Lee, a ShelterCare program participant, shared his success story with us about how ShelterCare Medical Respite (SMR) changed his life. We are excited to share his inspiring story with you now.
“I got hit by a car walking across the street and ended up in the hospital. I was homeless. I had no place to go. I was staying in a tent in Florence,” Lee explained. Lee’s injury was severe, too severe to recover on the street. “The doctor who did my surgery asked me if they released me, where I would go, and I told them I was going to go to a tent. With the injury that I had, I probably would have lost my foot. My ankle was fractured and broken. They put a whole bunch of screws in it. After the surgery, I wasn’t allowed to put any weight on it for three months. Getting in and out of a tent was not a viable solution with a wheelchair,“ Lee explained.
Lee is not someone who has been chronically unhoused. He first experienced homelessness at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when he moved to Oregon to be close to his family. “My dad lived on the coast, and when the pandemic hit, I was in Washington state. They were talking about making it really difficult to travel between states, so I quit my job and moved here.” Lee quickly discovered the low rental vacancy rate in the area, “I thought I would just be able to move into a place. I’d lived here 30 years ago, and there were rooms to rent and things like that. That wasn’t the case at all.” According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the rental vacancy rate in Lane County was only about 2% at that time.
This period of homelessness was a difficult time in Lee’s life: “after three and a half years, I was pretty rough around the edges,” he explained. Then things got even worse: “one moment I’m walking across the street, and the next thing I know I’m hit by a car and I’m in an ambulance,” he said. He needed help more than ever.
He told us about how it felt talking with his medical team before being referred to SMR. He remembers saying, “I don’t care where you send me or what I have to do, but I really don’t have any place to go.”
Lee was able to stay at SMR for the entire time he was in a wheelchair. “I was there from January through May, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am. It’s hard for me to walk still. It was nice to have a roof over my head. It was nice to not have to worry about meals. It was nice to be out of the tent. I was grateful to have a place I could go into, lock the door, rest, and not have to survive,” he said.
ShelterCare Medical Respite is an 18-bed facility that provides safe, emergency shelter for people who are experiencing homelessness and have recently been discharged from the hospital after an acute medical episode, yet still require limited care. This year, in partnership with Kaiser Permanente, SMR became one of the first 12 programs in the country to be certified by The National Institute for Medical Respite Care!
While Lee was staying at SMR, he reflected on his career in healthcare and social services and the burnout he experienced, “when I first started working with individuals who were developmentally disabled, we had three staff to five or six clients, all in wheelchairs, and all needing a lot of care,” he explained, “toward the end, I was working one to five. That’s how you burn somebody out. I lost a lot of faith in human beings at that time.” Lee told us about how being in such a supportive environment when he was the one in need was more than just physically healing for him: “Over the past six months, my compassion has gone up because someone helped me when I really freaking needed it and was there for me,” he said.
Esther is SMR’s Lead Service Coordinator; she told us how seeing Lee’s progress was her favorite part of working with him, “even with everything Lee had been through, he was able to maintain that focus on that positive goal, and it made it easy for us to help him get there. I feel that we got to see more of a full process with him than we do for a lot of other people that we work with. During his time there, he was able to make so much progress that he was able to move, not to another shelter, not to a sober living house, but to his own independent apartment on his own two feet, standing, not in a wheelchair.”
Not only is Lee able to walk and is living in his own apartment, but he also got a stable job doing phone surveys, which has allowed him to continue focusing on healing, start to make his apartment his own, and begin to think about his goals for the future. “I’ve been able to take a couple of paychecks and get stuff for the apartment that I didn’t have, like a fan, a blender, and I’ve got a couple of pieces of furniture now that I feel like are mine. The next thing for me is continuing to focus on working. I like the job I’m doing. I’m about three months out from when I’m going to have my leg X-rayed again, and at that point, I think it will be completely healed! I’m working toward buying a car or electric bike,” he said.
“You can tell that the individuals who work there (SMR) have had experiences in their lives that have brought them out of the woodwork to help others. It was a good place for me to go and rest, and that’s really what I needed,” said Lee. Your donation will help our compassionate staff, like Esther, continue providing support to individuals like Lee, who need a safe place to heal from a traumatic medical event. Will you change a life with us by donating today?