When you call customer service, you never know who that voice on the other end of the line could be.
It might be someone as cordial and devoted to helping as 27-year-old LaBrittany Knight of Indianola.
She works from home, answering calls for Whirlpool’s warranty services department from her wheelchair. Knight was born with cerebral palsy, a group of disorders that affect a person's ability to move and maintain balance and posture.
Nov. 24 was the most thankful Thanksgiving ever for the family of Picayune’s Gavin Miller.
Just a week before, a hit-and-run driver crashed into the 17-year-old as he was walking to a school bus stop.
A resulting head injury left his mother, Hesper Miller, worrying: “Is he going to be like himself afterwards?”
“He’d wake up, and it would just be a blank stare,” she said. “Thanksgiving day was his first good day. He was awake and alert and I said: ‘There he is, that’s my kid.’ He was making little jokes, and I was so happy.”
“You do what you have to do.”
That’s the attitude J. Carmen Arevalo took when he was told his leg needed to be amputated after it was crushed in an on-the-job accident.
And it’s the mantra he adhered to as he learned to walk again with an above-the-knee prosthesis from Methodist Orthotics & Prosthetics in Flowood. And one he repeated as he continued to amaze his caregivers at Methodist Outpatient Therapy.
“I’ve seen very few people at any age with his type of injury do what he can do,” said his physical therapist Karen Klein.
On Oct. 24, Jody Jones of Flora added irony to injury.
While trying to remove an unsafe tree stand, he fell 22 feet to the ground.
The impact crushed his right heel and fractured his right femur, pelvis and some vertebra in his spine.
Still, Jones feels fortunate. “I don’t know how I landed like I did. I should have landed flat on my back or head,” he said. “The Lord was watching out for me is all I can say.”
On Aug. 16, doctors doubted Undray Love of Houlka could survive a brain-injuring ATV crash.
“They initially told me he would not make it through the night,” said his wife, Chastity. “They never gave us much hope, really. While we were in critical care, every day, every minute was life or death.”
Love ultimately endured brain surgery, a 32-day coma, a lung collapse and a serious infection. But he began an unbelievable turnaround after arriving at Methodist Rehabilitation Center on Oct. 1.
A Code Blue used to send Dr. Michael Montesi running to help a patient in distress.
But on July 26, the alarm brought people dashing to save his life.
“I don’t remember any of it,” he said. “They found me on the floor face down, and then I went into respiratory arrest. They called the code because I had stopped breathing, and they didn’t know if my heart had stopped.”
Like many of the patients he treated at Bolivar Medical Center in Cleveland, Montesi had been stricken with COVID-19. By the next day, he was headed by plane to Baptist Medical Center in Jackson.
Methodist Rehabilitation Center has announced Clinical and Support Service Employees of the Quarter for its Jackson hospital and external campuses.
For the fourth quarter of 2020, the honorees include Aubrey Seay of Memphis, the north Mississippi nurse liaison for MRC; Martha Gail Powell of Jackson, an environmental services technician at MRC’s main campus; LaQuana Davis of Canton, a respiratory therapist at Methodist Specialty Care Center in Flowood; and Domonique Singleton of Ridgeland, office coordinator for Methodist Physical Medicine in Flowood.
If he’d been by himself at Winner’s Circle Park in Flowood, De’Mon McClinton might have overlooked the odd sensation on his right side.
But since he was alone with his two young sons, he headed home. Now, he hates to think what might have happened if he hadn’t played it safe on July 22, 2019.
Just hours later, what started as a “funny feeling” escalated to a full-blown stroke.
“It could have gone so wrong,” he said. “My right side was affected, from my face to my right leg.”
After she broke her spine in a horse-riding accident, Kalyn Smith adjusted to her new normal the only way she knew how: by taking the reins.
“I remember when she first got here,” said Jacob Long, her physical therapist while at Methodist Rehabilitation Center in Jackson. “At the first session, she said ‘I want to do everything I need to do to get as mobile as I can, to get back out there and do the things I want to do.’”
When Angela Malone asked for a hug the other day, her son, Adam, could only say, “Mom, you know I can’t.”
After muscular dystrophy severely weakened his right arm, the 19-year-old didn’t have the strength for a full embrace.
But mother and son recently managed an emotional clinch thanks to a device now available at Methodist Rehabilitation Center’s Assistive Technology Clinic in Flowood.
Known as the Kinova O540, the device attaches to Adam’s power wheelchair and provides dynamic mobile arm support for everything from hugs to mealtime tasks.