‘ Our lives turned upside down’ as brain tumor emerges in a young woman
Joyce Jones give kiss of encouragement to daughter Erika before a physical therapy session.
Story and Photographs © Robin Rayne Nelson/ZUMA Press All Rights Reserved
Tears welled in Joyce Jones’ eyes as she watched Shepherd Spinal Center therapists help her daughter Erika Jones stand for the first time in months.
“This is a milestone,” Joyce Jones said, struggling to keep her emotions at bay.
Her daughter was recovering from surgery four months earlier to remove a massive tumor that left her with brain damage, paralyzed on her right side and unable to walk or speak more than a few words.
“Our lives turned upside down this past October. Erika is my only child. She’s 32 and was in perfect health — or so we thought,” said Joyce Jones, who lives near Lassiter High School with her husband John Jones.
Their daughter was on the way home from work when the seizure occurred. She managed to drive to a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot before slumping over on the wheel. A customer saw her and called 911, she said.
Paramedics broke into her car and rushed the 2003 Lassiter High School graduate to Northside Hospital where tests revealed a massive brain tumor that was nearly the size of a softball.
“Her doctors called it a meningioma. It was on the front part of her brain and around her spinal cord. They said it had been growing for at least ten years and had actually squeezed and moved her brain over. They were surprised she didn’t have headaches and vision problems earlier,” Joyce Jones explained.
“It took the surgical team ten hours to remove it,” she said. “Swelling on her brain forced the surgeons to do a second operation the next day. She had five more in the weeks after that. Now she has a shunt in her brain for the excess fluids, a G-tube in her abdomen to help with feeding and a tracheostomy so she can breathe. “
Erika lived with a roommate for several years but returned home last year while she looked for a place of her own. “She was just about to move into an apartment and live on her own when this all happened,” Joyce Jones explained.
“She had her new furniture purchased. It was going to be that next weekend. But that’s all changed now.”
Erika Jones was transferred to Shepherd Spinal Center in November. She remainsparalyzed on her right side and is unable to walk. Though she has significant cognitive deficits, she manages to say a few words. “She can say ‘Hi’ and ‘God’ and ‘I love you,’ and she still smiles. The Erika I knew is coming back,” her mother said. “I can see that feistiness. She is a fighter.”
Erika Jones has physical, occupational and speech therapy five hours a day, six days a week. She wears a foam helmet to protect her head and awaits another operation in a few weeks to replace bone in an exposed area on her skull.
Her mother spends hours every afternoon at her daughter’s hospital bedside before returning to her family’s Marietta home. On this day, she had good news to share with her husband John Jones, retired bus driver for Cobb County schools whom students and friends called “JJ.” “I knew this was not going to be a walk in the park,” Joyce Jones continued. “But thinking back to when Erika was being wheeled into the operating room, she wasn’t fearful.
She never cried. She said she knew it was all in God’s hands and he would lead the surgeons. Today the therapists got her in a standing frame and raised it up so she could stand up and lean on the tray. I know it was hard for her but she’s doing it.”
That her daughter was awake and smiling was in itself an answer to prayer, she said. “Before they removed the tumor doctors said she could have a stroke during the surgery. I remember praying, ‘Dear God, please let her wake up and be able to do some things. I don’t want her in a nursing home.”
Joyce Jones and her husband are hopeful their daughter can be released from Shepherd Center at the end of January and return home.
What comes next has them both intensely anxious.
“Her doctors said recovery will be a slow process and they said I’ll need to be patient. We’ll need to adjust to our ‘new normal,’ but JJ and I really have no idea what that will be like,” she added. “Her doctors can’t say if she will ever walk or drive again. It may take years.”
“Erika’s brain injury was devastating and tragic,” explained Dr. Anna Elmers, M.D., a physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist at Shepherd Center who supervises Erika’s therapy. “She will be dependent and need 24-hour care, seven days a week for the foreseeable future. It will be quite expensive.”
“Erika will need help in all parts of her day, including feeding, bathing and dressing,” according to Ali Harris, Erika’s primary physical therapist at Shepherd Center. “She has what is known as ‘global aphasia.’ She doesn’t always comprehend what people are saying to her and she’s not able to express herself verbally,” she added. She may be able to walk again in time, she added.
The bedrooms in the Jones’ two-story home are on the second level. They hope to convert their first-floor dining room into a bedroom for their daughter, but need plumbing and carpentry help in expanding a first-floor bathroom to accommodate her wheelchair.
“I lay awake at night worrying if Erika will recognize this is her home. We’re going to make this a comfortable place for her. We considered selling and relocating to a single-level house but we didn’t want to leave our friends in this neighborhood.
Many have offered their help in caring for Erika,” Joyce Jones explained. “We will need their help.”
Erika Jones’ health insurance from her job as a music production assistant will cover the costs of a hospital bed and portable hydraulic lift for a while, she said. Jones hopes to arrange for Social Security disability and Medicare coverage in the coming days.
“I’m 64 years old. John is 77 and recovering from back surgery. He’s weak from emphysema and diabetes and he’s on oxygen. Erika weighs 190 pounds and I don’t think we are strong enough to lift her in and out of her bed and wheelchair, even with the lift,” she said.
A skilled care facility is not an option, she emphasized. “Our daughter needs to be home where she can get the love and care she needs. We have a few weeks to get ready before she comes home. A neighbor, a niece and one of Erika’s close friends have volunteered to help care for her.”
The couple worries about finances, as they are on a limited, fixed income.
“We’ll need money for diapers and pads for Erika and a lot of things Medicare won’t cover. I’m not sure how we’re going to meet those expenses,” Joyce Jones explained. Her daughter will need a wheelchair-accessible van for trips to doctors and physical therapy that will continue in Decatur for the foreseeable future, she explained. Insurance will not provide transportation, and the type of van Erika requires cost at least $30,000, she said.
“This is a life changing event that nobody planned and they definitely didn’t budget for in life,” explained Nancy Hornsby, a family friend who arranged a Go Fund Me account to help with Erika’s support expenses once she returns home. She hopes to raise at least $70,000. “Erika had a full time job and paid her own bills. Now her parents are trying to make sure her outstanding bills are paid as well as take care of their own obligations. Joyce and JJ are unemployed and living off retirement income,” she said.
“There is a long road ahead for all of us involved with Erika, probably much longer than any of us choose to realize,” Hornsby said.
What may help Erika Jones recover as much as anything costs nothing. “She used to play ball for the AAU, the Amateur Athletic Union,” Joyce Jones recalled. “It would be good if some of the girls she played with could come to visit her once she’s home. I know that would bring a smile to her face and help her heal.”
As another physical therapist worked with Erika on an electrical stimulation cycle designed to restore function to her stiff right leg, Joyce Jones collected her coat and bag. The day’s therapy was nearly done and her daughter would soon be transported back to her hospital room with her mother close behind.
“Erika and I were the best of friends, like partners in crime. She used to call me15 times a day, and there were times I kidded her about that. ‘You just called me an hour ago,’ I remember saying to her,” Joyce Jones recalled.
“But now I wish with all my heart she could pick up the phone and call me.”
ROBERT RATONYI, 80, was a 6-year-old boy in Budapest, Hungary in 1944 during World War 2
Story and Photographs ©Robin Rayne Nelson/ZUMA Press All Rights Reserved
Kennesaw, Georgia — Robert Ratonyi can still see the piles of watches and wedding rings at the entrance to the ‘Big Ghetto.’
He remembers the fear that gripped him as he watched armed Hungarian soldiers — sympathizers of Nazi Germany — bark orders to hundreds of Jewish women and children around him on a cold October night.
It was 1944, in war-ravaged Hungary. German troops had invaded the country to continue with their mission to deport – and ultimately exterminate — millions of European Jews.
Ratonyi, now 80, is one of an ever-dwindling number of Holocaust survivors. He shared his tale of horror and survival with a standing-room-only crowd at Mt. Paran Christian School Tuesday night. Ratonyi was six years old that year. His father had been shipped off to a labor camp two years before. He and his mother had been rousted from their Budapest flat in a “Yellow Star House” for Jewish families at 3 a.m. by local police. They were lined up with hundreds of other Jews and escorted to the entrance of a fenced resettlement community in the town’s old Jewish quarter, he said.
“One by one, each person was ordered to leave their money and valuables in a pile on the sidewalk as they passed through the narrow gate. I will never forget that,” Ratonyi continued.
He shared how he held tight to his mother’s hand. Once he and his mother passed through the gate, armed Hungarian soldiers pulled them apart and shoved his mother into a line with hundreds of other women.
“She turned back to me, crying as they led her away. She couldn’t speak. She just cried. The children, we were all crying,” as our mothers were led away, he said.
His mother was forced to march with thousands of other Jewish women to a labor camp more than 120 miles away, across the border in Austria. Nearly 4 of every 10 women died along the way. Recalling that vivid scene in his mind brought him to the edge of tears.
“This is not a pleasant thing to talk about. Every time I do I’m transported back to that time,” he said. “It’s not an easy thing to do, but I do it because I have an obligation. When you hear a first-hand account it gives a different perspective from what is often taught in the schools.”
Ratonyi was born in 1938, “the year of Kristallnacht, the German name for ‘Night of the Broken Glass,’” he said. “It was two days of riots in Vienna and Berlin. More than a hundred Jews were killed, 30,000 Jews deported, 1,000 synagogues destroyed and 30,000 Jewish businesses destroyed,” he told the Mount Paran audience.
By 1944, most Hungarian Jews knew what was going on with Jews in other countries, he said. They learned of mass numbers of Jews in Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Austria who were stuffed into rail cars and delivered to concentration camps throughout German-occupied countries.
“They knew what was coming,” he said.
Every Jew six years and older was required to wear a yellow star-shaped patch on their outer garments, he said. Though his mother dutifully sewed stars on his jacket and hers that marked them as Jews, he was too young to grasp the significance of the symbol.
“The only thing I knew about being Jewish was that we celebrated Jewish holidays at my grandparents’ place. Neighbors, kids I played with, they celebrated Christmas. That’s how naïve I was,” he said. “People in Budapest hoped the war would end before German troops invaded and occupied Hungary, but those dreams were crushed,” he said. As German troops took control of Budapest, Ratonyi said he “quickly lost his innocence. I learned being Jewish had consequences,” he told the crowd.
He shared his tale of survival as Allied Forces bombed the town. “There were American bombers by day and British bombers by night,” he recalled. He took shelter in a cellar with his mother during the bombing raids. “I learned the whistling of the bombs and the blasts that followed early on,” he said.
Ratonyi described how his mother pleaded with a local Protestant pastor to convert him to Christianity. She begged the pastor to provide documents that proved he was not a Jew.
“But the answer was no. There were strict laws against that,” he said.
He told of his heroes, including his mother’s friend who found him alone and frightened in the ghetto and managed to deliver him to his grandparents. It was a small flat that eventually became a refuge for aunts and cousins as the German occupation continued, he said.
One relative was able to secure papers that kept them safe for a while. His cousin scoured bombed-out buildings at night for items that could be bartered for food. Ratonyi told of surviving on one small can of soup per day, of bomb-ravaged buildings and blown out windows, of sleeping next to others for warmth in a bitterly cold winter, and how his extended family moved from one flat to another and then another just to stay alive as 1944 turned to 1945.
He described how hundreds of Jews were rounded up by German soldiers, marched to a place near the Danube River and executed, their bodies falling into the water – and how his cousin saved his family from a similar fate.
“Miklos, my cousin, was very bold. His job was to find anything of value in the ruins that could be exchanged for food. One day he noticed a crumpled piece of cloth in a stairwell. It was an armband, just like the ones used by the Arrow Cross party, the facist militia who were Nazi sympathizers. Miklos stuffed it in his pocket,” Ratonyi said.
Later that day as his cousin return to the ghetto, he came across several dozen Jews held at gunpoint in the courtyard. Ratonyi was among them.
“There were three members of the Arrow Cross militia holding us, two young men and an older man with guns. It was a shakedown for anything of value the soldiers could use to barter for food. It was near the end of the war and they were desperate,” he said. “It happened a lot. Those who had nothing to give were usually taken to the bank of the river and shot,” he explained.
“Miklos realized what was happening. He pulled the armband from his pocket and put it on. He walked up to the older soldier and said, ‘These are my Jews.’ The old man looked at him and glanced at the armband. “Very well. You deal with them,’ the old man said as he walked away. My cousin saved our lives that day. He was 14 years old.”
He told of unimaginable horror as German soldiers, “with great efficiency,” dragged 500,000 Jews from their homes in Budapest and surrounding areas, stuffed them into cattle cars and shipped to work camps or death camps.
Many from his extended family did not survive the Nazi’s ‘final solution,’ he said. The day Budapest was liberated by the Red Army in 1945, he said “I was too weak to even watch from the window as the troops entered the area. After we were liberated, we didn’t know for several months if my mother survived the labor camp,” he said. “When they brought her back she had typhus and diphtheria. She was skin and bones. I said, ‘That’s not my mother,’ she looked like a skeleton,” he recalled. His mother eventually recovered.
“A bomb didn’t kill me. I didn’t get sick or die of hunger. But the greatest contributors to my survival were my heroes — my friends, grandparents, cousins and family members.”
Ratonyi hopes that sharing stories of the Holocaust can avert the danger of history repeating itself.
“It’s important for me to tell my story. There are those who deny the Holocaust, but there’s no point in arguing with them. I don’t know how to deal with them,” he said. He raised the question to the audience: “How could such Nazi atrocities happen in the middle of the 20th century — in an enlightened, educated and civilized Europe?”
“The answer teaches a valuable moral lesson,” he continued, when 500 million Christians in Europe stood by and said nothing as Nazi Germany’s plan to exterminate millions of Jews proceeded.
Ratonyi shared Martin Niemöller famous condemnation of those silent bystanders:
‘First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Socialists and Trade Unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I was neither.
“Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
“Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up for me.”
The lesson, Ratonyi said, is to never tolerate apathy or indifference to the suffering of others.
“We should always speak up when we see injustice or prejudice inflicted on other human beings,” he said, concluding with Santayana’s quote: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Medically Fragile, Going Homeless, and a Broken System
Sarah Allen and her medically fragile son Aidan struggle with a state Medicaid system that refuses to obey federal law to provide adequate in-home nursing care for him.
But that pales in comparison to her larger worry: Sarah and Aidan will be without a home and separated in a matter of weeks.
Its wasn’t supposed to go this way. Sarah was happily married and pregnant. Now, she will need to find a shelter somewhere. Her son may become a ward of the state and placed in a nursing facility. They’re hoping for a miracle.
© 2017 Robin Rayne Nelson/ZUMA Press
All rights reserved
Sarah Allen gets her son’s meals primed in a pump that delivers a constant flow of the liquid directly into his stomach though a ‘G-tube.’
Marietta, Georgia — Sarah Allen primed the pump for her toddler son Aidan’s gastrostomy tube. She tried to stay focused. She couldn’t let her anxiety and fear get the better of her, even though the reality of losing what precious little she had – including her son – occupied her mind relentlessly.
In six weeks, Sarah and her medically fragile child will be homeless and likely be torn apart.
The now-single mom has few resources and no place to go once she’s forced to leave the small house where they’ve been living for the past nine months. While Sarah could find a women’s shelter, her son’s complex medical condition would be too much of a liability for a shelter to accommodate. Aidan would be likely become a ward of the state and be relocated to foster care or a nursing home.
Aidan’s daily meals and medications are liquid and constantly flowing from this bag into his stomach.
Aidan was born with cerebral palsy. He has a number of neurological and developmental issues due to a cytomegalovirus, (CMV) a common but not well-recognized virus that can be devastating to unborn children. He is nonverbal and unable to crawl or walk. His vision is limited. He has difficulty swallowing. He requires high-calorie liquid nourishment through a portable pump and tube that leads directly into his stomach, feeding him continuously for 20 hours a day.
Sarah and her toddler son laugh and giggle as they get ready for the day
Aidan’s complex medical needs require 24-hour care and supervision. Though not a trained nurse, Sarah is Aidan’s primary caregiver. Other than brief respites when a registered nurse or certified nurse assistant comes to their home to help, Sarah is constantly by Aidan’s side.
It is Sarah’s full-time job, and one that she never leaves. It is a job that pays nothing, which means Sarah has no income. They live on food stamps and $860 a month in child support and Social Security benefits because of Aidan’s disability.
Before Aidan was born, Sarah married a man she thought she knew. She considered him to be her soul mate. Sarah was working and looking forward to a happy family life together. “Things were perfect,” she recalled. Several months after their wedding, Sarah was pregnant, eagerly anticipating her role as a mother. After years growing up in an abusive, dysfunctional, drugs-and-alcohol drenched family, “I finally had my family,” she said.
That dream came to an abrupt detour when a doctor’s exam detected serious medical issues with their unborn son. Aidan was considered ‘high risk.’
Aidan lays in his mother’s lap as she cleans her son’s mouth with a glycerin swab. He is not allowed to eat anything by mouth.
“The perinatologist encouraged me to terminate my pregnancy. I was told he would likely not survive birth. If he did, he would be born deaf, blind and disabled.” Aidan would likely experience multiple seizures, the doctor told her.
Sarah refused to terminate the pregnancy. “I had to give my son a chance at life,” she said.
Aidan’s father left soon after that for job training in Germany. “He was supposed to come home in six weeks. He never did,” she said.
Aidan was born with the umbilical cord around his neck. He has several brain malformations, with lesions and scars throughout. He suffered a stroke. He has enlarged ventricles, liver and spleen. He has hundreds of seizures every day and his vision is seriously impaired. He doesn’t crawl or walk, and is wheelchair dependent. He is non-verbal and eats with a G-tube throughout the day, she explained.
Now 28 years old, abandoned by her husband and the life she thought she had — with a medically fragile infant who needed constant care — Sarah moved from place to place and tried to get on with her life.
“I knew I had to find a way to support us. I didn’t have anyone to watch him, so working a regular job wasn’t possible. I had to be able to drop what I was doing at any time to tend to his seizures so working specific hours from home online wouldn’t work. SSI takes almost 40% of your income anyway, so the money wouldn’t have been much.”
“I came to the conclusion that being an online student would not only enable me to gain an education, but I could also use the student loans for living expenses,” she explained.
Sarah thought it was a good idea at first.
“
Exhausted from lack of sleep, Sarah tries to rest on a sofa while keeping a close eye on Aidan. He can lay on his tummy but so far is unable to crawl.
“I was able to put down my books and tend to him when he needed it. But then my grades began to suffer. I failed a class. I wasn’t sleeping and it was taking its toll. In order to receive loans, you have to be a full time student. Being a full time student with a normal child is different because your child can go to daycare, a family member or a friend. They don’t need special training for their care. But being a parent to a medically fragile child and being in school full time is an entirely different story. Standard day cares won’t take him.”
There used to be daycare centers in Georgia for medically fragile children, staffed by registered nurses who could provide the required care while parents worked. Cuts in Medicaid funding caused those centers to close in 2015.
Sarah applied for what is known as ‘Section 8’ public assistance housing but was turned away. “There was at least a three-year waiting list,” Sarah recalled. “I understand. There are lots of handicapped people who need housing. I just wish these wait lists were a thing of the past.”
She met a man through an online dating service. As they talked over lunch, Sarah shared her story. “That relationship didn’t go anywhere, but he offered this house to me as a place for Aidan and me to live so wouldn’t go homeless,” she said. Small and clean, it was accessible by Aidan’s wheelchair and not far from a hospital.
“We had a home. I could take care of my son. We didn’t have much but we survived,” Sarah reflected.
Though Aidan’s doctor prescribed a consistent and sufficient level of in-home nursing as a medical necessity for Aidan, the Georgia Pediatric Program (GAPP) that manages that support consistently ignored those orders. That support is funded with Medicaid dollars.
“I fought and fought for it, but only received 8 hours per week. Sadly, the 6 nurses I went through in 4 months were no-show or very late for every shift,” she said. “It became extremely stressful, inconvenient and time consuming to have to train a whole new nurse all over again. After joining a few Facebook support groups for special needs, I learned that’s sadly very common,” she continued.
Aidan gets a workout on a large rubber ball as part of his weekly physical therapy.
Because of his cerebral palsy, Aidan is reliant upon assistive equipment. He receives weekly physical, occupational, and speech therapies through private companies who take Medicaid.
“Sometimes he needs supplemental oxygen. I always keep a suction machine and pulse oximeter nearby, just in case. He sleeps with me, or at least very close to me, because he requires monitoring 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I haven’t slept a full night since he was born. He feeds at a slow rate continuously because he can’t tolerate a lot of food in his stomach,” she explained
.
Aidan is covered by Medicaid for medical bills and disability equipment. They receive EBT food stamps from the state. Aidan’s special formula costs are covered by Medicaid.
But she is frustrated and angry with the state system that many observers say is woefully broken.
“I need help to care for Aidan. I’ve pleaded for more hours for nursing care. I can’t do it alone like I have been,” she added, noting that he own health is not good either. Sarah’s father died of congestive heart failure. Though she appears to be a vibrant and energetic young woman, Sarah was diagnosed with serious heart issues herself.
Serving Aidan as his primary caregiver without adequate help is placing her physical and emotional health at risk and that affects Aidan as well, her doctor told her.
The program’s most recent review of Aidan’s case reduced his in-home care to eight hours a week.
Wearing a backpack with the ever-present pump and tube connect to Aidan, Sarah encourages her son to enjoy the specially-adapted swing at a nearby park.
“I guess they figure as long as I’m caring for Aidan, they don’t need to,” Sarah said. “I’m a full time nurse without a nursing license, keeping track, grinding up and administering all his medications and working 20 hours a day without income because that’s what my son needs. And the state agency that’s supposed to help simply won’t do what the laws say they must do.”
“I’m wearing out. I’m performing nursing level care and it is very scary because I could mess up,” she added.
Children are entitled to receive care so that their medical condition does not deteriorate, notes Ruby Moore, director of the Georgia Advocacy Office.
“In-home skilled nursing services are one of the many federally mandated services that enable children to remain at home with their families thereby avoiding the risk of placement in an institution,” she said.
“The Department of Community Health conducts periodic reviews of hours provided and regularly decreases hours of skilled nursing — contrary to doctor’s prescriptions, “she continued.
“The arbitrary reduction of a child’s skilled nursing services puts the child at risk for unnecessary medical complications, including death or institutionalization,” she cautioned.
While families have the right to appeal the reduction of services, they often are not sucessful as they cannot afford a lawyer, she noted. “In failing to provide children with the right to necessary medical care, the State is putting the children and the State of Georgia at risk,” she said.
Headed home after an afternoon outing at a park.
Children subject to these arbitrary decisions are at risk of becoming wards of the state or at risk of entering nursing facilities at government expense. “As the state is liable for violating the rights of these children, Georgia is at risk for greater liability as a result of its implementation of these willful and irresponsible practices,” she continued.
Meanwhile, Sarah takes life day by day, entertaining her son as best she can with free trips to a local park where they could walk in the fresh air. A television in the small living room pulls in a scratchy signal from one of the few broadcast stations in Atlanta. Sarah can’t afford to pay for cable television or internet. She’s built some of the furniture in the house herself. Sarah struggles with loneliness and isolation. She longs for friends she can “hang with, someone to just call up and talk,” she said.
But even when — or if – the state provides more hours for in-home care, Sarah can’t really leave for more than an hour or two at a time.
“Registered nurses and CNAs are not allowed to lift more than 40 pounds by themselves, so it takes two people,” she said. Sarah’s own heath problems are both a concern and restriction.
Still, she tries to remain hopeful.
Sarah tries to stay focused on her son’s care, though the two will soon be forced to leave their home. They will likely be separated.
“I am extremely thankful that we have a roof over our head. But the owner needs to sell this place in a matter of weeks. I don’t know where we will go. Maybe God will find a way to give us a home of our own, for the first time in both our lives.”
“I still wake up with a smile on my face. I have a happy toddler to love for as long as I can,” she added.” I may not have him forever, but I want him to be happy for the time he is here. I want my son to know love and live in a home — not an institution.”
Sarah and Aidan share hugs on their front porch.
Faces of the Waiver
Individuals with developmental disabilities depend on Medicaid waivers for any quality of life. Thousands in the U.S. are served by the waivers, but thousands more are on waiting lists. Proposed cuts and caps to Medicaid would be devastating for all of them.
By Kip Grosenick and Robin Rayne Nelson
©2017 ZUMA Press All Rights Reserved
Comer, Georgia — Pam Walley knew it was bad news as soon as she heard the nurse’s cry from her daughter’s bedroom.
“I think Callie’s leg is broken,” nurse Lori Cain said as she gripped Callie’s thigh with both hands, hoping to immobilize it.
Pam rushed to her daughter’s bedside and frantically called 911 for an ambulance. Pam knew by the look on her daughter’s face that her pain was excruciating. “Your thigh isn’t supposed to be moving in two directions,” Pam recalled. The bone had apparently snapped as Lori was lifting Callie from her bed to get her dressed for a visit to a local swimming pool.
“It wasn’t anyone’s fault, or anything specific that caused the break,” Pam explained later. “Callie has osteopenia that causes very brittle bones.”
Pam and her 22-year-old daughter live in a rural community outside Athens, Georgia with Pam’s husband Richard, who lives with a disability from an accident several years earlier.
While nurse Lori Cain holds Callie’s thigh to keep it immobilized after her femur snapped, Pam Walley calls for an ambulance to take Callie to the emergency room.
Callie rests in the trauma room after being treated with morphine for her pain. Pam Walley listens as a nurse explains her care plan.
Callie recently finished high school and received her diploma, which she has displayed on her desk. In many ways, Callie is a typical young woman who enjoys manicures and the occasional bit of gossip about the other girls in her community. Pam is clearly proud of the fact that her daughter made it to the high school prom with a date: a typical high school activity made possible because her Medicaid-funded caregiver was present to provide the medical support she needed.
Callie uses gestures and her eyes to communicate. She was born with spastic cerebral palsy and epilepsy, and needs support in a number of areas of her life. She is legally blind and uses a wheelchair.
“Callie is the strongest, bravest person I have ever met in my life. I don’t think many tough, grown men could endure what she’s enduring,” Pam offered.
She is committed to giving her daughter the best life possible, as full and as meaningful as she can muster.
Callie requires skilled nursing care at home, funded largely from a Medicaid waiver for individuals with developmental disabilities.
Those funds may be in jeopardy if proposed cuts to Medicaid are approved in legislation currently under congressional consideration.
Pam’s anxiety is palpable as she considered what might have happened had she been by herself with Callie, without a nurse to help manage the broken leg situation. “It would have been disastrous,” she said.
“The Medicaid waiver gives my daughter a far better quality of life because of the care it provides. If Medicaid is cut back, Callie and thousand like her will suffer unimaginably,” she explained.
Under ordinary circumstances, Callie needs to be turned every two hours. “This broken leg prohibits that kind of movement. Where she is right now, she just wants to be still.” That’s exactly what her doctor ordered. “The moving is awful, but once she is still again, she’ll give us a smile that I swear is to reassure us.”
Pam admits she has her hands full as she helps Callie live a full and meaningful life. “It can become overwhelming at times.” Her unabating love for her daughter means there are many hats she must wear to give Callie the highest quality of care possible. “Sometimes I feel like a doctor, a nurse, a social worker, a lawyer, an insurance agent and a politician. I just wanted to be a mama,” she said.
Callie’s Medicaid waiver currently provides funding for 121 hours a week of skilled in-home nursing care. Pam often fills in two shifts a day to care for her daughter when scheduled caregivers call in sick – or just aren’t available. That is in addition to her part-time job in the school system that helps support the family. Some of Callie’s medical and prescription costs are covered by Pam’s insurance coverage from her job — for now.
Pam Walley prays as she comforts her daughter Callie in the Emergency Room at Athens Regional Hospital after her leg was broken.
With so much on the line, she is watching carefully as the politicians in Washington, D.C. talk about re-crafting national healthcare policies. “With a number like $800 million being tossed around as potential cuts in Medicaid, I’ve had about enough. When you look at my daughter’s face and know that Medicaid funds are what is keeping her alive, it is much harder to be impressed with saving $800 million.”
Like many men in Dalton, Georgia, Lance Stephens is a fierce University of Georgia Bulldog fan. A self-described ‘hamburger connoisseur’ who likes to brew his own beer, Lance also cherishes a night out on the town with his girlfriend. “I have a good life,” he says with a big smile as he reclines in his motorized wheelchair that supports his thin legs, atrophied from cerebral palsy. “Or CP for short, as they call it,” he says. Lance is unable to walk, but talking isn’t a problem. He has his opinions, which he happily shares.
Lance Stephens with his host home family, Wendy and Kevin Curtis. “I have a good life now. I hope they don’t mess with Medicaid waivers. My life depends on it,” he says.
Lance doesn’t dwell on his physical limitations. “I can do a whole lot for myself,” he adds. “A whole lot.”
Lance has lived in a host home for the past seven years with housing sponsors Kevin and Wendy Curtis and their two sons. Their home has been modified to accommodate Lance’s wheelchair, including a long ramp from the parking area to the house, with open spaces and wide doorways inside. Lance has a spacious private room that he keeps tidy and well swept. He thoroughly enjoys Wendy’s southern cooking and shares Kevin’s love of sports — though not for the same teams.
Lance knows his life with the Curtis family could quickly fall apart if Medicaid funds that make it possible are cut from federal and state budgets.
“These politicians just ought to stay out of it, this Medicaid thing. People’s lives depend in it, including mine. I’m on it for a reason,” he says.
With his host family Wendy and Kevin Curtis and support coordinator Angela Mackler, Lance Stephens jokes about his favorite sport team, the University of Georgia Bulldogs. Kevin and Wendy are strong University of Tennessee Vols fans.
Lance uses a dry mop to keep his spacious bedroom clean and tidy. “I can do a whole lot for myself,” he says.
One thing Lance insists on sharing when first meeting someone is listing the many places he has lived in his 48 years. It is a mix of hospitals, group homes, apartments and shared living arrangements. Many were less than pleasant experiences. “I’ve had a rough life,” he says.
“Lance feels like this is his house,” says Wendy, with a loving smile.
With his host family Wendy and Kevin Curtis and support coordinator Angela Mackler, Lance Stephens jokes about his favorite sport team, the University of Georgia Bulldogs. Kevin and Wendy are strong University of Tennessee Vols fans. “The unfortunate reality for Lance – and thousands more like him — is that all the years of hard work to secure a good living arrangement could be in jeopardy if the current cuts in Medicaid proposed by congress become a reality,” she explains.
“We’re known as home providers. We opened up our house to Lance and one other person with disabilities in exchange for the Medicaid money offered,” Kevin said. Managing the home and providing what the two men need for a higher quality of life is the Curtis couple’s full-time job. “It’s not a whole lot of money,” he adds,”that’s not why we’re doing it.”
Kevin Curtis had a massive wooden ramp constructed outside his house to accommodate Lance and his motorized wheelchair.While Lance can do much for himself, there is still a lot of work for those who care for him. Kevin counted a dozen people involved in providing Lance with the care he needs to thrive in his community. Some of them are immediate members of the Curtis family, like their sons, who are not paid. Others include professional caregivers like the one who accompanies Lance on his outings, and a support coordinator who supervises his care and well-being.
“There’s lot of moving pieces and a mountain of governmental bureaucracy, both state and federal, to manage,” notes Kevin. “A world without Medicaid to cover the myriad of costs required to keep Lance healthy, stimulated and alive borders on the unthinkable.”
Lance nods in total agreement. “I would be living in an old folks home,” he says. “My life would be miserable. It would be a living hell.”
Kevin Curtis had a massive wooden ramp constructed outside his house to accommodate Lance and his motorized wheelchair.
_____________
“The whole system of caring for the disabled is in big trouble,“ observes Vaughn Calvert, retired father to 41-year-old son John, who experiences autism. John was born with intellectual challenges that give him the mental ability of a four-year-old child, he explains. With the help of the Georgia Options organization, which provides teams of caregivers for around-the-clock support to those with developmental disabilities, John is able to live in his own apartment in Athens, Georgia.
John Calvert enjoys a splash in his apartment complex swimming pool, as direct support staffer Joshua Hall watches
John Calvert sorts his laundry in his apartment. John lived at Central State Hospital in Georgia for 14 years before it closed. He was born with intellectual disabilities that left him with a mental ability of a young child. Now 41, John lives in his own apartment with direct support staff to keep him safe, well-nourished and active. That support comes from Georgia Options, a non-profit organization that supports individuals with developmental disabilities, and Medicaid waiver funding makes it all possible.
Dinner time in John’s apartment, as support staffer Joshua Hall works on the day’s notes.
Previously, John lived for 14 years at Central State Hospital, a massive institution in the middle of Georgia that was once known as the state’s lunatic asylum. It was closed several years ago by federal mandate. Vaughn knew his son needed to be in a place where he could live his own life, but a nursing home was not the answer.
“John lives in his own place. He’s his own man,” Vaughn says. “John gets out in the community to go shopping. He visits the local library. He sees movies and visits a local YMCA where he swims and plays basketball.” John is also an avid horseman and rides once a week at a local stable that specializes in accommodating people with disabilities.
John loves horses and enjoys time at the Butterfly Dreams stable near Athens, Georgia
Time on the basketball court with his friend and support staffer Josh Hall
John and his sister Laura spend an afternoon in a nature preserve in Athens, Georgia
He rested easier several years ago when John first began living more independently. He believed his son’s care was in good hands. The current Medicaid storm on the horizon has him deeply worried, and he often has sleepless nights. “It’s struggling already, so I think if you decrease Medicaid funding the system will implode for sure,” he says.
“Our families are in the position that they have to constantly fight from the minute their kid is born to their last breath,” says Rena Harris, who directs Georgia Options. “They can’t rest. Our families are exhausted.”
“The system is not working now, who in their right mind thinks taking money away from it will make it better?” Callie’s mom argues.
Government agencies use a complicated formula involving clinical assessments to determine who among thousands of developmentally disabled people are the most needy and eligible for Medicaid. For individuals living outside the walls of institutions, a waiver is required.
While nearly 12,000 Georgia residents are currently provided with waiver funds, another 8,700 individuals have been approved for the waiver but must wait for funds to open up. The list continues to grow, with only a few hundred approved each year.
“People with disabilities have the same right as everyone else — to live full and meaningful lives in the community, “ notes Talley Wells, an attorney and co-director of the Disability Law Project at the Institute on Human Development and Disability at the University of Georgia.
“In 1999, the United States Supreme Court affirmed this right in its landmark Olmstead decision. It held that requiring someone to receive services in an institution or nursing home is disability discrimination when that person can live at home with supports.”
“Olmstead is often compared to the Brown v. Board decision due to its impact in outlawing segregation of people with disabilities in institutions and requiring integration of people with disabilities in the community. A Medicaid waiver is often essential to ensuring this integration because it provides what people with disabilities need to live, work, and participate in community life,” he adds..
If there is any upside in this, it is the opportunity that comes from having Medicaid in the headlines, notes Rena Harris.
She is optimistic that many people care about vulnerable citizens but don’t understand what cuts to Medicaid mean. “If we can educate them on what this means and who will be affected, then we might be able to effect change.”
She warned against underestimating the community affected by the proposed cuts. “The disability community and self-advocates and people who love them and support them are fierce,” Harris continues.
“My daughter is a very squeaky wheel even though she’s non-verbal,” Pam Walley adds. “It is incumbent on the rest of us to unite our voices so Callie and others like her can have their message heard.”
Stephenie, At Last
Happiness is difficult to define for a person who doesn’t fit neatly into society’s conventional concept of gender. Transitioning to the preferred gender is sometimes the only solution to resolving dissonance between one’s internal identity and how society perceives them. It is especially challenging for older individuals who have lived with the discord for most of their lives — but ultimately decide they must be true to who they are, often at great personal cost.
Stephenie Viewweigh was able to live her last years in the gender she always knew she was. She died Friday, June 13th, 2014.
Story and Photographs © 2014 Robin Rayne Nelson/ZUMA Press
All Rights Reserved
East Point, Georgia –Stephenie Vieweigh would never forget the bitter, metallic taste of the rifle barrel in her mouth. Her finger was on the trigger — and she was pulling it.
“I couldn’t go on living a lie, unable to be who I really was,” she explained.
It was six years ago on a late-summer morning near Turtletown, Tennessee, a small mountain community near the Georgia and North Carolina borders. Stephenie was sitting beside her kitchen table in the house she built a few years earlier.
“My friend Dan from the local Alcoholics Anonymous group had stopped to visit. Nobody locks their doors in that town, there just wasn’t any reason to. Dan just walked in the door as I was taking what I thought would be my last breath. He saw me and in a split second grabbed the gun out of my mouth. I just sat there, sobbing, unable to talk,” Stephenie remembered.
“He kept asking, ‘What’s up? What’s wrong?’”
“Everyone in that town only knew me as Stephen. The real me — the person I was in my head, my heart and my soul — was Stephenie. I told him, ‘I know I look like a guy but I’m a woman. I got stuck in the wrong body. I think like a woman. I have the emotions of a woman. I perceive life in a feminine manner. I’ve known all this since I was about six years old.’”
“I said, ‘If I couldn’t live my life as the woman I knew I was then I didn’t want to go on living. I couldn’t be ‘her’ where I was. I couldn’t not be ‘her.’ The physical, emotional and spiritual pain was more than I could handle.’”
Stephenie’s friend had never heard about transgender, transsexuals or gender identity issues. “I don’t know anything about what you’re saying, but you need to get hold of a therapist. Now,” Dan insisted. He unloaded the rifle and took it with him. He left the bullets on the table. “I’m sure Dan was bewildered by what he had witnessed. He kept his distance from me after that. I never saw him again.”
“For as far back as I can remember, I wrestled with knowing I had the wrong body. It was a bad joke that I couldn’t do anything about. I was never male, I just looked like one for most of my life,” said Stephenie, now 69. As Stephen, she served four years on a destroyer in the Navy and is a Vietnam War veteran. She also earned college degrees in architecture and computer-aided design. “I lived in Indiana, Florida, Tennessee and now Georgia. I worked in construction as a painting contractor, carpenter, framer, plumber, and even as a county computer technician. I presented a male façade as Stephen during the day, but my brain always knew different.”
“For several years when I lived in Florida I’d come home after working all day, get dressed in something pretty and drive thirty minutes to Tampa. I’d visit friends, go to restaurants and just interact with people as Stephenie. Some nights I stayed out until one or two in the morning. I was always terrified of being discovered,” she continued.
That gender struggle was stuffed down deep when, as Stephen, she met a woman and married. That secret-self had to remain a secret.
“My wife owned a ladies’ consignment shop. My job was to maintain the place. I’d go in after hours, look through all the fabulous clothes and shoes and get dressed while I worked on whatever the place needed. If my wife ever suspected, she never said anything.”The couple moved to Tennessee a few years later and built a home, but the marriage didn’t survive. “It had nothing to do with my gender issues, though,” she explained.
Her need to be Stephenie soon emerged stronger than ever. “I returned to living as Stephenie all the time while I was home. I started on hormones but never really saw any change in how I looked. I saw the same ugly mug in the mirror every day. I kept sinking deeper and deeper into depression,” she said. “I remember tying a rope around my neck several times while sitting in the loft, thinking it would be better to be dead.”
There was no place to go outside of her home. The closest town was more than 90 minutes away. “Some nights I’d just get dressed in slacks and a blouse and drive around those mountains at midnight when everyone else was asleep, hoping nobody recognized me.”
A recovered alcoholic with 26 years of sobriety at the time, Stephenie thought she could cope with the gender discord. “But after decades of this torment in my head, I just didn’t want to go on living,” she said.
A few days after her suicide attempt, Stephenie located a therapist in Atlanta to help her understand gender incongruity. They emailed back and forth several times a day for a few weeks. “Finally, I found the courage to drive down and see her in person. We connected right away. I saw her once a week for a few months. I didn’t feel like blowing my brains out anymore.”
After several months of sessions, the therapist persuaded Stephenie to move to Atlanta and begin living full-time in her preferred gender. “I couldn’t go on the way I was. I‘d lost my house in foreclosure and didn’t have any place to live,” she explained.
Two weeks later, her red pickup truck loaded with boxes of clothes and a few personal items, Stephenie left rural Tennessee for a new life in Atlanta.
“As soon as I got out of my driveway, I felt free. There was this huge sense of relief. It was all about coming unattached to what I’d been attached to. It was more than just Tennessee, it was my whole life up to that point. It was exciting and extremely scary. I’d heard all these stories about transgendered people getting stabbed, mugged, beat up or shot.”
“I suppose I’m what some people call a ‘late bloomer,’ but age doesn’t really have anything to do with it. I reached a point where I either had to be Stephenie or be dead, but I’d come through too much in my years of sobriety to be dead because of this,” she continued.
“I made the decision to push through my fears. I allowed myself to open the door and get on with my life. At 63, I was finally going to be the real me in front of everyone. I wasn’t going to lie any more.” she said. “That decision saved my life.”
Stephenie rented a succession of bedrooms in and around Atlanta, hoping to find work to supplement her limited Social Security income. It didn’t worked out as she’d hoped. Last year she was robbed at gunpoint in the house where she was living. “They took my rent money, food money, my purse, makeup, computer, my car, my ID, everything. But I’m still alive,” she said.
“When I came to Atlanta, the public’s awareness of transgender was nothing like it is now. When I got here there were lots of stares and whispers. I got all caught up in being accepted by other people. I relied on how other people viewed me. If other people liked me and accepted me then I could like me. I relied on other people’s comments to know how to feel about myself. It hurt in the beginning because I wanted to go from Stephen to Stephenie at 100 percent. I wanted everything to be wonderful.”
“I also got caught up in the commercialism of being a woman — the right clothes, the right hairdo, the right makeup. That’s all outside stuff. It has nothing to do with who you are as a person,” she said.
She calls transitioning an ‘inside job.’
“It’s not about other people putting their arm around you and telling you you’re okay. My transition succeeded the day I accepted exactly who I am, what I look like and how I present myself. When I realized that, I said, ‘Yippee, I can do this!’ If there are those who point and snicker or show disrespect, I don’t pay them any attention these days,” she said.
“If people like me, that’s fine. If people like how I’m dressed or how I wear my makeup, that’s fine. If they don’t, that’s fine, too. They have that choice, just like I have that choice. My voice is a bit rough and I know I’m never going to be what society calls pretty, but I don’t need other people to validate my own sense of who I am. These days hardly anyone addresses me as ‘sir,’” she added.
“I know my face isn’t beautiful, but so what? To who? Take the makeup off a lot of those models and see what they look like. Women have bought into the lie that they are only what they look like.”
Stephenie limits herself to one meal a day out of habit and financial necessity. Her Social Security check goes for rent, utilities, food, cell phone service and car insurance, with enough left to buy peanuts for her neighborhood squirrels. She manages to make weekly visits to a local AA meeting and drives thirty miles each way to a gender support group every few months.
Tall and thin, Stephenie exudes an unwavering confidence in her internal sense of identity, though she has as no funds for a legal name change. Her driver’s license still reveals her birth name and sex. Her prominent bust is the result of silicone breast forms. “They look, feel and jiggle just like real boobies.They just come off at night,” she joked. “I don’t have money for doctors, hormone therapy or sex reassignment surgery, but I’m too old for all that now anyway,” she said, wistfully.
“Transgender stories are all over the newspapers and television now. Maybe we’re not totally accepted yet but society is much more aware of our struggles these days,” she said.
“An old friend from Florida managed to find me a few months ago on the Internet. We actually dated many years ago. I told her about my transition to Stephenie and what my life had come to. She was very accepting.”
“She invited me to come live with her. We’ll share the food bills and utilities and I’ll have enough money to live on. It will be great to be with my friend, away from all the crime in Atlanta. I can start living instead of just existing.”
“At last I can have my license changed to read ‘Stephenie.’ Maybe I’ll see some other friends from back then, once I get moved,” she said. “I’m sure we’ve all changed a lot — maybe some of us more than others.”
Tom and Jan’s Alzheimer’s Journey
Story and Photographs © Robin Rayne Nelson/ZUMA
Jefferson, Georgia –Tom Blacketor leaned over his wife Jan, sleeping peacefully next to him on their sofa. He whispered tender, loving words into her ear.
Jan sleeps a lot now. Alzheimer’s disease has taken a toll on her body as well as her brain. She woke slightly and tried to respond to Tom — with words that were unintelligible except to Tom. He smiled and gently kissed her cheek, something he does constantly through the day.
“I brought her home from the nursing home last week. She was there eleven months. She got really good care but the $2,500 monthly bills were more than I could pay,” Tom explained.
Tom and Jan met nearly fifty years ago. They were high school sweethearts and married a few years later surrounded by rural Indiana farmland. He worked for several newspapers on the huge printing presses. She raised their two children. They moved to Georgia in the mid 1980s.
Jan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease two years ago at age 63.
“I’m 67. I had retired, but Jan’s condition was getting worse. She became very combative and restless. She did things that worried me, like putting our small dog in the refrigerator. The dog was fine. She was in and out of the hospital as her doctors tried to find the right combination of meds for her. The only solution was to place her in the nursing home. I went back to work to try to pay for it.”
The monthly costs were more than he could manage. Tom fell behind in his mortgage payments and nearly lost his house.
A few months ago, an infection left her unable to walk. She lost weight and slept most of the day at the nursing facility. Tom’s early-morning printing press job had dwindled to just a few days a week.
“It just made sense to quit the job and bring her home.”
A hospice nurse visits several times a week to help bathe Jan and check on her medications. Tom devotes most of his day to caring for his wife. His daughter and niece provide care when Tom needs a break.
“It’s better that she’s home now. I can take care of her and spend time together,” Tom said.
Tom watches Jan as she sleeps during the day on a living room sofa. He anticipates her needs, makes her meals, prepares her medications, changes her diapers and does all he can to make her comfortable. The television is usually on, tuned to a news channel with the volume turned low. Some days he has soothing Christian music playing.
“The doctor says maybe she has six months. Nobody knows. I just take it one day at a time. She’s the love of my life and every day we have together is precious.”
Blending In
A Unique Coffee Bar Raises Autism Awareness
Story and Photographs © Robin Rayne Nelson/Zuma Press
Atlanta, GA — Customers who stop at the Cafe´Blends coffee bar likely just see Omar Troy as the friendly young man with the engaging smile who offers them a complementary coffee or latte while they wait for their cars to be serviced. It’s only when they take a closer look at the sign or the subtle logo on Omar’s apron that they might sense something is different. 
Remembering ‘Zackie Boy’
A mother’s anguish as her child is placed in a nursing home
Story and photographs © Robin Rayne Nelson/ZUMA Press, All Rights Reserved
Powder Springs, GA — Nola Sayne greeted guests at the memorial celebration for her son Zachary, who died a few days into 2013.
Few of the guests had actually known Zach. He died where he had lived for the last 15 years – in a nursing home 200 miles away from his Georgia family.
Nola wanted the afternoon to feel more like an open house than funeral. “It’s to be a celebration for Zach,” she said.
Nola’s personal knot of emotions was a twist of grief, sadness and relief, all tinged with an undercurrent of guilt for placing her son in a skilled-care facility when he was ten years old.
“I always felt I should have done more to keep him home and care for him here,” she said quietly, even though she admits she had few options at the time.
“Zach was born five weeks premature. It was an emergency c-section and I was told everything was okay. I later learned he was born ‘blue’ and they had to give him oxygen for ten minutes to bring him back,” she said.
Nola brought her son home unaware of any problems. But Zach was her second child and she soon knew something wasn’t right.
“He didn’t make eye contact, he didn’t try to hold his bottle or try to lift his head,” she recalled. “His doctors eventually said he had spinal meningitis. After I got his medical records from the hospital we went to a see a neurologist. The doctor walked into the room and said, ‘He has cerebral palsy.’ I was 23 years old. I didn’t even know what that was.”
After several years of therapy, Nola enrolled her frail son in a special school for severely handicapped children. He never crawled or lifted his head. Typical milestones in child development never arrived. Within a year he began having seizures.
By then, Zach’s father was out of his son’s life. “He couldn’t handle it. He was never involved with his son,” Nola said.
“Zach eventually was able to do a few things that indicated he understood me. He could push a button or move a joystick with his hand. He responded to what I told him and he knew when I scolded him,” she said.
Zach laughed when she tickled him or whispered in his ear. “I used to lean over and say ‘Zackie boy, Zackie boy’ and he would just laugh and laugh. He was always wanting me to hold him or touch him. But he never spoke.”
While Zach was at the special school and an after-school daycare program, Nola was able to work; first as a customer service representative, later as a legal secretary.
“Whenever I applied for a job I explained my situation as a single mom with a seriously handicapped child. There were many times I had to leave early. I was always in trouble in my first job for leaving early or missing work because of Zach’s health problems. My other bosses were very understanding and kind.”
Caring for Zach when he was home was a full-time job in itself.
Nola’s son Josh was older by 22 months. “He learned to be very independent. I taught him to cook and do his own laundry when he was nine. Josh had to take care of himself because I had to take care of Zach.”
“I was Zach’s arms and legs and voice. If I fed him I couldn’t put him in a high chair because he’d fall over. So I sat him in my lap to feed him. When he was sick he slept on my chest so could feel him. I’m still a very light sleeper.”
“I carried him everywhere — to the video store, the grocery store, everywhere we went until he was 10 years old. He only weighed 30 pounds.”
Zach had a fragile immune system and was prone to constant infections. He had pneumonia numerous times, seven in his tenth year alone.
“That’s when doctors realized he had been aspirating food into his lungs when he swallowed. Part of it would go into his esophagus but part of it went into his lungs. The doctors decided he needed a feeding tube.”
After the tube had been placed, Zach gained nearly a pound every week. Lifting and carrying Zach soon became a struggle for Nola.
The day care center’s director called and said the staff was uncomfortable with Zach’s feeding tube. They wouldn’t keep him anymore, even though they had cared for him since he was six months old,” Nola recalled.
“The other daycare centers in the area refused to accept him,” Nola said. “My mother had been helping with Zach for all these years but she moved to Arizona. Zach’s father was still completely out of the picture. My support was gone.”
Nola placed newspaper ads hoping to hire someone who could care for him after school. One woman, an empty-nester, agreed to take the job. It didn’t last long.
“She called me after the first week and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore. Please come get him.’ I drove to her house. Zach was in his little carrier, sitting on the front porch. The woman opened the front door a crack and was crying. She said, ‘I’m sorry’ and closed the door. That was it.”
Nola tried for weeks to find another caregiver for her son but had no luck. Her understanding boss graciously allowed her to bring Zach to work with her.
“It was a metal fabricating plant. Zach slept on a pallet near my desk while I worked. It was noisy and dirty but the guys that worked there were wonderful to us. They were like brothers.”
Nola knew it couldn’t continue like that indefinitely. She moved in with friends to save money. She applied for Social Security benefits to help with Zach, but her application was denied.
“I didn’t have day care anymore. I didn’t have anyone to watch him. I had to figure out what to do. Zach had gained nearly 25 pounds because of his feeding tube. He had grown out of his wheelchair. And now every time we went somewhere I had all this other stuff to take, the feeding pumps, the equipment, all his medicine. We became even more confined.”
“A social worker asked if I’d ever thought about placing Zach. I didn’t know what that meant. She said, ‘You know, putting him in a facility.’ I told her I didn’t know I could do that.” The social worker mailed Nola a list of nursing homes in the southeast that accepted children.
“There weren’t any facilities in Georgia that would accept children. There was one in North Carolina that had a long waiting list. There were some places in Florida. Alabama had two that were specifically set up to care for disabled children,” Nola recalled.
She drove with a friend down to the Father Walters Home in Montgomery, Alabama to have a look.
“I have to admit that part of me was relieved. I felt like I’d had a newborn with me for ten years. This home had 24-hour nursing care and I thought they’ll take care of him the way he needs to be cared for,” Nola recalled.
When the time came to move Zach into the facility, her friend drove Nola and her boys on the three-hour journey.
“It was absolutely horrible. I felt like an awful mother but I didn’t know what else to do. I had no options. My friend kept saying,’ This is the right choice. The kids at this place are always clean, most of the staff have worked there for years and they obviously love these kids.’
“And she asked me, ‘What are you going to do if you don’t do this? Do you have a bunch of money to pay a nanny or nurse to watch him?’ I didn’t.
Nola, Josh and her friend got Zach installed. His ward was a large room with several beds and large cribs, medical equipment and stuffed animals. The home accommodates 54 children.
The drive back to Georgia was somber. “My friend and I cried the whole way home,” Nola said.
Her tears, sadness and self-doubt festered in the weeks that followed. Her doctor prescribed anti-depressants. She began to drink.
“I felt very alone. I learned later that Zach had grown very depressed too. At first I called every night and talked to him. I drove down every two weeks, sometimes every week for a day or two. And Josh blamed himself for his brother moving to the home. He said if he had helped more at home then Zach could have stayed with us.”
Nola remarried a year after Zach was moved to Montgomery. She had known Jeff since high school. He was totally supportive and they often drove together to visit Zach.
“I felt like nobody else understood. Having a special needs child, you’re already in a small minority. When people learn you’ve placed your child in a nursing home they looked at you funny so most of the time I tried to avoid talking about it. They wonder, how could a parent do that?”
“It was too much to explain. People would ask me if I had kids. If I said yes and they asked their ages, they would say, ‘oh yeah, those high school years,’ or bring up drivers licenses or ask about college. It would lead to questions I didn’t want to answer. It was just easier to not talk about it.”
The weekly drives to Montgomery eventually became every three weeks. Usually Nola drove alone. Sometimes Jeff joined her. Now and then Josh would come along.
When Nola arrived on Saturday mornings she would tenderly brush Zach’s hair and as she talked to him. Sometimes he would open his eyes when he heard Nola’s voice. Mostly, Zach slept.
Nola routinely checked the feeding pumps that kept him nourished. She fluffed his pillows and made sure he was as comfortable as possible, carefully lifting his brittle and atrophied arms and legs. Sometimes Nola or Jeff lifted him in his wheelchair for a ride to the family room where they could take turns reading children’s stories to him. When weather permitted, they visited the home’s courtyard for a change of scenery, always mindful of bright sunlight’s effect on Zach’s pale skin and sensitive eyes.
In all the years of visits, the goodbyes never ceased to be difficult. Nola would kiss Zach’s forehead and whisper ‘I love you’ in his ear. Zach would sometimes respond with a blink of an eye. As dusk approached, Nola would head back to the interstate for the long drive home, always with a heavy heart. She was grateful for the excellent care her son was receiving, but in recent years there was a constant voice in her head urging her to bring Zach back to Georgia.
Zach had been in Alabama so long that he was now a resident of the state. Nola had to file for guardianship in order to move him back. In the fifteen years since she placed Zach in the home, not a single skilled-care facility for children had opened in Georgia. “Nothing had really changed. The waiting list for Georgia’s Medicaid Waiver that provides funds for disabled residents had grown to nearly 6,000 names,” she said.
With years of inactivity, Zach developed scoliosis that created problems with his lungs and heart. His breathing became labored. There were numerous visits to the Montgomery hospital’s emergency room. Nola always stayed with him, often for days at a time. “I wasn’t going to leave him in the hospital without a voice,” Nola said. “Bad things happen when you can’t talk.”
In the last few months as Zach’s condition deteriorated, Nola sensed the end was near. “His fingers were touching his arm and his toes were completely curled under,” she said.
“I wasn’t praying for healing anymore. I was praying for God to pretty much just take him. I had talked with Zach on some of his hospital stays when it didn’t look good. I held his hand and I told him, “You don’t have to stay here. It’s okay. You can let go.”
“At Christmas, we drove down to visit and bring his gifts. They were brightly colored pillows and pajamas. He had quite a pillow collection since that’s how we shifted his position in the bed, with pillows.”
The next week, Zack was back in the hospital for more breathing difficulty.
“The doctors couldn’t find anything specifically to treat but wanted to keep him in the hospital just to be safe. I fought that,” Nola explained. “His condition wasn’t going to improve. They couldn’t cure him. If he stayed there he would be on oxygen 24 hours a day and would just live there. They were constantly doing IVs in his armpit because they couldn’t find veins, it was horrible.”
“Zach was miserable in the hospital. He wanted to be back in the nursing home. I told the doctors, ‘If you’re concerned about liability don’t worry, I’m not going to sue anybody. I reminded them of the ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ order I signed. I said, ‘We can’t keep Zach around forever.’ I didn’t want anyone to be a hero. Zach was soon back in his own bed in the nursing home.”
Four days after New Years, nursing staff called to tell her Zach tested positive for flu. His doctor assured her Zach would be treated in the home rather than subject him to another hospital stay. Nola was grateful. She planned to drive down first thing the next morning.
The call at 4 a.m. jarred her awake. “Zach’s breathing had become much worse,” she said. “The ambulance was called to rush him to the hospital. I cried and called my mom, who had recently moved back to Georgia. She agreed to go with me immediately.”
The nurse called again twenty minutes later. Zach was gone. He died before the ambulance could get there. It was over.
“It was the call I had imagined I don’t know many times, wondering how it would come,” Nola reflected. “I wanted to be there when he died. But he didn’t die alone. He died in his bed, at home, where he was comfortable.”
That Zach’s memorial is on a Saturday is quite appropriate. “Today would have been a typical ‘visit Zach’ Saturday,” Nola said.
It will take time for the sadness and the grief to lift, and the guilt that comes with placing your child in a nursing home.
“I did everything I knew to do,” Nola said. “But I will always ask myself if I couldn’t have done more.”
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Nola and Zachary Sayne’s story is featured in ‘Not Home,’ a documentary on children who live in nursing homes by filmmaker Narcel Reedus. I was privileged to serve as the still photographer for this project.
No Labels, Please
Story and Photographs by Robin Nelson
Milton, GA — Meggy Kay felt like a princess. Her best friend and high school classmate Alanna Christian was giddy with excitement. The girls watched from Alanna’s bedroom window as their tuxedo-clad ‘Prince Charmings’ approached the house with corsages in hand. It was prom night. This would be a most special occasion — and not just for the students.
“It’s a rite of passage as the kids make that transition into being adults. For parents of children with challenges and developmental disabilities, it’s a milestone as well,” admits Meggy’s dad, Kenny.
Meggy and Alanna are both seniors at Milton High School. They’re both in the special education class because of intellectual challenges that eventually become apparent, but that doesn’t stop them from having the same dreams and goals as their fellow students in the regular classrooms.
“Meggy is who she is,” explains Kenny. “As for her disability, it’s a little of this, a little of that. Doctors have mentioned autism. There’s no physiological reason for her intellectual disability. We don’t have a label for it. I think it’s better that way because Meggy is not defined by a disability. She’s more like the other girls than she is different.”
Meshiel Christian, Alanna’s mom, nods her head in agreement. Meggy and Alanna have been best friends since they met in a self-contained sixth grade special education classroom. Alanna, 20, was diagnosed with a developmental delay and mild cerebral palsy. She experiences autism to a slight degree and at times seems quite shy.
“Alanna knew all about what to expect for the prom. She knew about getting her nails done, the dress, a limousine, and dinner reservations, all of it. Alanna and Meggy are just like the other girls in so many ways,” Meshiel said.
“I had a moment when tears came to my eyes when I saw her all dressed up, waiting expectantly for her date to come calling,” recalled Meggy’s mom, Mindy.
“I was a granny-knot of emotions. I said, ‘where’s my little girl?’ but she’s growing up. For parents raising special needs children — and especially girls — it was a ‘wow’ moment. I was so happy for her because she had the opportunity to go to the prom with her friend Jimmy and just be like the other students. These kids have all been a part of each other’s lives. They were all in there together enjoying a special night. Nobody’s making a fuss because these students have a developmental challenge.”
Jimmy Rice, 18, experiences autism. He has one more year in the school’s special education program.
“My son has never mentioned that he feels different from other students,” says his dad, Charlie. “He has lots of friends in the school. They might see him in the hallway looking confused once in a while and they’ll ask, ‘Whatcha need, Jimmy?’ They’ll get him pointed in the right direction. They don’t treat him like a child. They include Jimmy in activities because he’s their friend, not because it’s ‘poor Jimmy.’ Nobody’s feeling sorry for him. And that’s the way it ought to be. Jimmy is just so happy-go-lucky and he has friends who like him for who he is.”
“Jimmy had mentioned the prom a few months ago, but he didn’t have a date. And then Meggy asked him to go with her. He was so excited to be going,” his mom Cindy recalled.
“His tuxedo was actually his high school band uniform. He’s a percussionist in the band, and he loves it,” Charlie said. “He chose a different cummerbund and shirt, and then Jimmy and his mom sat down at the computer to order Meggy’s corsage online. He took the initiative.”
Alanna met her date Elijah two years ago at an area dance organized for students with disabilities. Elijah is 16 years old and a sophomore in another school. Though he experiences Asperger’s syndrome that affects his ability to socialize and communicate with others, his parents only told him of his diagnosis a year ago.
“Beyond the name, nothing has changed,” his dad, Terry Walker explained to Elijah. “I said, ‘Son, you think different from other kids, but that’s all.’ Sometimes if parents make too much of a disability the children will see themselves as different, maybe use it as an excuse or a crutch.”
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For Meggy, Alanna and their moms, Prom Day was complete with manicures and pedicures, gowns, high heels, mixed with the aroma of hairspray and perfume.
Meshiel Christian styled the girls’ hair in her home-based salon. Alanna soaked up the attention, the hair and the makeup like a sponge. “She wants to learn to do hair when she’s done with school,” Meshiel said
Not so much for Meggy, though.
“Mom said I had to wear makeup. I did my own lipstick,” Meggy said proudly. “Except I missed a spot.”
Mindy did her best to fix it. “Meggy’s not a real girly-girl, she doesn’t like makeup much. She’s more into baggy short and t-shirts. But I try,” she said as she smoothed a smudge of eye shadow Meggy had also applied.
“I had to wear my heels around the house to practice walking,” Meggy said as she struggled with her new shoes. “I had to wear them to the dinner table. And while washing dishes.”
Alanna was completely at ease in her gown and silver sandals. Her neighborhood girlfriends stopped by her house to see Alanna and Meggy dressed up. They gushed as how nice the girls looked. Alanna and Meggy both beamed. Cameras flashed. Then it was time for their grand entrance down the stairs.
Jimmy and Elijah stood proud at the front door, their dates’ corsages in hand. Terry straightened his son’s tie and reminded him of proper etiquette. “How to be a proper gentleman has become a lost art. But it’s not lost on him. In my mind, I’m so proud of him because he’s a sophomore going to the prom with a senior,” he said.
“Society puts it in your head that persons with disabilities need to be treated different. Keep them separated from the others to keep them safe. You can hear it when people talk to someone with a disability and they talk down to them as if they were a small child. And then they talk louder and slower to them. We shouldn’t do that, but people often do,” he observed.
“Jimmy looks so nice in that tux,” Meggy said. “When I came down the stairs I didn’t recognize him. Usually he wears t-shirt and jeans but tonight he looks like a man!” she whispered to her mom.
The time was growing near for the couples’ departure. The ‘limo’ was waiting. There were dinner reservations before the prom. The young women and their dates stood outside Alanna’s home and posed as a friends, parents, neighbors — even a former teacher — gathered with cameras for what seemed like hundreds of snapshots. It was a scene undoubtedly replicated at thousands of homes across the country on prom night.
Then it was off to an evening without parents, in a massive hall that had been magically transformed into a wonderland of laser lights, glitter balls, streamers and elaborate decorations that prom committee members spent weeks making after school. It was a night of loud music with hundreds of their classmates dancing, laughing and mingling during a tender time somewhere between adolescence and adulthood, spiced with formal gowns, tuxedos and sparkly shoes – and a slow dance or two. Meggy, Alanna, Jimmy and Elijah were right in the middle of it. Prom night would be a precious memory for all of them. No labels needed.
Nuclear Angst in the Heartland
In 1933, the federal government’s creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority helped bring electricity and economic development to much of rural Tennessee. It was steeped in controversy when it began.
In the wake of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in March, TVA’s controversy continues to brew.
Story and Photographs © 2011 by Robin Nelson/ZUMA Press All Rights Reserved
Loudon, TN — Mansour Guity sipped his morning coffee on the deck of his waterfront home and gazed at the peaceful Tennessee River below. “Yes, it is beautiful. I am very blessed,” he said.
But Mr. Guity wakes every day with an unrelenting concern about the Tennessee Valley Authority’s nuclear plants in this region of the south. Especially the Watts Bar reactors, 31 miles downriver from his home.
“It is an accident waiting to happen,” he says of the facility, mired in controversy since on-and-off construction began in 1973. “There is a serious potential for trouble still embedded within the structures. It is not a matter of ‘if’ something happens, but ‘when’ something happens,” he warned.
He speaks with authority. And more than a little anger.
Guity, 69, a senior nuclear engineer, was lead quality assurance auditor for design and construction at the Watts Bar site in the late 1970’s. Not long after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979, Guity was handpicked to join the now-defunct Nuclear Safety Review Staff, which was responsible for reviewing multiple nuclear power generators in the TVA fleet.
Mr. Guity said he discovered unauthorized shortcuts and inadequate craftsmanship in numerous aspects of construction at the Watts Bar site.
“I exposed significant nuclear safety problems in my reports, many of which remain unresolved today,” he said.
“I found cables that had been bent beyond their permitted radius. Other cables, critical to the operation of valves and switches in the reactor and containment building, had been vertically suspended without any support. Some had been pulled and stressed beyond their limits. Nobody really knows how badly the cables may have been compromised, and they are the nerve system of a nuclear power plant. There were problems with welds, and concrete walls that were too thin, and just a lot of poor work.”
“I was asked to serve on the NSR staff because of my experience and because I said it like it is. But the TVA didn’t like what I had to say,” he continued. “My reports that exposed serious problems were often ignored.”
“Regardless of whatever happened in the 70s and 80s, it’s a new era today,” insists Ray Golden, a TVA spokesman. “There probably are still some long-standing allegations that have not been closed out,” he admitted. “But, before Unit 2 comes online, before we get a license to operate, there will be an exhaustive review by this company and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”
The NRC has the exclusive authority and responsibility for the safety of the American public when it comes to nuclear power, Mr. Golden said. “They don’t take that lightly. The NRC has the expertise to come in and inspect every aspect of the site — the licensing documents, the cables, the welds, wall thicknesses, all of it. They will make the ultimate determination if a license should be granted or not.”
“When information came to light about construction quality problems at Watts Bar in the 80’s, the TVA and NRC investigated them. I can’t speak to the rigor of those inspections; I would hope that they were very rigorous. People make allegations or raise concerns and those allegations are investigated. Sometimes to their satisfaction, other times not to their satisfaction, and they tend to want to retain their issue,” he noted.
Mr. Guity eventually went public with his reports. He was the primary witness in a 1986 congressional investigation into the TVA.
“Twenty years ago, the NRC declared Watts Bar to be the worst nuclear plant ever designed and constructed in the world. It took a lot of courage for the NRC to come up with that evaluation,” he said.
It was the cloud of collusion, corruption, fear and intimidation during that time that troubled him the most, he said.
“Third-party inspectors had the responsibility to examine every facet of construction and write their reports. Everything had to meet strict guidelines. Inspectors were often quietly ordered by their supervisors to accept things that didn’t meet quality or nuclear safety compliance requirements,” he said.
“If something wasn’t right and an inspector made note of it in his report, there was a TVA manager who called the inspector’s supervisors and strongly encouraged them to ‘rein in’ that inspector. Inspectors sometimes changed their reports because they were in fear for their jobs,” he said. “I couldn’t trust their reports because they had been compromised.”
“This was all happening during a time when anyone who spoke out was fired. The inspectors were so scared they were afraid to talk to me on the telephone,” Mr. Guity continued. “There were times I had to drive two hours away to a remote location or telephone just so these inspectors could feel safe in telling me what was really going on.”
“The TVA knew what they were doing. They were under the gun to reduce completion costs and get the thing running to generate electricity. Many of the problems are buried beneath 30 to 40 years of construction,” he said.
Construction at Watts Bar stalled in 1986, for both economic and safety reasons. The region’s demand for more power had slowed. The downtime was used to correct problems, TVA officials explained. It would be eleven years before Unit 1 was completed and licensed to operate in 1996.
Unit 2’s construction resumed in 2007. Expected to be fully operational by the end of 2012, it will be the first new civilian reactor in the U.S. to power up since Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in March.
After his testimony in Washington, D.C., the Nuclear Safety Review Staff was eliminated in a TVA reorganization. Mr. Guity was reassigned to a new job in the TVA offices in Chattanooga, an hour further south.
Stripped of any real authority and reporting to his new post without defined job responsibilities, Guity found himself with little to do except read newspapers, industry journals and talk on the telephone with his friends. “I was a workaholic. Now I had nothing to do. If my supervisors did give me something to evaluate I usually found flaws — and that was the last thing they wanted,” he said.Depression eventually took its toll on Mr. Guity, forcing him to go on medical disability in 1987. A Department of Labor investigation later supported all of his allegations. 
“When Mansour Guity and other whistle blowers came forward in the mid-eighties, the TVA had represented to the NRC that Watts Bar Unit 1 was ready to go online. When the NRC started looking into the allegations, they said ‘no’,” recalls Steven Smith, a Knoxville, Tennessee veterinarian who left his practice in 1999 to lead a clean energy initiative.
“Not only did they not let Watts Bar come on, they shut down all of TVA’s reactors for three years,” he said.“The TVA is very arrogant about the way it approaches nuclear power. They feel like they can do anything. They have amnesia about some of the historic issues that have plagued the agency. It is their overly aggressive approach to nuclear power that led to TVA having the largest debt of any utility in the country,” he added.
“During that eleven-year period, there were certain systems they still had access to that they fixed,” he said. “There were others they claimed were not part of the critical paths for shutting the reactor down that were likely not addressed. I think some of those things were baked into the reactor, which are now difficult to reach.”
“To be fair, Unit 1 has run reasonably well since it came online 15 years ago,” Mr. Smith continued. “It is unclear if Unit 2 will do the same. It is also unclear if some of those fundamental problems that were identified during the construction phase will be able to withstand the full demands of the reactor when it goes online. Did they only correct some the surface things? Over time, will some of those fundamental flaws in construction manifest themselves before the operational life of the reactor is over? That story will only be known after forty or sixty years.”
“These reactors are terribly unforgiving if they get out of control. It is definitely an outdated design. The systems in these older reactors have multiple paths for failure. They are dependent on a number of human factors, particularly in how they are shut down,” he said.
The Fukushima disaster in Japan shook the nuclear power industry to its core, Mr. Smith noted. “It was a jarring demonstration of just how quickly cascading events can cripple a nuclear reactor,” he said.
“To the industry’s credit, they do build in redundancies. ‘Defense in depth’ means if multiple things go wrong, you are still able to shut the reactor down safely and maintain control. But it should make everyone question the normal thinking about how much defense in depth you have.”
“At what point have you done enough defense in depth to where it is safe? The industry will say what they’ve done in the U.S. is enough, anything else will just add cost,” Smith said.
“Can I say Watts Bar will be the reactor that has a problem? That’s hard to say. But the longer they push that reactor and the longer it operates, the greater the chance for some of those baked-in issues that Mr. Guity identified to become a problem.
“The way the NRC is regulating, allowing these reactors to run longer than they were designed to do, allowing license extensions, allowing the utilities to make them run harder than they were designed to do, dialing back on regulatory oversight reviews, I think is a prescription for an accident. Bringing on Unit 2 next year doubles the possibilities that some of those fundamental problems could manifest themselves,” he said.
“The regulators and the general public should be asking a lot of tough questions. A big question is, will the NRC take the lessons learned from Fukushima, or will they give Watts Bar a pass?”
Mr. Golden admits that the TVA, like nuclear power industry at large, was knocked off-center by the Fukushima disaster.
“We never considered the concept of stacked events, about what would happen if we had a combination of a flood and a tornado, or a flood and an earthquake. The NRC never had that as part of their design basis. So this is a whole new lens that the regulators and the industry has to look through,” he said.
“Within a day of the Fukushima disaster, we had centralized response team from all three TVA sites. We wanted to know what happened, how did it happen, and what is the significance of what happened. We are analyzing our plants. Fukushima showed us there are opportunities for improvement. As an industry we will become, in a perverse way, a better industry because of this event.” Mr. Golden continued.
But to Mr. Smith, the 1950’s live on in this region of the country.
“There is this legacy in the Tennessee Valley, in the area of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where nuclear power was born. Nuclear energy is part of this area’s culture. The TVA tries to characterize itself as being the only utility that is bringing on new nuclear reactors,” he explained.
“There’s nothing new about these reactors. This agency has a troubled past and is trying to clean up its balance sheet with old reactors that were never finished. They want to bring these units online before they are so old they are obsolete and become lost assets.”
“From a safety perspective, that doesn’t do anything to build confidence. From an innovation and leadership perspective, we think the TVA should be focused on the clean energy side,” he said.
The Watts Bar plant sits along the Tennessee River near its namesake dam in a rural stretch of rolling hills between Knoxville and Chattanooga. The serene river landscape in the plant’s immediate vicinity is host to dozens of fishermen every day, in boats and along the banks, who happily fill their coolers with catfish. “Some of the biggest I’ve seen, some of them fifty pounds,” noted one angler who has been fishing in sight of the majestic cooling towers for more than ten years. He had no concerns over the nuclear reactors’ safety.
Along the winding roads to the small towns nearby, many residents seem equally unconcerned about any potential nuclear mishap.
“Folks are hurting for money around here, they really pinch their pennies,” says Joe Zych, who owns the Peddler’s Village and Flea Market a few miles from the site’s well-guarded entrance. “There’s not that much work in the area except for the power plant. We would be a lot worse off if it weren’t here. I think it’s safe, and so do most of the people I know,” he said.
The power plant’s regular work force fluctuates between 900 to 1,400 employees. Construction crews for the second reactor account for another 3,400 jobs. Watts Bar’s current payroll exceeds well over $100 million. While the TVA pays no taxes because it is a government-owned utility, nearly $128 million for fees in lieu of taxes are paid to state and local governments. Road impact fees and purchase of local goods and services bump the total economic impact to well over $230 million, Mr. Golden explained.
When the second reactor goes online, the plant will generate a combined total of more than 2,300 megawatts of power per day.
Mr. Golden and other TVA officials maintain they are not only good neighbors, but safe ones as well.
“If you look at the TVA fleet over the past 37 years, and you look at performance indicators — the number of reactor trips, workers’ exposure to radiation, and radioactive waste material that is generated, you would see steadily improving numbers. We’re not perfect. There’s human frailty and mechanical issues, but collectively we are better than we were in 1974.”
“We’ve been the pioneer. To some extent we try to be a leader, too. We try to benchmark best practices in other areas — California, for example — and bring them back to our facilities to continue to improve,” he said.
The TVA conducted economic studies and determined there was two billion dollars in savings to their customers by finishing a partially constructed unit rather than building something new, Mr. Golden continued.
“The rigor, pedigree and quality assurance that goes into nuclear plants is massive, regardless if they were older units sitting idle or not. We don’t assume anything. Everything needs to demonstrate its safety capability. It is all refurbished, reverified and recertified in order to demonstrate that it is safe,” he said.
Mansour Guity would like to believe it was so.
Robin Rayne: A Southern Photojournalist's Notebook 