Client Success Stories

Home Care is as Important as Family
Ocal (rhymes with “local”) Sweet got her independence from her mother who got it from her father who was in the train service with the old Pennsylvania Railroad.

“My father was gone quite a bit,” Ocal recalls, and her mother was with her father in Canada when Ocal was born, making her a native of the North Country. However, her parents’ home was in Indianapolis and that’s where Ocal grew up. She got her first job as a legal secretary when she was 19, and married her late husband, Albert, who passed away in 1985. They were married 44 years.

“Albert and I were both only children and so we were both very independent,” Ocal says.

He was drafted in 1944 and spent much of his service in Japan during the rebuilding of that country after World War II. While he was away, Ocal moved back with her parents. Later on she trained as a reading tutor and taught first graders in the Indianapolis Public Schools for 15 years.

Independence was good training for senior living. Ocal’s husband has been gone for 20 years and she still lives in the same Indianapolis apartment complex where they lived together. She has lived 18 years in her current apartment.

Osteoporosis—complicated by two falls which fractured bones in her back—made independent living a little more difficult since February, 2003.

She spent a full year in and out of hospitals and residential rehab centers, then suffered her second fall, which sent her back on the same circuit again. She was losing her independence.

Then she met Chuck Wise, owner, Right at Home North and West Indianapolis, at the Saint Luke’s Methodist Church where she was still very active.

“He told me about Right at Home and I was very interested because the doctors were against me coming back home,” Ocal remembers. They were recommending she go to an assisted living facility where caregivers would be available “at the push of a button.”

But Ocal pictured it this way—sitting in a small hotel-like room with very little to occupy her mind and no human interaction except for brief visits from staff.

Worse, she would have to give up all her stuff. “Since my husband and I were both only children, we inherited a great deal of valuable heirloom furniture and other memorabilia,” Ocal says.

“It’s what makes my apartment home and I would have to give all that up if I moved into assisted living.”

With home care, Ocal’s apartment is a beehive of activity. Three Right at Home caregivers take turns during the week providing assistance with daily living. She has someone to clean and Meals on Wheels comes to her every day.

Ocal was Johna Allen’s very first assignment when she began as a Right at Home caregiver in October, 2003. Taking care of people came naturally to Johna since she was a trained and certified massage therapist.

At 21, though, she switched her career to home care and says, “I’ve learned so much from Ocal. She is so positive and has such a zest for life,” Johna says. “It’s a joy and a pleasure to work with her every day.”

“I still enjoy life,” Ocal says. Her byword is “perseverance.” “I’ve got a lot of grit and I just don’t give into aches and pains,” she says.

One good reason to keep going is to keep up with the lives of her only daughter and two granddaughters, ages 15 and 17. Her daughter is a guidance counselor in the Indianapolis Public Schools. They live a considerable distance from Ocal’s home, but she sees them as often as possible.

That makes home care as important to her family as to Ocal Sweet.

“Right at Home means everything to me,” Ocal says. “I pray I will live this way for a long time.”

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