Prospect youth honors late grandmother through school project
Chloe McCall, a junior at Slippery Rock Area High School, was glad the final weeks of her grandmother’s life were spent in comfort at Good Samaritan Hospice in Cabot before she died in early July.
“The nurses took really good care of her,” Chloe said.
One policy of Good Samaritan, which is a mission of Concordia Lutheran Ministries, is to avoid dressing their patients in hospital gowns.
Instead, Chloe’s grandma, Helen Boyer, and all other female patients at the hospice facility, wore nightgowns while male patients were clad in T-shirts.
Chloe was impressed by the nurses’ dedication to keeping things as normal as possible for patients and families at the hospice.
“It just helps them to be more comfortable, and it’s easier to see someone you love in pajamas and T-shirts rather than hospital gowns,” she said.
The policy so affected Chloe that she decided to raise funds to buy the nightwear for patients as her National Honor Society community service project at school.
She opted to sell hoagies for the project, and she wrote a short message on the purpose of the fundraiser so all who ordered a delicious sandwich would know where their money was going.
Chloe sold hoagies to her neighbors, and her father, Michael McCall, took an order form to his workplace, Penn United Technologies in Jefferson Township.
“We sold about 360 hoagies,” she said. “I think the people just realized it was a good cause and wanted to help out.”
The hoagies raised a little more than $1,000 to put toward comfortable pajamas for the hospice patients at Good Samaritan.
She and her mother, Beverly McCall, plan to hit a handful of department stores this weekend to purchase as may nightgowns and T-shirts as possible with the money that was raised.
“I feel proud, and I feel like my grandma would be proud of me,” Chloe said.
