There’s a vacant lot where her home once stood, so holiday homecomings will be bittersweet for Gladys Berry Jenkins of Anguilla this year.
Still, the nurse and mother of five was counting her blessings as she recently readied to leave Methodist Rehabilitation Center in Jackson.
After almost a month in hospitals, she would finally be in the company of her youngest kids—Timia, 11, and Adrienne, 5. And it’s a precious gift considering what the three have been through.
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Ten years later, Charlie Gibbs of Clinton still thinks: What are the odds?
“One of 200,000 mosquitoes bites me,” he says. And within days, he can’t move his arms or legs.
Doctors aren’t sure what to make of Gibbs’ mysterious symptoms. They check for heart attack, stroke and even the relatively rare Guillain-Barré Syndrome.
Then a blood test reveals the true villain—a tiny mosquito bearing a terrifying virus.
“I was the first person infected with West Nile virus (WNV) in Mississippi,” Gibbs says. “Aren’t I lucky?”
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London was the first taste of the sheer magnitude of the Paralympics for Methodist Rehab wheelchair fencers Ryan Estep and Joey Brinson.
And now they’re both counting the days until the 2016 games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
“It was a blast just to be there,” Brinson said. “It made me feel like all the work I had put in was worth it, just to make it there and be able to compete. And it really made me want to get ready for the next one. I’m ready now. I wish we could go do it right now.”
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Its burgundy cover is battered, and handwritten notes fill the margins of its well-worn pages.
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When Bill Meador began transforming his Hickory farm into a hunter’s paradise, he built one shooting house with a wheelchair ramp.
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It has been a record-breaking year for West Nile virus infections, but Crystal Walley doesn’t need newspaper headlines to warn her of the ravages of the mosquito-borne disease.
Reminders are all around her Wayne County home. There’s the power wheelchair parked in her dining room. The physical therapy appointments on her calendar. Even the fuschia-colored Jeep in the driveway.
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Methodist Rehabilitation Center will present a free seminar on relieving back pain at 6:30 p.m. Sept. 18 at Embassy Suites in Ridgeland.
Seminar speakers will be pain management expert Dr. Bruce Hirshman of Jackson and physical therapist Joe Jacobson of Madison. The two will discuss the everyday causes of back pain, common myths about back pain and the most effective treatments.
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On a particularly hot afternoon in late September, Shaquille Vance stood on the Madison-Ridgeland Academy track surrounded by a crowd of adoring middle schoolers.
They were clamoring to have his autograph emblazoned on the veritable rainbow of running shoes they held aloft.
At that moment, to those children, he was the biggest superstar in the world.
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At Methodist Rehabilitation Center’s Assistive Technology Clinic, physical therapist Allison Fracchia of Jackson does whatever it takes to fit patients with disabilities with the best equipment for their needs.
She even went back to the classroom to help 51-year-old Dean Whitehead of Indianola.
When his unique posture cried out for a wheelchair with custom-molded seating, she got the certification necessary to design and recommend a custom system known as Ride Designs.
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An early surge in West Nile virus (WNV) cases has Mississippians bracing for a possible peak year for the mosquito-borne disease.
But that’s not the only reason a crowd is expected at the next meeting of a Jackson support group for WNV survivors.
The other draw is the meeting’s new location. On Aug. 24, the group will begin gathering at Methodist Rehabilitation Center, the Jackson hospital where scientists have made a series of significant WNV discoveries.
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