Transcription of Differently Abled #122
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast Show #122 airing for the first time on Sunday, January 12, 2014. Today’s show is titled Differently Abled. Our guests include: Scott Wentzell, Marketing Director at Thomas Moser Cabinetmakers; and Charlie McBrady of Zachau Construction; both of whom are on the Morrison Center Board of Directors.
Each of us has access to a different set of attributes, skills, talents and physical characteristics. For some of us, the attributes are more readily apparent than for others. This is especially true of individuals who were in the past referred to as handicapped. We now understand these individuals to be differently able and often capable of accessing attributes that many of us never even considered largely as a result of learning to work with the world.
Today’s guests, Scott Wentzell and Charlie McBrady, have experienced this firsthand through their experiences raising differently abled sons and through their work on the Morrison Center Board of Directors.
We hope that our show causes you to think a little bit about people who are differently abled in this world and your interactions with them and perhaps how you might be differently abled yourself. Thank you for joining us.
I met our next guest at an art opening for Art Collector Maine through Thomas Moser, which I think a lot of people will recognize as being one of Maine’s top furniture makers in the state and nationally now. This individual, Scott Wentzell, is actually in marketing with Thomas Moser, but perhaps equally important is also on the Board of Directors with the Morrison Center, and probably more importantly is father to Scotty Wentzell who celebrated his 13th birthday?
Scott: That’s correct.
Lisa: Brings a really interesting sort of story into the world. I thought we’d have Scott Wentzell come on a talk about Scotty Wentzell, his adventures with Scotty and with his wife, Lisa. Thanks for being with us today.
Scott: My pleasure.
Lisa: Scott, you weren’t really thinking that your life was going to turn out the way that it did when it came to having a child who has this syndrome, Dubowitz Syndrome.
Scott: Correct, yeah.
Lisa: Which is very rare?
Scott: It is very rare.
Lisa: Not a lot known about it. Tell me a little bit about the beginnings of this.
Scott: Sure. My wife and I actually went to high school together, didn’t date until after college, but were familiar to each other so we go back a long ways. When we got married in the 90s, we were living up at Sugarloaf and thought that it was going to be a great place to start and raise a family.
When Scotty came along, we were surprised to learn at first it was a cardiac issue that he was born with, an issue called Tetralogy of Fallot which essentially he had four things wrong with his heart. He was born in Farmington. Immediately we were transported down to Maine Med which has one of the most amazing cardiac units in the country, and specifically pediatric cardiac professionals in the country are based there.
He had heart surgery at five days old and another full bigger surgery at about six months old, so we were immediately put on this path of the unknown with Scotty and immediately felt like we couldn’t be in a better place. It did mean that we left Sugarloaf and moved down closer to the Portland area to be a little bit closer to the services that he needed then. We came to realize that he needed long-term, but there’s so much here in this community that we never knew about because we never had reason to access the different programs and organizations that are here, so I love talking about his story and the world that opened up to us in having to understand how we could help him reach his full potential as our son and going through childhood. He’s 13 now, so we just entered the teenage years which is a little daunting for any parent. We’ve got a great support system.
Lisa: Did you know that Scotty had issues before he was born?
Scott: We didn’t. My wife’s pregnancy was completely normal, which is fairly typical for Dubowitz involved children. The first sign that we had that anything was wrong was when she was about a week overdue and went to have a stress test administered, what they would normally do for any woman who’s past her due date and then wanted to make sure everything was okay.
One of the things they realize when they do this test is they’re looking for the baby to react in a certain way. One of those reactions is seeing the heart rate go up. His heart rate was going down, which is the opposite of what they’d like to see. They decided pretty much on the spot that they needed to do a C-section and get him born and figure out what was going on. They knew pretty much right away that he had a pretty serious heart issue at play, called an ambulance and had a pediatric ambulance come up from Portland to Farmington and pick him up.
It was interesting, we were standing in the neonatal unit which for some odd reason, it was just us there that night, which I think is fairly unusual. He had pretty much every piece of equipment in the room hooked up to him. Farmington is where my family is from. My mom grew up there and her parents grew up there. Their parents grew up there, so I go way back in the community there.
I’m leaning against the wall looking at Scotty hooked up to all this equipment and I look over to my right and there’s a donor plaque for a capital campaign that had happened when they built the hospital or built that part of the hospital and it said, “All the equipment in this room provided by Jim and Barbara Flint,” and those are my grandparents. They were Scotty’s great-grandparents. I’m getting emotional as I’m talking about it right now.
Kind of told me right from the start that everything’s going to be okay. It was just one of those moments where it’s like you look around and go, “There is something bigger at play here.” It did have a calming effect and we found out the next morning that Tetralogy was the diagnosis. The cardiologist said it’s a serious condition, but we know how to correct it. We know what to do. We’re going to everything we can to make sure he’s okay and they did. The heart issue right now is kind of in the background. It’s a yearly checkup, but not’s something that’s on our mind on a regular basis.
Lisa: You almost lost it. This was a serious heart issue.
Scott: It was.
Lisa: It wasn’t something small.
Scott: Yeah, it was. He spent a couple of weeks in the NICU, Neonatal Intensive Care in Portland in the Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital. Dr. Reed Quinn was his surgeon, who is pretty well known around the world for some of the work that he’s done, took great care of him. There were a couple moments that were tense where they were reacting to the situation that Scotty was showing, but we never felt like we weren’t in the best place that we could be.
There’s a gentleman I know through Sugarloaf who knew someone on the board at Children’s Hospital. He told me while we were going through this that, “If you need me to make a call and get you into Children’s Hospital in Boston and whoever you need to see, just say the word.” I thought about it for a minute and said, “You know what, we’re really in the right place.” We felt so well taken care of and it was very personal. There was a connection that we made with the people there that I was afraid if we went to a bigger hospital, it might become a little less personal.
That was a scary time, but it was also a time of, like I said, we just had this feeling that we were going to get through it. With the help of family, friends and a lot of great professionals, that’s the way it worked.
Lisa: We asked you to come in because we want to talk about the Morrison Center where you are on the Board of Directors. When you sat down for your interview this morning, you handed me a piece of paper and you said, “I know we’re going to talk about the Morrison Center, but these are all the other organizations that have actually had a place in our lives, in Scotty’s life.” I’m going to read these off because it’s very significant and I think this speaks to this greater theme of being supported by community which is especially interesting considering you have a child who has a fairly rare genetic disorder.
You’ve listed the Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital, the Ronald McDonald House, the Morrison Center, the Greely School System S8051, Riding to the Top, Maine Adaptive Sports and Recreation, Maine Special Olympics, the Deering Little League Challenger Division, the Falmouth Adaptive Skate, Special Surfer Nights through Aquaholics Surf Shop, the Center for Therapeutic Recreation, the Pine Tree Camp, the Pine Tree Society and Root for Me. You’ve got a lot of people on your team.
Scott: We sure do. We feel so blessed that we have access to all of those different organizations and the program and services they offer because like I said earlier, unless you have to access them, they fly under the radar a lot of the time. I think for the greater population that looks at us and says, “Wow, you guys are really amazing for all the things you do for Scotty.” I love to have the compliment, but the way I look at it is we’re his parents seeking out everything that we can do to help our child be the best that he can be or reach his full potential.
I see people like my brother who’s got three young girls and all the work that he and his wife have to do to provide for them and make sure they get everything they need to reach their potential. For me it’s a little different. It’s different in terms of the things that we do may be a little bit different and our experience may be not typical, but the devotion and the dedication that it takes to be a good parent is pretty much the same across the board.
I think you get out what you put into it. Your kids will get out of in their lives what you put into as parents. I’m the first to say, for us it takes a village and without the people and the organizations you just listed, the friends and family that support us on a regular basis, it would be a lot different, that’s for sure.
Lisa: Dubowitz Syndrome is something that, I’m a Family Practice doctor trained in Preventive Medicine, so I take care of children and I’ve taken care of children at the Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital and I’ve not heard of this. This is a rare autosomal recessive genetic disorder, causes developmental delays, it’s just something that there’s not that much known about it. This is a culture where we like to get some information and then act on it and do something with it, but this really is a big unknown.
Scott: It is and when Scotty was born, there were less than 300 diagnosed cases worldwide of Dubowitz Syndrome, so there wasn’t a lot of knowledge base to draw on. In the years since, it’s become a little bit more organized and there’s been a little bit more of an effort to understand Dubowitz better. We’ve worked with three different geneticists over the past 13 years, two here in Portland, both happened to be named Smith.
A doctor down in Boston who’s affiliated with Children’s Hospital who does a regular Dubowitz clinic on an annual basis, for us that was really valuable because it allowed us to go … He schedules appointments in one day, so he’ll have half a dozen or 8 or 10 appointments with Dubowitz patients and their families. We all get there in the morning so we have time to spend with each other, meet each other’s kids and hear each other’s stories. The one thing that I learned very early about Dubowitz through that experience, was there’s a lot of variability in terms of what some of these kids and people that have been diagnosed with Dubowitz have had to deal with, both from a developmental standpoint as well as a medical standpoint.
Scotty’s place in that spectrum is a little bit more involved from a developmental standpoint in terms of his developmental issues are more profound than a lot of the Dubowitz kids that we met. His medical issues, the heart issue notwithstanding, but his ongoing medical issues are not nearly as profound as some of the others.
There is a little bit of a range and the geneticist has told us that his belief is down the road that Dubowitz will probably cease to exist as a diagnosis and be broken out into a number of other sub diagnosis. I guess I equate it similar to there’s the Autism spectrum and maybe the Dubowitz spectrum that as more becomes known, be broken down into different diagnoses. For now, it’s a diagnosis that allows us to say what his diagnosis is, but in terms of the practical sense on a day to day basis, it really doesn’t impact us greatly because we’re more tuned into what we’re going on a regular basis and what we’re doing day to day.
We just had an IEP meeting with him yesterday at his school. I looked around the table and there were 12 people at the table as part of his team at the Greely Middle School. They’re so amazingly dedicated to what they do and to Scotty. I don’t think the word Dubowitz came up once. It’s much more focused on him and where his progress has been in the last year and where we’re going to try to make more progress in the next year.
The diagnosis is important for a medical standpoint and participating in studies and trying to understand more about that is something we want to continue to do, but for me that’s more in the background. It’s more about what’s going on today.
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Lisa: As part of trying to understand what Dubowitz Syndrome is or what it might become, you’ve actually done genetic sequencing. Your wife Lisa was the second female ever sequenced after Glenn Close?
Scott: That’s our understanding.
Lisa: And you worked with the Jackson Lab?
Scott: We did. Thomas Moser had been doing some work with the Jackson Lab assisting in their development efforts and I came to know some people there. One of the things that someone was kind enough to do was talk to some of the scientists there about Dubowitz Syndrome and would there be an opportunity for the Jackson Labs to have a research project around Dubowitz Syndrome. At the time, the feedback was that not enough was known about Dubowitz Syndrome and the point at which Jackson Labs would become involved with researching a condition like that is they would have to have some baseline understanding of the genetic cause of Dubowitz Syndrome which did not exist yet.
It was probably about a year after that, through Children’s Hospital, we became invited to participate in a study at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland where they were using genetic sequencing to try to determine the genetic cause of rare syndromes that had been undiagnosed or where they didn’t know what that genetic cause was. The light bulb went off for me as, “That’s what the Jackson Labs needs.” There is an opportunity I hope down the road to have Jackson Labs play an active role in understanding more about Dubowitz Syndrome. The study’s still ongoing. We were sequenced at NIH in 2010, all three of us.
There were about a dozen other families with a Dubowitz Syndrome diagnosis in the family. What they explained to me at the time was doing sequencing now has gotten to the point where that can happen in a matter of a week or days. That generates a map of the DNA for each of us in the study, but reading the maps and comparing the maps is what takes a lot of time. They’re still working on it and hopeful at some point, they’ll have some great information to share with us and other scientists that might become involved in researching Dubowitz Syndrome.
Lisa: It strikes me that there are some people who have children that have issues, or let’s call them special needs, and maybe they’re not as comfortable with being out in the world with their kids. There may be even a sense of personal responsibility or something that maybe they feel like they’ve done, even though it’s not completely rational, but I think that this does happen. I see you, Scotty and Lisa being as much out in the world as you possibly can be. Has there ever been any problems with feeling that Scotty might be labeled or that he might be seen differently? Is there ever any question that you’re going to be out there living as fully as possible?
Scott: I think at first there may have been. Going back to my experiences, 30 something years ago in grade school, I can remember very vividly in my head some experiences that happened with special needs kids that were in the school that I went to. As I look back on it, were quite frankly appalling in terms of the way they were treated, the way they were labeled, the way they were cast aside not only by the kids who probably didn’t know any better, but by the school. They just weren’t equipped to understand or handle the special needs that they had.
The Morrison Center was the first place that really took that fear away for us. They’re so empowering there. They’re so inclusive of the family in their programs and with their educational programs that we were involved with, their preschool program. They made us feel so comfortable about who he was and it became pretty clear at that time that Scotty was a very social little boy. He really thrived on interaction with people. Even though he’s non-verbal and have obviously communication challenges, he communicates with his emotions. He’s got his own communication style and he has this ability to light up a room. He loves to be around people, the more people around, the more he gets animated and really likes to interact with everyone.
The transition from Morrison Center, after a few years being there and being so comfortable there, into the public schools was a little daunting as I started to recall my childhood experiences around special needs kids in the public schools where I grew up in Massachusetts. Within the first week, I’d say all those fears melted away. It became clear to me how much had changed in the 30 years plus since I was that age.
We had, not only from the school system, the kind of support that I didn’t really expect. They actually came to Morrison Center to observe Scotty the spring before he was being enrolled in Kindergarten. I just didn’t expect that to happen. I could tell right away how dedicated and involved they’d be in making sure they tailored their programs to make sure Scotty can participate fully and get the most out of it.
When he actually started in the schools, I was quite naturally afraid or fearful of what the other kids might say or do. We started getting calls from other parents that first week telling us how grateful they were that Scotty was in their kids’ class because of how much they were going to learn from him. I don’t think it’s a big secret that Maine’s not the most diverse state in the country, it’s probably one of the least diverse states in the country.
In a lot of cases, interaction with kids like Scotty is the first chance that a lot of kids his age have to experience diversity in some way. It became pretty clear early on that it was going to be a much different environment for him.
Naturally as someone who’s a marketing person and has been doing that for most of my career, if not all of it, and his outgoing nature. My wife and I look at each other and say, “Yeah, he’s here to teach people.” He’s here to shine the light in a very positive way on kids and people that are like him and maybe not like everybody else and what they can bring to the table opposed to what they can’t bring to the table. We’ve embraced that all along. My wife likes to be behind the scenes a little bit more, so I tend to be the one who’s out there a bit more, but Scotty loves to be out and about.
He’s had the opportunity to be on TV shows and in the paper. We did a campaign ad for Les Otten who founded what was called Maine Handicapped Skiing is now Maine Adaptive Sports and Rec as they’ve evolved. He asked us if we would share our experience working with that organization.
As much as I maybe hesitated to get involved in a political campaign, for me it was as much a PSA for Maine Adaptive and Maine Handicapped Skiing at the time, and Scotty loved it. Every time that commercial came on the television, his head would whip around and he’d get animated. He became a little bit of a celebrity at school, not that everyone didn’t know him already, but he loves to give high fives and fist bumps, so that had a whole flurry of that activity going on, too.
I take my cues from him a lot of the time. It’s kind of a natural extension of who he is and I guess who we are to spread the word and help people if we can either by sharing information about the organizations that we’ve benefited from or just telling our story and maybe encouraging other people to not be fearful and know that people want to help. People generally, genuinely want to help and be involved. To me, that’s what Maine is all about. That’s why I living here.
Lisa: As a father, what are your hopes for Scotty in the future? He’s 13, but I have a 12 year old and a couple kids who are older and I know we all think about where our kids might end up, or the type of people they might end up being.
Scott: Sure. It is a little daunting to think too far into the future. I have the sense that our hardest days are probably ahead of us as he gets bigger and becomes an adult. We do know that he’s probably got another heart surgery in his future. The correction he had for Dubowitz Syndrome, a pretty common side effect of that surgery is that a valve is impacted in a way that it will have to be replaced at some point down the road. He’s got a heart valve that’ll probably need replacement. That’s a little daunting.
I kind of look at the future as a big unknown. My wife and I have pretty much accepted that he’ll be with us for as long as we can physically care for him and we want that. We don’t have any interest in letting someone else do that. To me, that’s who we are as a family. Hopefully we all live long enough lives that at some point we’ve got to figure out another plan as my wife and I get to the point physically some day we not be able to do it all ourselves, but hopefully that’s a long ways off. I try not to think about it in specific terms.
I try to think about it more generally and broadly that he’s making progress all the time. It’s at his own pace, but every time we meet with the team he has at school or see people that we haven’t seen in a long time who maybe hadn’t seen Scotty in a year or more, they remark about how far he’s come, how much he’s changed, how much he’s matured and grown. That’s the way I look at it. We just want to continue making that progress, give him every opportunity to excel at all the things that he does and help us understand what he wants to do to the extent that he can and just keep pointing in that direction. It’s a little bit of an unknown, but at the same time, it’s something that we’re committed to.
Lisa: Scott, I know that people who are listening will want to learn more about many of the organizations that we discussed in the beginning of the show, but specifically I think, the Morrison Center. How can people do that?
Scott: They can go online. Just Google morrisoncentermaine.org. In fact, there’s a beautiful new website that’s in the progress of being created and hopefully will be online soon. The campus is in Scarborough. For a long time, the Morrison Center was based in Portland in a building that’s kind of right next to Martin’s Point Healthcare, right at that bridge there. That was its home for the better part of four decades, I believe. It was known as the Cerebral Palsy Center when it first started.
Betty Morrison, who was a driving force there who the center is now named for, I never got to meet her unfortunately, she’d passed by the time I got involved with the center, but many people that did know her have shared a lot of wonderful stories about her. I think the center reflects a lot of the values she had in terms of what I was just talking about, in helping people of abilities, find their abilities that they have in them and empower them to be everything that they can be.
There’s a very wide range of abilities and disabilities of the consumers and the people who utilize the Morrison Center’s services, which do range from preschool through adulthood. They have not only school-based programs, teaching programs, but employment programs. We do see the Morrison Center in our future as well with Scotty as he gets through the school system and graduates from high school in five or six years or so. The programs at the Morrison Center could be exactly what he needs to take that next step and continue moving forward.
The campus in Scarborough was built in 2007, 2008, so it’s been four or five years now. It’s a beautiful facility. It’s state-of-the-art facility. A new facility is just opening north as well. There’s certainly no shortage of need for the services that the Morrison Center offers. There’s a number of great organizations that offer similar programs, but think the Morrison Center team there and the staff is second to none.
That’s really it, for us. When we went to the Morrison Center, the facility was not very impressive at all. It was the people that made the difference there. Not only the people that were running the programs and the staff, but the other consumers that we got to know, the families we got to know. It was a hub of human activity in the physical space, while maybe not giving the great first impression was easily overcome. Now they’ve got the whole package.
They’ve got an amazing physical plant that takes a lot of, it opens the doors for the staff to really not have to think about where they’re doing what they do. They can really focus on what they’re doing. They have access to technology, to space and to equipment that really allows them to service all kinds of people of all ages.
Lisa: Scott, thank you for the work you do at the Morrison Center and for bringing Scotty into the world. Thank you and Lisa because he is, I would say, an ambassador of light perhaps?
Scott: Yeah, that’s kind of the way we look at it.
Lisa: I encourage people who are listening who would like to find out more about the Morrison Center to Google the website, learn more and perhaps donate and somehow contribute to the efforts because it may seem as though this is something that impacts a small number of people, but as you’ve shown, even through your experience with Scotty, it usually has a much broader reach than we realize. Thanks for being with us today.
Scott: It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Lisa: As a physician and small business owner, I rely on Marci Booth from Booth Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci.
Marci: I can’t imagine that I will ever be an artist. While I appreciate all kinds of art, I know that creating it is just something I’m not able to do. I don’t have that kind of talent and I find myself in awe of the people who do. Realizing that all of us have different and unique abilities and that we can’t be good at everything, is a tough thing to admit. It’s a lesson I teach my children, but it’s a lesson we all need to remind ourselves of as adults.
Recognizing your strength and talents early are keys to happiness and success. Leveraging those talents that others have is another key to a success. While I may never have a gallery exhibition of my artwork, I find great joy in knowing that what I and my entire team have, is the talent to help businesses run better. We are the leverage in entrepreneuring needs to be successful. I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need. boothmaine.com
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Lisa: People who are listening today may not even be aware of the great resource we have in the state of Maine called the Morrison Center. We’ve brought somebody in to talk to us about the Morrison Center. This is Charlie McBrady who is the Director of Business Development with Zachau Construction and also serves on the Board and is the President of the Morrison Development Center. Thanks for coming in and talking to us today.
Charlie: Thank you for inviting me.
Lisa: You’ve been in Maine a long time?
Charlie: Yeah.
Lisa: You graduated from the University of Maine. You live in Falmouth with your three kids.
Charlie: Yeah.
Lisa: These days. You’ve known the landscape, but you didn’t know that much about what was then called the Cerebral Palsy Center.
Charlie: That’s correct.
Lisa: This was something that became important to you because of your son Kyle.
Charlie: That’s right. The Cerebral Palsy Center used to be on Veranda Street. It was there about 40 years and it was in an old military hospital right where Martin’s Point is now and about two miles from my house. I still didn’t know anything about it until my youngest son Kyle was diagnosed with a learning disability which we weren’t sure if it was autism, MR, combination of things. We looked at different services around Greater Portland and went to the Morrison Center as one of them to see if that would be a good fit for our family.
Lisa: Kyle is your youngest. He’s 15 now and is at Falmouth Public High School. When you first were trying to understand what was going on with him, this must have been quite an interesting situation for you.
Charlie: It was. I really don’t remember exactly how old he was, but he was old enough to be in one of those car carriers; snap in, snap out car seats. My wife Jennifer and I went to an interview there to see if it would be a fit for Kyle because we still didn’t really know his diagnosis. The old center had a greenhouse that a bunch of guys built, probably back in the 70s through donations, that the adults that go to the center would grow plants and poinsettias at Christmas to the general public. It was an older greenhouse by the time I was there, but back when it started, it was sort of a state-of-the-art type of thing.
When you go into the old center, you’d go into the adult program first; which was the greenhouse, some community service people and the consumers that went there were basically in this antiquated lobby. As a young parent with a young kid, not knowing what your future holds, it was kind of a shock to your system thinking, “Oh my God, this is my life,” not knowing what that meant. That was a tough day.
As we walked through the halls of the CPC, we got to the preschool area and interviewed with the teachers. For some reason, you could sense that even though the building was in disrepair for the most part, a little shocked at the entrance, you could tell there was a spirit there and the teachers had a dedication to it. We ended up enrolling Kyle into the Cerebral Palsy Center at the time and he went there for a couple of years before he went to public school.
Lisa: It is interesting to think about the historical reasons for needing a Cerebral Palsy Center which has morphed into the Morrison Developmental Center. When you were trying to figure out what was going on with Kyle, it must have been very, a whole new world for you and Jennifer. You had two other children who didn’t have this issue and all of a sudden, there’s some undefined diagnosis that you’re chasing around that you didn’t even realize was on your horizon.
Charlie: Right. That’s exactly right. We didn’t know where to go, what to do and unfortunately most things in life once you go through it, you wish you could write a book about because if there was a handbook for you when you were at that stage because you’re just learning through your own experiences. All those kids are different, too. There was something about it we knew that no matter what, we were in good hands there and that somehow it was all going to work out.
Lisa: The Morrison Center, you described the preschool that Kyle was in. It’s actually something that’s available to people of all ages, really.
Charlie: Right. The Cerebral Palsy Center really deals mostly with people with multiple disabilities that can’t be mainstreamed into the public school system. Preschool is different in that we haven’t run an integrated program with typical and handicapped children even back then, which is great because when you go into a story time, you may not even know who’s the one with the handicap and who’s not. That was cutting edge back when he first went in there where you were doing this integration for preschool. It was great because a lot of parents could drop both of their kids off at the school or at the center. If one was older in the program and their typical brother or sister needed to go to preschool, a parent was able to go there.
It’s also great even though the facility itself was old and run down, we had all the therapies that you needed there under one roof. Even though it wasn’t perfect, we didn’t have parents having to take their kid out from some typical program to go to physical therapy, OT or speech. We had everybody under one roof. We had our own nurse. Even though the facility was not up to par, the staff certainly was and the programs were.
Lisa: Kyle now goes to Falmouth High School.
Charlie: Yup.
Lisa: You’ve remained very involved with the Morrison Center.
Charlie: Yup.
Lisa: Why is that?
Charlie: When Kyle left the CPC, about two years after, I got a phone call. Somebody wanted to have breakfast with me so I figured something was up. I got talked into getting on the Board, which I was all about it, giving back. You have to remember this is a center that never asked anybody for money. It never had a capital campaign. It never had an annual campaign. It just kind of went under the radar with the most involved people in the community.
It was a great place. No one knew about it and it didn’t have a lot of support, so I thought this would be a good thing to get involved in. I got on the Board there and then over the years, we didn’t have all kids with Cerebral Palsy. We had this mystique that that’s what it was. It really wasn’t.
We had people with CP, we had people with many different diagnosis, autism, MR, a lot because of multiple diagnosis. We decided that we needed to rebrand. We knew that we were growing out of the facility which was a two-story building with hallways that certain wheelchairs that people needed to work on couldn’t use.
We changed the name of the center to the Morrison Center after Betty Morrison who was the Executive Director forever, who ran the place on a shoestring and did a great job with what she had at the time. We knew we needed a change. We wanted to get away from the thought that we just dealt with people with Cerebral Palsy because that wasn’t the case.
We changed the name and we decided we were going to do a capital campaign, first time in history, to acquire some land and build the building. It was an exciting time to get on the Board actually. I was on the capital campaign committee and also the building committee to build our new facility.
Lisa: That facility is in Scarborough now?
Charlie: It is. It’s on Chamberlain Road. It’s probably five to six years old now. It’s a 30,000 square foot building with not just one, but two greenhouses that are state-of-the-art, for us at least. We have a multi-purpose room. We have classroom wings. We have a preschool wing. We have a school-aged wing and we have an adult wing. In the adult wing, it also encompasses the greenhouses and community service programs for adults. It even comes with a kitchen so they work on cooking skills and things like that.
Lisa: Why has it been important for you to have greenhouses in your new facility? I know you had them in your other one. What’s the tie-in?
Charlie: One, the greenhouse that we had wasn’t going to be big enough and we decided if we’re going to do it, we really should have two so we can transition some plants into other areas. A lot of the consumers that work in the greenhouses work in there several hours a week and when they sell product to the public, they’re scanned with a bar code and they actually receive a paycheck for what they make.
Some people might spend hours pawning at one plant because of the disability, whatever, but it’s their goal to go in there. They’re proud of it and they’re proud of pay day. We figured if we had two nice greenhouses in the setting that we were going to, we would have more community integration.
People would come in in the winter time. We sell poinsettias and because of the population that we have, we don’t use any pesticides at all in our greenhouse. We introduce good bugs to eat bad bugs, it’s totally healthy and our poinsettias are beautiful. They’re safe for cats. It’s a good thing for us.
It’s a beautiful place to go in the winter time. We have a Christmas sale there. It’s really helped the Morrison Center get on the map with the general public. If we talk about it more and more, people are hearing about what we do and it just translated into having a stronger program for people that really have the most needs.
Lisa: The adults that are part of the Morrison Center or the CPC, they actually work in the greenhouses?
Charlie: Yup. Many work in the greenhouse or we have a craft room where they do different crafts we have craft sales for. One important thing about it was when we moved into the new center, we didn’t realize that this was going to happen, but the old center was sort of, you drive by it, I drove by it for many, many years and I didn’t even know it was there, I may have bought a Christmas tree or two from there, but never really understood what they did there.
The new center, particularly with the adults, it was a hard transition for them because they went from a quiet place where they were safe in their environment with their peers, teachers that they knew, therapists that they knew to a bright building, a beautiful building where all of a sudden you had some people from the communities coming in to buy plants. It looked more like a beautiful school and I think for some of the adults, they had a hard time with that actually, because it brought back memories of when they were younger and maybe things weren’t so good.
Slowly but surely that transition has changed. If you go in there now, you’ll be greeted at the door by consumers. You’ll probably get a hug or two. To me, that was probably the most striking thing, actually.
Lisa: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is to help make connections between the health of the individual and the health of the community. The goal of Ted Carter inspired landscapes is to deepen your appreciation for the natural world. Here to speak with us today is Ted Carter.
Ted: “A world lives within you. No one else can bring you news of this inner world. “That’s something by John O’Donohue and Anam Cara. That’s struck me particularly strongly the other day when I was reading his book. I create places in the landscape that are looks within places. Places where deep introspection calls to you. I also create spaces that are looks without places. They’re places of projection and as you look out into the landscape from a particular place, it’s all about what can be in my life. Where am I going? What’s ahead of me?
I try to honor the spirit of the land and the spirit of the human being that inhabits that land and try to really create spaces that allow you both of those perspectives. They’re quite different. It’s part of the human journey. I think the land and landscape can really honor that journey through careful placement and careful consideration. You too can have a landscape that really speaks to who you really are and what you really want in this world. I’m Ted Carter and if you’d like to contact me, I can be reached at tedcarterdesign.com.
Lisa: The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast understands the importance and the health of the body, mind and spirit. Here to talk about the health of the body is Travis Blair of Premier Sports, Division of Black Bear Medical.
Travis: At Black Bear Medical, our priority is to find solutions for all our customers, but we take exceptional pride in the work we do with our customers who have extreme life challenges. Our Rehab Department and Service Department provide wheelchairs and other adaptive devices to make life more manageable for those with a disability. Our Service Department installs accessibility products in your home such as stair lifts, vertical lifts and ramps.
Our job at Black Bear Medical is to help people live life to the best of their ability, so whether you are disabled or having some difficulty in the golden years, we at Black Bear Medical can help the differently-abled level the playing field. Visit blackbearmedical.com or stop by our retail locations in Portland and Bangor to see how we do it.
Lisa: It hasn’t been an easy time for you personally. You’ve gone through a lot, you had an accident last year that was, are you willing to talk about this?
Charlie: Yeah, it was a freak accident. I owned a company that I sold and I used to take Kyle out on weekends to drive a forklift, and it probably doesn’t sound very safe for a 15 year old autistic boy, but he liked it and we had it down pat. We had done it a thousand times. Before I sold everything off, I took him one last time to drive the forklift. He got on the forklift and turned it on like he knew he could. I knew he could. He had never been able to put it in gear. Well, me, I walked around to the back of the forklift and he happened to put it in gear this one time and stepped on the gas and crushed me against a wall, or doorway actually.
I ended up breaking my pelvis in four places and my back in one and had to go to the hospital obviously that day. Kind of put a little interesting twist on our winter last year. He liked the fire trucks and the ambulances showing up, though. He felt that was kind of neat. Everything worked out fine and I didn’t have an operation. I was just laid up for most of the winter.
Lisa: The way that you’re describing it says something to me. It says that you have this willingness in your life to see things in a way that kind of moves you forward in a positive direction, whether it’s Kyle having a diagnosis you didn’t expect or getting into an accident that you didn’t expect. You just seem able to deal with what you need to deal with and move on.
Charlie: Yeah, I think everything happens for a reason, so you just take it one day at a time. Thank God I wasn’t hurt worse and I had somebody to support me, my family and we kind of just put our heads down and got through it. I think it’s diversity and adversity. My oldest two kids have grown up with it and they get it, so I think it’s been a good lesson for a lot of people that Kyle’s been in their lives; friends of ours, family and it’s actually a true blessing. It makes you just take stock in what’s important.
Lisa: You’ve been able now to expand the services of the Morrison Center from Cumberland County down into your county. That’s a big deal for you.
Charlie: It is. We had just moved into Scarborough and for 40 years they hadn’t done anything. All of a sudden we had this new facility and we’re talking about expanding. Half the Board’s like, “Listen, we do really well with what we’ve got here,” and the other half of the Board is like, “You know, it’s not fair that a 5 year old with a feeding tube has to get in a school bus every day and drive from Kennebunk or Berwick or the border of New Hampshire to Scarborough every day. Particularly in the winter, but year round to get services.”
The state’s been kind of pushing us lately to see if we’d be willing to expand our program. We thought about it long and hard. With all the things that are going on with the state of Maine, funding, it was a difficult decision, but we finally decided that we were going to acquire a building in Wells, which we did. We renovated it this summer and opened up a smaller 6,000 square foot school. We have a preschool program that’s already full with 15 kids.
We’ve got a school-age program there and an adult program that’s starting with a beautiful kitchen just like the one we have in Scarborough on an 8 acre campus. Maybe there’s room for expansion down the road because clearly it’s a beautiful building and we turned a restaurant into a school. It looks wonderful, but it’s not going to be big enough I don’t think, so some day down the road, we’ll probably try to do something with that, but for right now, we’re just going to enjoy what we’ve got in the services that we’re providing.
Lisa: It sounds like one of the most important things through all of this has been the people that have been there to support you, to support Kyle when he went to school there, to support the people that still go to school there, support the children. It seems like it takes a very special person to have that sort of flexibility, openness and desire to help.
Charlie: Yeah. It’s funny, we just had our grand opening in Wells, and one thing that struck me and struck some people I invited down that don’t know a lot about Morrison is that we got this staff, some of the staff were from Scarborough, but primarily we hired all new staff down there. They’re so energetic and they’re so grateful to have a nice facility to work in with this population because they really don’t have that opportunity in many different facilities. That helps a lot, have a job, it is the staff, it is the people and we have a Board of Directors that goes to board meetings because they really are passionate about it.
It’s not a resume-builder by any means, but we’ve got some great people that quietly go about it and do what needs to be done for this population. It’s not a huge organization, it certainly is big enough and growing, but it’s all about these individuals that belong in the community that we’re proud of and are growing every day. We’re lucky to have a great staff, we’re lucky to have a great board, but really when you go to these centers and you watch what goes on, it’s very clear why it was there.
Lisa: It’s interesting to hear you describe other people as being so quietly supportive and going about their business because when you came in, you said, “What are we going to talk about?” as if maybe you didn’t have an interesting story to share yourself. Does this just feel so normal to you in your own life that it doesn’t feel like it’s as interesting as perhaps other people might find it?
Charlie: I think so. I think everybody’s got a story to tell, but when you’re living your life, you don’t really think it’s anything special and different. Every now and then you might notice that maybe someone might have a few more bumps in the road than others, but really it’s what I know and we’re surrounded by these wonderful people. I’m always amazed at board members for instance, that don’t have any immediate family with disabilities that are so dedicated. They see it and I think that they’re just feeling, “How lucky am I that I don’t have the struggles every single morning that some people do.”
Yeah, I don’t think my story is anything special really, we do what we need to do. We’re not given anything that we can’t handle I don’t think. That’s what I think.
Lisa: For people who are interested in donating to the Morrison Center or maybe they have a family member or loved one that might benefit from services at the Morrison Center, how do people find out about the organization?
Charlie: We’re online. If you just Google “Morrison Developmental Center” or the “Morrison Center”, it’ll pop right up.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Charlie McBrady who is the Director of Business Development with Zachau Construction, but for the purposes of this interview, more importantly, the President of the Morrison Developmental Center and father of Kyle, husband to Jennifer and father to Ian and Erin. I appreciate all the work that you’re doing. I think you are, you’re just as you described, quietly going about your life, but I think the world is probably a little better for having you in it.
Charlie: Thank you.
Lisa: You have been listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast Show #122, Differently Abled. Our guests have included Scott Wentzell and Charlie McBrady. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit doctorlisa.org. Also, in the March issue of Maine Magazine you’ll find my profile of Scotty Wentzell and his family. I hope you take the time to look at this and enjoy it. The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast is downloadable for free on iTunes.
For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and Like our Dr. Lisa Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter and Pinterest and read my take on health and wellbeing on the bountiful blog. We’d love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also, let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Differently Abled show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
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The Dr. Lisa Radio Hour is recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Our executive producers are Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. Our assistant producer is Leanne Ouimet. Our online producer is Katy Kelleher. Become a subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle on iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details. Summaries of all our past shows can be found at doctorlisa.org.