Life, Love and Longevity : Nuns Shower Patients With Unconditional Affection, Care at Convalescent Hospital

Earnest affection thrives in the waxed, polished and scrubbed hallways of Mary Health of the Sick Convalescent and Nursing Hospital.

You can see it in the flutter of white as the 19th century Spanish order of nuns, Sister Servants of Mary, painstakingly wake, bathe, dress and feed women debilitated by dementia, cancer and the ravages of age.

You can see it when hospital Administrator Jodi Rupp walks into the convalescent home’s recreation room, embracing slight women in wheelchairs, clasping knotted hands in her own.

You can see it shining in the bifocaled blue eyes of Ida Wright, age 100 years and 4 months, a Mary Health resident for nearly five years.

“I like it here,” Wright said during a recent break from physical therapy--playfully tossing a big yellow ball around a circle.

“They treat you good. The people are nice.”

With the slightest of cackles, the woman with the wispy poof of white hair says that the best part of living at Mary Health is the occasional jaunt to the Alamo restaurant, where she can sip a beer, eat a cheese enchilada and flirt in Spanish with the waiters.

“It’s not too bad for an old woman--deaf, dumb and blind.” Another laugh. “Just deaf and blind, really.”

Small wonder then that Mary Health, as it is called, has some 184 women on a waiting list for 61 beds. Or that the hospital’s $2-million capital campaign is faring so well, gathering $800,000 in grants and donations plus another $900,000 in pledges spaced over the next five years, according to Director of Development Robin Woodworth.

There’s just something special about Mary Health, said Rupp, whose own mother needed the convalescent home’s around-the-clock care in the final 10 months of her life.

“Usually, people go to convalescent homes to die,” she said. “But they don’t come here to die. They come here to live, to love, to experience, to be safe, to be cared for before they die. They live first.”

After 32 years in Newbury Park, the hospital is planning a major face-lift that includes installing a new heating and cooling system, adding a security system, renovating the decidedly ‘60s decor, creating a park and pavilion complete with a 50,000-gallon Koi pond and improving the stained-glass shrouded chapel.

The improvements are intended to enhance the quality of life for residents, by allowing each woman to control her bedroom’s temperature, for example.

Other additions, such as the shady park with paths wide enough for two wheelchairs across, will allow residents and families to visit in a less clinical setting.

Still other renovations are needed to counteract the wear and tear of three decades.

“We’ve been patch, patch, patching for years,” Woodworth said. “But we can’t patch anymore.”

Although the hospital has about $1.7 million in hand and in long-term pledges, more funds are needed to make the immediate changes, Woodworth said.

“Say someone pledges $50,000 over five years, that’s $10,000 a year, and that’s great,” she said. “But we can’t wait that long to do the remodeling. . . . The hospital has never operated on credit. We’re not going to do repairs until we have the money to pay for them.”

The Spanish order of nuns, devoted solely to caring for the sick, aged and poor, founded the convalescent home and adjacent convent in 1964.

Serving all comers--about a third of the Mary Health residents receive Medi-Cal--the quiet convalescent home, which costs between $3,000 and $3,500 a month, has grown steadily in size and reputation.

“At the time we opened, we had just 18 [residents], and we prayed to St. Joseph that we would get more,” said Sister Luisa Irizarry, who has lived at Mary Health for 32 years. “And now we have to pray to St. Joseph for fewer residents.”

At Mary Health, that is the great irony: The better the 28 nuns and various staff members perform their jobs, the fewer openings they have for new patients.

“We provide the best care for the residents regardless of how the resident is or who the resident is,” said Sister Maritza Arce. “Because the residents are so well taken care of, they live so long.”

That care--including open visiting hours and a strict schedule in which every woman gets up and grooms every day--is simple enough, but it seems to make a profound difference.

Most residents live at Mary Health for five or six years, others stay for three times that, Rupp said.

As a result, Rupp has to turn away about two families a day who can no longer care for their elderly family members.

“That’s the worst,” she said. “These people are hurting. This is their mother--the person they care about most in the world--and we can’t care for her.”

Despite the heartache of refusing families in need, Mother Purificacion Ferrero said there is no other way to care for the hospital residents.

“We do love the ladies--they are part of us,” said Ferrero, the hospital’s president. “To me, they are like my mother and my grandmother. I love them in that way.”

Wearing pink nail polish that matched her sweatsuit and socks, resident Betty Brown, 83, can attest to that.

“They take good care of us,” she said. “They really care.”