 31, 2011—Linda Stewart lived in a Madison residence hotel for two months and 10 days, after rising water forced her from her Old Hickory home. The situation was made more challenging by the fact that she was joined at the hotel by her four dogs: Kobe the peekapoo, Summer the poodle mix, Niki the Pomeranian, and...
Love and lessons
May. 31, 2011—For Slattery, the experience of the flood disaster last year unfolded in two ways: first was the total loss of the house, followed by the process of putting the house back right. That part, Slattery says, is now behind them. “We are absolutely done,” he says. The total reconstruction of the single-level home that took...
Floating on a river of uncertainty
May. 31, 2011—One year after Barbara McCafferty and her husband, Dave Paczko, were rescued from the chest-high waters filling their home, the couple is still swamped by the financial and emotional aftermath of Nashville’s historic floods. McCafferty, a post-op assessment nurse in Vanderbilt’s Digestive Disease clinic, said the one-story house near Percy Warner Park was inundated with...
Mary Teloh, overseer of History of Medicine room, retires after 38 years
May. 31, 2011—Mary Teloh, who worked for 38 years as a librarian at the Eskind Biomedical Library and its predecessor, the Medical Center Library, proudly shows off a crystal bowl she received at a retirement reception May 27. Teloh is known for her devotion to the history of medicine, and the history of VUMC, and was the...
Zoe without the zzzzzzzzzz’s: My storm-phobic dog creates sleep-deprived days—for me
May. 31, 2011—You know how advocates for pets are always citing figures showing that pet owners live longer? I am completely puzzled about how this could possibly be so. One example: one of the keys to a long and healthy life is getting enough sleep. I cannot recall a single occasion when a pet has helped me...
So many people did so much
May. 31, 2011—It was teamwork that helped Karl Boehme, Ph.D., and his family get through those chaotic first days after their Bellevue home took on three feet of water in last May’s historic flood. And it was teamwork that helped them get through the months-long rebuilding process. Family members, friends and co-workers in the Division of Pediatric...
Giving patients a hand
May. 31, 2011—The human hand has five digits, 27 bones, and a complicated system of nearly 80 tendons and muscles, and Peggy Haase and Skip Brown have spent the last 20 years caring for each and every one of them. Haase and Brown were the first occupational therapists at Vanderbilt University Medical Center to become certified hand...