Topic: job cuts

Gateway axes 28 jobs for new facility; elderly ‘gatekeeper’ among the terminated

By Christine Anne Piesyk | October 24, 2007 |

In 1997, I was in a bed in Cooley-Dickinson Hospital in the northeast, virtually immobilized from the shoulders down, unable to move, shrug, shift, and sometimes breathe without pain piercing enough to make me black out. I could think, talk, and see three of everything from the painkillers I was told would kill the stabbing pain. They didn’t work.

My family lived 1400 miles away in Tennessee, and my mom was in the first stages of Alzheimer’s. I was alone, but for a few friends who tried to visit me, a county away, when they were not working. I was just far enough away to be inconvenient and difficult to get to.

It was the kindness of people just like Ella Mae Arnold, a “fired” Gateway Hospital employee of 30 years standing, who made a difference, kept me sane. Ella Mae Arnold, the face of Gateway’s front desk services, having toured the new Gateway Hospital (at left) and viewing the area in which she expected to work, was fired, a move that has left her distraught, her world turned topsy-turvy. Ella Mae was a breathe of humanity, someone real to connect with, even for a moment, when events unfold that are frightening, foreign, and overwhelming. «Read the rest of this article»

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