Sue Davis was so thrilled with the care her husband, Freddy, received at Southlake it prompted her to donate. Among the items on her ‘wish list’ is a children’s playroom.
Health
January 29, 2008 04:38 PM
beingwell magazine Winter 2008
By: Lindsay Kyte
Everyone loved Freddy Davis. Not only was he adored by his wife, Sue, and his daughters, he so enchanted nurses at the Southlake Regional Health Centre that they spent their rare breaks chatting in his room, joking and making sure he looked “just so”.
It was the staff’s special touches that eased Mrs. Davis’ pain of losing Freddy to a combination of Parkinson’s, dementia and cancer.
“Freddy had a team of about six nurses and they were all beautiful,” she says. “Each one did something different.
Mr Davis woke up every morning at about 2:30 all his life to work at the Ontario food
terminal. In his dementia, he worried on stormy nights about driving and about his trucks on the road.
“One night, about 10, one of the staff called me to calm him down. She said, ‘Can you talk to Freddy? He’s very worried about the storm.’ I just thought that was incredible of her to take the time.”
Mrs. Davis simply can’t say enough about the nurses: “Another nurse joked with him all the time. I got there one day and the staff told me that she was giving him a bath. So I went down the hall and there was her jacket out in the hall and Freddy’s clothes. So I cracked the door open just a little and
I said, ‘Would you like me to bring you some wine?’”
While the nurses never failed to notice any little comfort they could bring, Mrs. Davis, in turn, noticed how busy the staff often were. “The staff are running constantly. But they still treated my husband like he was the only one on the floor.”
With this in mind, Mrs. Davis, a breast cancer survivor herself, decided to donate to help build Southlake’s regional cancer program. She has a specific plan of recommendations for improvements that would support both staff and patients.
“I would love to see one or two rooms where family members can stay there overnight when patients are in their final stages. What they did for us was pull in a gurney so that my daughter could sleep next to Freddy. My sister and I slept in chairs because there’s nowhere else. I’d also love to see a nice homey family room.”
Also on her “wish list” is a children’s playroom.
She recalls, “There was a little girl whose mom was obviously dying and she had to sit on the floor in her mom’s room and play with her little games because there’s nothing set up.”
But, she adds, if she only had three wishes, she would want “as much support for nurses as
possible.
“The nurses don’t stop running.”
Mrs. Davis, who worked in retail for the last 25 years and now spends her days gardening, reading and listening to music, as well as doting on her daughters and grandchildren, says if she had one message to tell potential future donors, it would be this: “If they have $10 or $10,000 or $100,000 to give, anything would make a difference to support the staff who do such an incredible job.”
She wants everyone to know how wonderful a hospital Southlake is.
“You can hear pretty negative stories about hospitals sometimes. But we were treated so well from beginning to end that I couldn’t not want to help. The nurses took care of Freddy like he was their own father or grandfather.”
Now Mrs. Davis wants to make a similar difference in the lives of people who daily dole out doses of both medicine and comfort.