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Services Connect Highland Park Senior To Social Lifeline
By L. A. Johnson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
July 13, 2004
"I get out of breath real easily even with oxygen; almost everything is an effort now," says Carrie Steele.
The thin, clear tubing that delivers pure oxygen to Carrie Steele's lungs is a lifeline and a ligature.
She doesn't like to complain. Life just gets hard sometimes and old age is seldom kind. Time and her body are betraying her, though her mind and spirit remain strong.
Her blood pressure and cholesterol run high. She had a heart attack in December and has emphysema.
"That's what you get when you smoke," says the petite-yet-sturdy Steele, who turned 80 in May. "I don't no more but I did."
She can move freely about her Highland Park home -- upstairs and in the basement -- even though she is tethered to an oxygen-generating machine with 50 feet of tubing.
"It goes anywhere I go," she says. "I get tangled up in it every once in a while, but it's still a good thing to have."
The hiss of the machine as it pushes air through the tubing pierces the silence at regular intervals.
"Mum loves her," Steele says, scratching her cat, Kitty, under the chin. Cinny, her other cat, watches through the banister from a perch about 20 steps up the flight of stairs. Cat tchotchkes -- from paintings and photos to figurines and stuffed animals -- fill her home.
Steele takes a portable oxygen unit with her whenever she leaves the house.
"It's really a nuisance, but I'm just glad to have it," she says. "When I cuss it, I think, 'At least it gets me out of the house.' "
Since she started oxygen therapy after her heart attack, venturing out into the world has required more effort.
"Draggin' that oxygen, it's heavy," she says. "You know what shoulder purses were like, they kept sliding down? And that oxygen won't stay on my shoulder, just cumbersome, that's all."
One Monday she got up, got showered and dressed, packed her oxygen and headed to her doctor's office downtown, only to realize she was there a week early.
"I said to myself ... 'I better call and check,' but I didn't," she says. "If I had, I would have saved myself the trip."
"I was a little bit upset with myself ... that I'd wasted that time and effort ... but ... I got over it and ended up laughing at myself."
She worked at Wendy's on Fifth Avenue, Downtown, as a hostess for more than 18 years and quit about eight years ago.
"I got up every morning of my life at 4 a.m. and was on the bus by 5 a.m. because I wanted to work breakfast," she says, bemoaning the fact that Wendy's doesn't serve breakfast anymore. "All my job was to make you want to come back, and they didn't care if that took me sitting down to have a cup of coffee with you."
Steele became a virtual social director in Wendy's upstairs dining room. She made people who came in alone sit with others and organized parties for birthdays or retirements. Two customers she introduced one morning eventually ended up marrying.
"They were at different tables and I put the two at the table and then two more and two more," she says proudly. "Eventually there were 12 and they met every morning."
Steele still receives occasional calls and letters from the couple.
In a 1990 a Wall Street Journal article about older people working for younger bosses, Steele, then 66, said some younger people shirk their work duties and don't fear losing one job because there are plenty of other entry-level openings.
"When I was 16, I was beating down the door begging for a job," she said in the article. "The only thing they've got over us is that they're better-built and better-looking."
She used to visit the Vintage Senior Center on Highland Avenue three to four times a week for breakfast or bingo. Now, she gets over there only every once in a while.
"I get down, get a little bit depressed and sometimes I can talk myself out of it," she says. "I get out of breath real easily even with oxygen; almost everything is an effort now."
More than 6,200 homebound seniors are served through the Allegheny County Area Agency on Aging. There were more than 228,000 people 65 and over in Allegheny County in 2000, according to the U.S. Census, and more than 30 percent of them lived alone.
Steele's son has set up support services for her to make life a bit easier. She receives Meals on Wheels.
"Nine out of 10 are good," she explains.
Once a week, a young woman comes in to help Steele clean or "rid up," as she says.
Then, there's Effie.
Technically, Ethelyn "Effie" Baynard is a senior companion to Steele through Ursuline Services Inc. She visits her about once a week just to chat and pass the time. However, the two have become fast friends. They banter like a vaudeville comedy duo, these two older ladies -- one white, one black -- both with red hair.
"I was telling her about the men -- or lack of men -- in my life," says Baynard, an East Liberty woman who doesn't look a day over 57 but is actually 68. "I don't want my clean sheets messed up. I don't want to cook for them."
"I thought we were through with men," says Steele, as if the two had made an earlier pact.
"We don't want to bring them home. We're not going to feed them," Baynard says.
"We won't even let them up on the porch," adds Steele with a chuckle, as she sits on the landing at the bottom of the stairs and straightens out little kinks in her oxygen tubing.
"Yes, once you let them in the door, it's kind of hard to kick them off," Baynard says.
Then they laugh a knowing, throaty laugh -- like old friends sharing an inside joke -- but there's a slight edge to their giddying laughter that bespeaks an intimate knowledge of love and heartache.
"My first and third husbands were wonderful men," Steele says. "The second was a snake in the grass."
Steele's third husband, John, died almost two years ago. They'd been married 30 years. Lung cancer claimed a son, Bruce Gamrod, in 1995. He was only 44. Steele says she was angry with God for a long while after her son's death, but through therapy she worked through her pain and regained her faith.
She wouldn't consider marriage again, though she believes she still has "it."
"I got it, I just don't know what to do with it," she says. "I'd love someone to take me out to dinner, though, or for a ride every once in a while."
And while she and Baynard have men on hold, show biz isn't out of the question.
"Maybe we could be in a sitcom together," Steele tells Baynard. "You'd be the straight guy."
Baynard singled out Steele from a group of people to whom she could have been a senior companion because Steele sounded down to earth.
"She's wonderful, and I'm not saying that just because she's sitting there," Baynard says. "When I first met her, I enjoyed talking with her and we just clicked from day one."
"I think it's our red hair," says Steele, who feels her weekly visits with Effie go much too quickly.
Baynard plans to help Steele get a rolling cart for her portable oxygen machine so that she doesn't have to carry it when they go out on walks. Steele jokes that everyone who comes to visit wants to take her for a walk to the park, in some sort of grand exercise conspiracy. But she doesn't mind.
Sue Schultz calls Steele about 4 p.m. each day as part of Contact Pittsburgh's Senior Reassurance
Program
.
"There are lots of people out there who just need a phone call to know somebody is out there checking on them to say 'hello,' " says Schultz, 52, of Pleasant Hills.
Schultz and Steele have been talking for about four months and they discuss everything from Schultz recently taking up fishing and Steele's cats to the war in Iraq and Food Network chef Emeril Lagasse of "Bam!" fame.
"I got addicted to him," Steele says.
She's a Bill O'Reilly fan, too.
"The only thing is, I think if you're not saying what he wants you to say, he tries to shut you up," Steele says.
"Our conversations are more upbeat than when we first got started," says Schultz, who believes the conversations are mutually beneficial. "If she's a little down, I tell her something funny and get her to giggle a little bit."
Schultz looks forward to the daily chats as much as Steele does.
"I don't look at it as a chore," Schultz says. "At 4 o'clock, I'm calling my friend."
Steele agrees.
"I've never seen her. I don't even know her last name. I just look forward to it," Steele says. "She is just a doll. Sometimes we chat for 20 or 30 minutes."
Steele's mood and emotional well-being have improved since she started the daily conversations with Schultz, says Megan McKinley, director of youth and senior services at Contact Pittsburgh.
"She's wonderful, just a really social woman," McKinley says.
Steele remembers the kindness of the visiting nurses and McKinley, who visited her every day after she returned home from the hospital following her heart attack.
"I was bad after they left," she says. "I felt terrible and [Contact Pittsburgh] recommended all these people to come and see me."
Her son, Chuck Gamrod, takes her grocery shopping, picks up her prescriptions, comes over for dinner each Thursday and calls her every day.
She brags about Gamrod, who works at Betsy Ann Chocolates.
"He made truffles for Pavarotti," she says proudly.
He used to bring her candy, but she eventually had to ask him to stop.
"I was a chocoholic."
Gamrod got his mother the food, cleaning and senior companion services when he noticed things were just too much for her to do by herself.
"She's on oxygen now and trailing a cord around, but she's not an invalid," says Gamrod, 55, of Frazer. "It's tough. She'd like to be independent and come and go and do what she needs done when she needs it done, but she can't ... and it's frustrating."
Gamrod tells his mother to look at the glass as half full instead of half empty.
"And that's what I say to myself," she says. "If I feel like I'm being smothered and things are closing in on me, you know God will never give you more than you can handle and I believe that."
And the help she has received through Contact Pittsburgh and Ursuline Services has made all the difference.
"You feel like you're the only person in the world [having a tough time] and I was so down," she says. "Now, I have so many people calling and coming over every day, I have to write it down on a calendar."
She has been surprised to learn how much help is out there.
"I thought when you were old, they just put you in a corner and left you, but that's not true."
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