FLORIDA WHITE
Florida White is grateful to be where she is today. Despite having chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), she lives in senior housing in West Roxbury and is able to enjoy shopping and lunch dates with her friends, as well as regular visits from her large and loving family. Her journey back from serious illness began six years ago.
Mrs. White had been diagnosed with asthma ten years earlier, but a case of pneumonia caught her off guard. "I was in Memphis, Tennessee, for my mother's funeral when I became sick," she recalls. "I was in the hospital there for three days." She flew back to Boston feeling weak, and her breathing became increasingly worse. In quick succession, Mrs. White was rushed to the hospital, went into a coma and was put on mechanical ventilation. When she awoke from the coma weeks later, she learned she was in the hospital.
"They told me I had very bad pneumonia in both lungs" she says. "I couldn't walk or talk. I couldn't do anything."
Those days were difficult ones for Mrs. White, but the combination of outstanding medical care, attentive nursing care and respiratory and physical therapists who wouldn't let her quit resulted in her successful recovery. "The respiratory therapists were so kind to me," she says. "They said that if I worked with them, I could get back to where I was before I was admitted to the hospital. I told them that was impossible. But we did work together. They even made me enjoy going for exercise."
Mrs. White did go home, but pulmonary problems brought her back a year later. "When the staff heard my name, they all came running," she recalls, noting that she was back in the care of Martin Joyce-Brady, MD, a pulmonary medicine specialist on staff at Boston Medical Center and Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Joyce-Brady, who directs Radius' program, had overseen the process of weaning her from the ventilator to a tracheostomy tube to the use of supplemental oxygen. "Dr. Joyce-Brady has been wonderful to me," she says.
"COPD is nothing to play with," says Mrs. White. "It gets you down. I've been a patient in all the rehabs, and Radius is the best one."
PUBLISHED WITH PERMISSION.
