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Patients Tell Their Stories - Terry and Loyce Warner |
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Patients Tell Their Stories - Terry and Loyce Warner
There was a lot going on for Loyce Warner of Hadley in September 2005.
Her granddaughter Aina was being baptized on September 24. Her husband, Terry, was scheduled to take part in a sleep study at Lahey Clinic on September 29, and Loyce was to drive him there. And on September 30, Loyce was scheduled to have her left knee replaced at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a procedure that was to be videotaped as a physician resource.
"Everything was happening at once," says Loyce. "I was staying up every night late, rushing around," she says.
So, when Loyce woke up on September 28 with pains in her chest, she feared the worst, but she says her concern wasn't so much for herself as it was for those who were relying on her in the coming days.
"I thought, 'Oh my God. To be fair to everybody, I'd better go to the Emergency Department to see what's happening,' " she says.
Loyce says the attending physician, Dr. Gustavo Diaz, took "all kinds of tests" to rule out heart attack or stroke, and after four hours, she was released with a clean bill of health and drove herself back home.
The experience struck Loyce as a very positive one because Dr. Diaz was very attentive and the nursing staff was kind. It moved her so much, in fact, that she and her husband, Terry, made a financial gift to Cooley Dickinson.
"I was so grateful to them. I had to express my gratitude," she says. "They did a superb job. I can't say enough about them.
"Our philosophy is, we appreciate what people do for us. Making a gift was the only way I could think of that would show my appreciation."
While this gift was the first unsolicited one that the couple has made to Cooley Dickinson, it is not their first gift. They've contributed to the annual fund over the years because they've had many positive experiences at the hospital.
Terry had his left hip replaced here. Granddaughter Olivia, while visiting with her mother Mary Ruth from Pennsylvania, was treated for the croup in the Emergency Department, and for a week in June 2004, Terry kept the ED staff busy with three separate visits.
Terry was working on a woodworking project back then, using a table saw to cut pieces that he now knows were "much too small" to cut using such a saw.
On June 21, 2004, he accidentally cut into his left thumb, and he promptly visited the ED.
Dr. Raymond Conway bandaged his thumb and put something on it that would bind the skin back together. "He said I filleted myself," Terry says.
That was a Tuesday. Two days later, on June 23, Terry ended up back in the ED after a wrong turn with the table saw caused severe wounding to the middle finger on the same hand.
Terry had surgery that same day at the hospital by an orthopedist who put three vertical pins in his finger.
He put his woodworking project on hold then, and thought that was the end of his medical problems, but only two days later, on Saturday, June 25, hornets swarmed around Terry while he was working outdoors and stung him repeatedly - on his injured hand.
This time, the ED nurses saw him coming.
"They said to me, 'You haven't been playing with that table saw again have you?'" Terry says.
Both he and Loyce laugh at the memory of that week, then Loyce smiles and says:
"So, don't you think we owe the Cooley Dickinson Hospital something? We really do. We really feel like this is our hospital. We should support our hospital."
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