Speaking with Strength

Two things turned Lauren Caspary (2009 MAST MED-NO) into a speech pathologist – her grandmother’s strength and childhood summers spent in Houston volunteering at The Institute for Rehabilitation and Research at Texas Medical Center.

Before Caspary became a senior speech language pathologist at Texas Children’s Specialty Care – Sugar Land, she learned a lot about hospitals in Houston. “My grandmother was a polio survivor,” Caspary said. “Nita Weil – she contracted polio in 1952.”

Weil was twenty-two when polio greatly reduced her movement capabilities and made her respirator dependent. Weil’s strength led Caspary to becoming the director of volunteers at TIRR. “I managed the ventilator settings and there was a hierarchy of foods my grandmother could and could not eat,” she said. “She was my driving force why I wanted to be a speech pathologist.”

After Caspary completed a bachelor’s degree at the University of Houston, she earned a master’s degree and set her sights on giving brain injury patients a path to thrive. “I treat discharged neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) patients and acquired brain injuries from accidents, brain tumors and encephalitis, just to name a few,” she said.

For first-time parents, unfamiliarity with both the hierarchy of eating and the NICU environment can lead to tense moments. Parents often do not realize the large number of steps involved in going from a baby taking a bottle to eating a solid dinner. There is also the trepidation that comes from seeing the hospital in the rearview mirror. “Many people – once they leave the hospital – they ask: Now what? What do I do?” Caspary said.

The next step is often outpatient therapy. The NICU structure is replaced by a new base and set of developmental goals. Sometimes, frustration sets in for parents. “Outpatient therapy is a marathon, not a sprint,” Caspary said. “We are holding that parent’s hand to get where we want to be.”

The challenges come from many angles. First-time parents are in a new environment. Even for experienced parents, there is the common urge to compare a child’s progress to a sibling or children in other families. If one child did something a certain way, should that happen again? “A comparison chart sets up for big failures,” Caspary said. “Each patient moves at his own pace.”

It is a world Caspary entered with some solid backing from LSU. Her path was on medical footing rather than the school-based pathologist track. “I picked up so much medical knowledge and did an internship at Touro Infirmary in uptown New Orleans,” Caspary said. “I worked with traumatic brain injury patients and in the stroke unit. My background is all medical, and I don’t think I would have gotten that somewhere else.”

Texas Children’s is ranked No. 2 on the U.S. News Best Children’s Hospitals Honor Roll. That standing means Caspary and her peers provide care for children from many regions throughout the U.S. The challenge of identifying issues is constant. “It’s not for the faint of heart,” Caspary said. “When you hear a child speak or see a child take food off a spoon . . . our wins are little, but they are big!”

AMERICA IS EVERYONE’S OYSTER CONTINUED FROM PAGE 57 them no matter what their ethnic background. I would pull apart the literature and find something they all could connect with. I believe if you speak to people in a certain way and you treat people a certain way, they will see the level of love within nearly whatever it is, because love resonates with everyone,” she says.

An innate desire to serve those in her community was instilled and nurtured within Gyimah by her mother, and this upbringing undoubtedly led to her ability to accomplish the many projects intended aimed to benefit those in need around her.

“My mom wanted everyone to feel included. She was all about inclusion before I even knew what the word inclusion really was. She would say ‘I can't give to one and not give to the other; if I can't give to all then I'm not going to give. I can't look over one person, I can't boost one person up and belittle someone else. It's not how it works; you must treat everyone how you want to be treated because you want someone to show that level of compassion to you but for you to do that you have to show that level to others, and if it's not reciprocated you know you treated someone right that’s what counts.’ We’re human beings and we’re bound to make mistakes, but I was brought up to try my best to be my best,” she says.

Gyimah’s childhood was filled with giving back to her community, and she never lost sight of those charitable values. She carried those values to LSU, which gave her a foundation of learning that led to the inspiration and fruition of her various charitable projects. “LSU inspired my desire to later create the AMOA. It was my professors and those literature courses I took at LSU that sparked within me a desire to learn more about the duality of being an American and a minority.

LSU brought this into being, helped to cultivate, and provided resources. It was almost as if it was a catalyst, a spark, ignited in me from being in those English and literature courses. So that was the premise of what I was able to do at BRCC, because I first was at LSU,” she says.

Gyimah recalls the time she thought about creating a student organization dedicated to the understanding of LSU’s multicultural student body. “I’ll tell you something, and it’s ironic. I remember there was an announcement in the Reveille asking students that if they wanted to start a student organization how they could contribute to the fruition of those organizations. I always wanted to have something that celebrated different cultures, but I didn’t pursue that announcement because I said to myself, ‘I'm just one student, I don’t know that many people to be able to start an organization, and I don’t even think I'd be able to do it.’

In my heart, though, it was something I wanted to do,” says Gyimah.

Though she didn’t believe she could create such an organization, she had the desire to do so, and after her student writing project her desire became a reality. She created her foundation based on an excerpt from Dust Tracks on a Road by one of her favorite writers, Zora Hurston: “Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world – I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”

Gyimah was inspired by this passage, realizing that America was everyone’s oyster – and everyone could obtain a beautiful America by sharpening his or her oyster knife.

By Rachel Holland