By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
The Optimal Aging Community Fair was all about getting older while remaining healthy in body and mind.
Monday’s fair was the first major public event for Bowling Green State University’s newly launched Optimal Aging Institute.
For luncheon speakers the event, the Wood County Committee on Aging put together of panel of local residents who have faced the kind of challenges people encounter as they age.
Denise Niese, executive director of the committee, said it was not hard to single out those selected. Nancy Wright, Tim Tegge and Dr. Richard Barker are all well known in the community and have bounced back from challenges that would set others back on their heels. A video of Nora Liu, a retired university women’s basketball coach, was also shown. Though in assisted living herself, she continues to lead exercise classes.
Wright, of Grand Rapids, helped her husband run a funeral home and is a very active community volunteer. Her moment of truth came on Feb. 11, 1993, when she wasn’t feeling well and had her husband bring her to the emergency room at Wood County Hospital.
There the emergency room doctor missed the signs of a heart attack because no one expects a 50-year-old woman to have a heart attack. The error was caught. She received the proper treatment.
Wright not only lived to tell about it, but to preach about her experience, especially to women who may mistakenly think they are not at risk of a heart attack.
Wright said that she learned that after menopause women’s risk of heart attack is the same as men’s. She also has a family history of heart disease. It killed her father, and all four of her brothers have heart problems.
Tegge, who was born in 1964, was, in his words, “the rookie” on the panel. He’s been dealing since he was a child with a condition many experience late in life. He had a form of early onset macular degeneration, “which means I have a lot of blind spots.” Maybe one of the biggest, he said, was that he was at the age that he’d be asked to be on the panel.
Tegge related how he felt after being laid off that he’d found the perfect job as the executive director of the Wood County United Way. His skills were a match, but then he learned that the outgoing director drove 15,000 miles a year. Tegge, because he is legally blind, cannot drive, instead he gets around by bicycle.
He was discouraged. How could he do the job? Deb Manley, one of the United Way board members, encouraged him to persist. The interviews went well. He got the job, and with a reassignment of responsibilities and using volunteers to catch rides, he thrived. “There’s a different way to do it,” he said. ”Piggybacking a ride here to get a ride there.”
He found that while one way of doing things may work for most people, another way may work better for 1 percent of the people, and the job will get done as well or even more efficiently.
He stayed at United Way for eight years before taking a job as director at the Sight Center in Toledo. “It was one of those rare jobs that I got to really contribute to my community in a way I hadn’t in the past.”
Barker discussed two crises he faced.
First he talked about the time years ago when his children were still young that he went through a divorce. It was “horrible,” he said, and disrupted his life.
He suffered from low self-esteem. “I swallowed the idea that there’s a stigma to seeing a psychiatrist, so I did. He helped tremendously. … What I had to do was develop a relationship with myself.”
Barker said he had to adopt the attitude that before he could help others, including his children, he had to help himself get well first.
But that also meant relying on others, including his parents.
Sometimes people are “too happy to do things by yourself where there are people who want to help you. Get their help right away.”
Later Barker talked about the aftermath of a traumatic brain injury. While working at home in May, 2010, Barker stumbled, and fell, slamming his head into concrete and cracking his skull. He was flown by air ambulance to Toledo in critical condition where he had brain surgery.
Wright said that everyone in Wood County was praying for him at the time.
Barker said: “No one can understand why I am still alive.” And it left him wondering: “Why did God spare me at that time?”
His patients have asked him the same thing, Barker’s answer is simple: He was saved so he could be there treating them.
He found after his accident that he took more time just listening to his patients, and not just about symptoms. “We would talk about what’s really important, friends and family.”
