"Edmonton man in wheelchair earns his keep shovelling snow" (Dwayne's Home)/ "Life saving 'Get Swabbed' campaign hits campuses this week"

Mar. 10, 2017 "'10 feet tall and bulletproof': Edmonton man in wheelchair earns his keep shovelling snow": Today I found this article by David Staples in the Edmonton Journal.  In the newspaper it was titled "Man finds road to recovery is really more of a sidewalk".  It was inspirational.  This is about the charity called Dwayne's Home:

Many days this winter, as I’ve trudged to and from work, I’ve come upon someone remarkable. 

On a sidewalk in downtown Edmonton, a man in a wheelchair is either shovelling snow or chipping away at built-up ice. 

I was curious about the man, so this week I approached him. 

His name is Dave Cummings, he says, born in June 1959 in Peace River. He has worked construction, pouring cement and at various odd jobs.

A few years back, Cummings says, he got into a scuffle in a downtown Edmonton mall. He was thrown over a glass barrier and fell two floors. He ended up badly injured with two pins in his leg. He’s not paralyzed, but immobile, which has put him in the wheelchair. It also led him to live in his current apartment at Dwayne’s Home.

Dwayne’s Home is a private apartment facility for homeless men at 100 Avenue and 102 Street. They pay $1,000 a month for room and three meals per day. 

When I walk past Dwayne’s Home, there’s often plenty of guys hanging out, smoking, talking, not doing much of anything. Cummings, though, keeps busy. Cummings says he does some panhandling now and then, but his main thing is the snow shovelling. 

Why do it?

“Because I’m bored,” he says. “It’s something to do. It takes me all day. I start in the morning and I don’t finish until the sun goes down.”

“He’s our ice scraper man,” says Dwayne’s Home program director Tim Gardner, who added many passersby will stop and give Cummings money for his efforts. 

“It works very well for him,” Gardner says. “It’s a good little gig … He’s in a wheelchair scraping ice and he does very well. Not only that, our managers will throw him a few bucks because they’re grateful for what he does — and the next-door neighbour. 

So he’s smart. He chops wood and warms himself twice. He’s out there, he’s not freezing, people offer him cigarettes. So I admire that, really, in him. He could just sit around and feel sorry for himself, but he doesn’t.

“I’ve known David for about 15 or 20 years and his story is a tough one. He used to run on the streets and get into trouble … Then, of course, his health has let him down and he’s ended up with us.”

I ask Gardner what the philosophy of the business is. 

“We don’t want to see people dying on the streets.”

The highest praise for Cummings comes from Dave Martyshuk, who founded Dwayne’s Home and owned it until this past summer. 

He still owns Pyramid Housing, another downtown residence for the hardest-to-house.

Martyshuk used to rent places to oilpatch workers, but entered the social housing market in 2007. At that time, his own brother Dwayne, who used to be a manager at Suncor in Fort McMurray, was in the grips of cocaine addiction.

Dwayne once mentioned to his brother that it would be fine to have a place for addicts where they could live, have services delivered, and work together to beat their addictions.

In 2010, Dwayne died from his addiction. His brother named Dwayne’s Home after him. About 140 men live there, with slightly more than that at Pyramid Housing.

Martyshuk says when men arrive, they’ve often been living in alleys or in the valley. They’re dehydrated, exhausted, nervous and quiet. The main thing is to get them some food, some rest and attend to their needs. 

The idea is to get them healthy and see if they can rebound. As for their addictions, they’re allowed to drink beer at the apartment dining hall, but no hard drugs or liquor is tolerated.

 
“They’re not all successful,” Martyshuk says. “Some of them are really tough. We take the hardest of the hardest.

“I wasn’t able to be successful with my brother, but I’ve been successful with many other people.”

As for Cummings, Martyshuk says: “You should have seen him when he first came in. I didn’t think he was going to live past a month … Compared to when he came in, it’s like night and day. He’s got something to wake up for and that’s what we try to instill down there.

“Dave is incredible. He likes to keep himself busy. He likes to be productive. He’s a very proud man. I can do anything you can do, and if I don’t do it better, I’ll be surprised — that’s his attitude. He’s 10 feet tall and bulletproof.”

http://edmontonjournal.com/news/politics/david-staples-10-feet-tall-and-bulletproof-edmonton-man-in-wheelchair-earns-his-keep-shovelling-snow

Nov. 19, 2019 "Life saving 'Get Swabbed' campaign hits campuses this week": Today I found this article by Christine Sismondo in the Star Metro:

Have you been swabbed yet?

If you’re a healthy person under the age of 35, you probably should — it could save someone’s life. 

That’s the message organizers of a November “Get Swabbed” campaign are hoping to get out there as they recruit potential stem-cell donors at 27 postsecondary school campuses across the country.

The campaign is a lot like a blood drive, except that volunteers from the Stem Cell Club collect swabs of cheek cells, not plasma, from potential donors. For some, that’ll be the last they ever hear of it. 

Others might come up as a match for a patient with one of 80-some cancers, blood diseases and immune system disorders that can be treated with a stem-cell transplant.

“Stem cells are like blood factories that live in the bone marrow,” explains Dr. Warren Fingrut, founder and director of the nationwide Stem Cell Club. 

Nancy Li is swabbing her cheek to collect cells during a Stem Cell Drive at the University of Toronto. Other universities across the country are participating this week.

 “Sometimes patients have diseases that damage those factories leading to problems and a stem-cell transplant offers a patient a chance to replace those damaged blood factories and go back to producing healthy blood again, potentially saving the patient’s life.”

Fingrut, an internal medicine physician at the University of British Columbia, started volunteering at stem-cell donor drives over 10 years ago as a Mcmaster student, and was moved by stories of patients unable to find a match. Although the registry is more robust than it was when he started, it has a long way to go still.

“It’s exceptionally difficult for patients to find a match,” he says, noting that a registry is essential to most people looking for donors.

A match is most likely to come from people with a similar ethnic background but some ethnic groups are underrepresented in the registry. This is, in part, because registries tend to be in Western countries where there are more Caucasian donors than other ethnicities.

That makes it harder for non-caucasian patients to find a match.

That’s something 22-yearold Ali Rizvi, a volunteer with the University of Western Ontario’s Stem Cell Club, was already aware of when he was diagnosed with leukemia in 2016.

“Initially, I was worried about a stem-cell treatment and that freaked me out right away because my parents are both different ethnicities,” says Rizvi. “I’m a mixed baby, Persian and Asian, and there’s also just so much else in there, I was just freaking out because I knew how much the stem-cell registry was lacking in ethnic donors.”

Rizvi counts himself lucky, since his siblings were a match. His cancer went into remission with another treatment that ended a year ago. Still, he says the scare put the problem in perspective. 

“At first, I was volunteering with the Stem Cell Club as something to put on a resumé. But then, after my diagnosis, I was determined to get the whole world to sign up.”

What would stop anyone from doing this? Fingrut thinks there’s a lack of awareness about how stem-cell registries work and misunderstanding about what’s involved in donating. 

The first step is a swab. If you are a match and selected for a transplant, it’s a simple outpatient procedure not dissimilar to donating blood. It just takes a few more hours.

“So, this is an act of altruism, obviously. The donor has to donate the time and has to go through the process but, overall, it’s quite low risk,” says Fingrut. 

“Balanced against saving someone’s life that no one else could, that seems like a fair trade.”

https://www.pressreader.com/canada/starmetro-vancouver/20191119/281625307139235