Baylor gerontology students become live-in learners
___By Mark Wingfield
___Managing Editor
___WACO--When Natalee Oliver was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, she wept and sulked for two hours.
___Now that she's back to herself, she is certain her life calling is to bring comfort and joy to those afflicted with the dreaded form of dementia that affects millions of older

BAYLOR UNIVERSITY graduate student Natalee Oliver (right) visits with Charles Middlekauf at the Regis/St. Elizabeth Center in Waco, where she lives and works to gain experience. Accompanying her are Michael Olmstead and Madonna Mamerow.

Americans.
___The Baylor University graduate student didn't really have Alzheimer's. Rather, her diagnosis was given as part of a class assignment in which Baylor gerontology students are required to live for 24 hours in a nursing home pretending to have certain assigned ailments.
___When informed that her role was to be an Alzheimer's patient, Oliver thought she had drawn the worst possible fate. But after she pulled herself together and began interacting with the Alzheimer's patients on the fourth floor of the Regis/ St. Elizabeth Center in downtown Waco, she made friends for life.
___Now Oliver lives at the center full time while completing her studies at Baylor. She is one of seven Baylor graduate students who live at the assisted living and nursing care facility while working as administrative liaisons there.
___The unique program, called The Bridge, is the brainchild of Brian Dodd, chief operating officer of Regis/St. Elizabeth, a Catholic institution operating in the historic Regis Hotel. The hotel has been renovated into assisted living apartments, and the St. Elizabeth nursing home was built next door. The two properties are connected and administered as one.
___The Bridge recently was named "program of the year" by the Texas Association of Homes and Services for the Aging.
___In addition to the 24-hour plunge into nursing home life offered to Baylor students, The Bridge has three major components.
___The first is the residency program, in which Baylor students live at the Regis, giving them opportunities to interact with the residents at all times of day and over extended periods.
___The second is the administrative liaison role. In exchange for their apartments, the students are required to work at least 15 hours a week as a link between resident families and administration. They help resolve problems and answer questions after normal business hours--when most family members visit but when other administrators are gone.
___The third is an administrator-in-training program, a 1,000-hour internship program for students seeking licensure as nursing home administrators.
___By all accounts, the residents of the Regis/St. Elizabeth love the Baylor students. In them, they find companionship, enthusiasm and energy.
___Oliver and one of her Regis buddies make weekly shopping trips together. On one of those outings, a clerk asked her, "Is this your grandmother?"
___"No," she replied. "She's my friend."
___Other times, Oliver plays dominoes with residents. But she's learned to watch her hand, she explained with a grin. "They cheat."
___In return for their commitment, the Baylor students get the kind of learning that's impossible to pick up in a classroom.
___This kind of learning happens only when you "hang out with old people," said Madonna Mamerow, a Ganado native who plans to enter medical school and become a geriatrician.
___Her experience at Regis/St. Elizabeth not only has confirmed her career choice, it is making her a more compassionate person. And she is certain it will make her a better physician.
___"When I go in to work with patients, I'm not just going to look at what ails them" physically, she explained. "I know now there are so many things you have to look at before you can make an accurate diagnosis."
___Mamerow's mentor at Regis/St. Elizabeth is Baptist chaplain Ann Pennington, a graduate of Baylor and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and a former missionary to Brazil. Through Pennington's influence, Mamerow is learning to approach medicine in a holistic sense--and to come to grips with her own personal experiences and biases that might prevent her from hearing what patients really are saying.
___By working and living among the retirement and nursing center residents, Mamerow is learning to "see them as human," she said.
___This is one of the benefits of The Bridge for both students and residents, Pennington said. "It breaks down stereotypical images we have of youth and aging."
___Inevitably, though, the program puts the young students face-to-face with the harsher realities of life--both for good and ill.
___Michael Olmstead, a Baylor student from Euless who is in the administrator-in-training program, was surprised by the positive side of this when he gave a resident something he had made by hand. He thought the gift was rather useless and was disappointed in it. But the resident he gave it to treasures it and keeps it on display in her room.
___Oliver recently experienced the sad side of this interaction, though. One of her dementia patients always wore a ball cap. She continually teased him, asking him if he would wear a Baylor cap if she gave him one. Before she remembered to get the cap for him, he died.
___"The lesson I learned is don't delay," she said.
___Though sometimes difficult, it is lessons like these that will make the soon-to-be Baylor graduates better health-care workers--and better people.
___"What we're learning is life," Mamerow said.
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The Baptist Standard