When Morgan Trosper shared a selfie on July 9, she didn’t know she was in the midst of a medical crisis.
The Louisville 17-year-old just felt funny and decided to tell her friends. “My body is doing something weird,” she typed. “My fingers, toes and tongue have started going numb.”
Initially, she wasn’t that alarmed. “You know how when your leg goes to sleep? That’s how it felt.”
But over the next several days, a crippling weakness began to progressively paralyze her limbs.
After being hospitalized with COVID-19 for 49 days, Tansy Rawls missed her own bed, her two dogs and food that didn’t come out of a hospital cafeteria.
So she initially resisted a transfer to Methodist Rehabilitation Center in Jackson.
“I did not want to go. I felt like it was time to go home,” said the 55-year-old Jackson resident. “But they convinced me. And it was the best thing, because I couldn’t do anything but stand up, really.”
Methodist Rehabilitation Center has announced Clinical and Support Service Employees of the Quarter for its Jackson hospital and external campuses.
For the third quarter of 2020, the honorees include Pam Everett of Terry, a registered nurse at MRC’s main campus; Martha Davis of Madison, a financial counselor at MRC’s main campus; Rachel Cooley of Madison, a physical therapist at Methodist Outpatient Therapy in Ridgeland; and Susan Mitchell of Terry, a billing coordinator at Methodist Orthotics & Prosthetics in Flowood.
Methodist Rehabilitation Center’s gift shop may have closed, but the gifting continues.
Former gift shop manager Terri McKie recently donated nine bulging bags of stuffed animals from the store to Children’s of Mississippi at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson.
Located on the UMMC campus, Methodist Rehab is a next-door neighbor to Batson Children’s Hospital. So McKie said it was only fitting that Mississippi’s premier hospital for children be the chosen beneficiary of the shop’s cuddliest stock.
Alone, paralyzed and unable to utter a word.
Dezron Wesley of Brookhaven awoke to that reality after a third stroke sent him to a Jackson hospital on April 8.
Because of COVID-19, his wife, LaTonya Wesley, couldn’t be by his side during the hospitalization.
And the 48-year-old said it was frightening to be isolated and incommunicado. “I was at someone’s mercy,” he said.
“He told me how scary it was to wake up and not be able to talk or say what he needed,” said Taylor Miller, his speech therapist while at Methodist Rehabilitation Center in Jackson.
It’s not how Gray Spencer expected to spend his 22nd birthday—heading home to New Albany after three weeks at Methodist Rehabilitation Center in Jackson.
But on April 22, he was just happy to have overcome a traumatic brain injury in the middle of a pandemic.
“I’m just really thankful,” Spencer said. “I’m blessed to have had good therapists. Without them, I definitely wouldn’t be where I am today.”
Right now, he’s on a trajectory to return to college and his job as manager for the Ole Miss basketball team.
Most days, the staff at Methodist Orthotics & Prosthetics in Flowood focuses on building prosthetic limbs and orthopedic braces.
Now, they’re also creating personal protective gear for workers on the frontlines of the COVID-19 crisis.
It all started when Mark Adams, the CEO of Methodist Rehabilitation Center in Jackson, saw a YouTube video about a New York City hospital using 3-D printing to fashion desperately needed face shields.
Matt Dubuisson thought he was going to die.
The Pass Christian 60-year-old had fallen some 25 feet from a tree stand. And when he hit the ground, he “felt and heard” bones breaking.
“I knew it was bad when I reached and felt my legs and couldn’t feel anything,” he said.
The impact fractured 12 ribs, his sternum and broke his back in three places. One vertebra shattered “like a brick that had been thrown against concrete.”
“After my CAT scan, they said my chance of walking again was not good,” he said.
While studying to be a physical therapist at the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s School of Health-Related Professions, Annie Campbell heard nothing but good things about Methodist Rehabilitation Center’s student program.
“I heard over and over again that it was such a great clinical experience,” Campbell said.
So she says she jumped at the chance to enroll. And now, after 12 weeks working with and learning from the staff of MRC’s spinal cord injury program, she says it’s more than lived up to the hype.
Trey Carroll didn’t expect “recover from a stroke” to be on his to-do list before turning 30.
“I worked out all the time, I ate really clean and I don’t think I was that stressed out,” the Madison resident said. “I thought of myself as a healthy person, with a strong heart and low blood pressure.”