VITAS Innovative Hospice Care® celebrates its dedicated and innovative employees every chance it gets, weather or not. But following the hurricane season of 2005 there were dozens of stories of employees, from home health aides to medical directors, doing the unexpected. Here are a few of those stories.

At Home in Elgin

Hurricane Katrina sent Gulf Coast residents scurrying for shelter as far as Elgin, Illinois, in September. When it was proposed that the empty Elgin Mental Health Center could temporarily house some of the evacuees, 7,000 members of the Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington got involved in a big way.

Karen Ellithorpe, a VITAS nursing home team manager in Chicagoland Northwest, worked with a church group charged with providing the comfortable touches—linens, lamps, TVs—that would make the institutional setting more homelike. She and her husband spent a September Saturday in their community collecting the things that make a room a home, then met others to fill several trucks with furniture and supplies that would bring life to what was once a state mental institution. “We collected wonderful things—new things!” Ellithorpe recalls. “I started by going through my own house, and I’d think, ‘I can’t give this away, I might need it someday.’ And then I realized, ‘These people need this right now!’ It was definitely a What-Would-Jesus-Do? experience.”

Sweet Success in Schaumburg

Victor Sweet, certified home health aide at VITAS’ Chicagoland Northwest program, might have put on a few pounds in September after Hurricane Katrina flooded the Gulf Coast. But it was for a good cause.

Sweet spends much of his time caring for hospice patients at the Lexington of Schaumburg Healthcare Center, where he says there is always a community–minded event going on. When Katrina hit, the Lexington activities director suggested, “Let’s raise money for the victims.” All three floors responded with fund-raising efforts. “Everyone put their heart and soul into it,” reports Sweet, who lives up to his name year round with thoughtful gestures and delicious baked goods, helped buy the ingredients and then tied on an apron to take orders for banana splits, hot dogs and pizzas. (He admits to doing his share of the buying and eating, too.) Thanks to Sweet and others just like him, the Lexington of Schaumburg sent $25,000 to Katrina victims.

Tour of Duty at Fort Polk

Sheila Love and her family had rented a van for a September vacation to visit family in Fort Polk, an army base near Leesville, Louisiana, when Hurricane Katrina blew through. “We were going to cancel, but then my cousin called and said, ‘Come down, we need some help.’”

So the Loves headed south out of Chicago, where Sheila has been a certified home health aide with VITAS Chicagoland Northwest for 10 years. Her cousin has both a military career and a church in Leesville, about four hours from New Orleans. Sheila and her husband gave up their reservations at the base resort to free up more room for incoming evacuees, then spent the week filling the van with necessities, from water to school supplies, for grateful crowds gathered at distribution points all over the base and town. Sheila attended several meetings with her cousin’s wife, a counselor there, and heard first-hand the survival stories.

“They were eye-opening,” she says. “I came back from that vacation a different person. I don’t get upset by the little things anymore. I almost wish we’d brought our kids, just so they’d appreciate how much we have. Giving a kid a coloring book—you’d think we were giving away cars, they were so ecstatic.”

Sheila says the area continues to be deeply involved in relief work, and donations are still needed. Contact Rev. Master Sergeant Derrick Johnson, 6451 B Leadbetter Court, Fort Polk, LA 71459.