By Felipe Bakr, Senior Transactional Legal Resource, Ensign Services, Midvale, UT
Yesterday, I had an experience that changed the way I look at our facilities and my role as one of its Service Center employees. My wife’s friend invited her to an activity at a nursing home; she accepted and asked if her husband and kids could also go. After her friend said my wife’s family was welcome, she promptly accepted and said we were all attending the activity. Days after, my wife told me where we would be going the following Monday. And guess what? It was at Provo Rehabilitation & Nursing. Before becoming a Service Center employee, I have been at that facility twice to help with church services. But at this time, I had a completely different experience. After a message, prayers, and songs, they allowed me to introduce myself – but no one, except my wife, knew about my job, and I didn’t disclose it.
Then, I had the opportunity to talk to some of the residents – and at that very moment, everything changed. I learned their names, stories, struggles, experiences living in the facility, and valuable life lessons.
Let me share one of them: Steven. He’s originally from Olympia, WA. He has six children and twenty-three grandchildren all over the country. He is a mechatronics engineer and loves research. He has been living in the facility since the autumn of 2019 due to Parkinson’s disease. Because of his health issues, he even lost his voice entirely one year and a half ago – living at the facility already – but after a procedure where they put some cartilage on his vocal cords, he can talk again. He also did three other procedures to improve and adjust his voice. He also said how much speech, physical, and occupational therapy and his life at the facility have been helping him to improve his voice and health. He cried happily and thanked God and the facility’s employees for his life improvement – he called it several times a “miracle.” Then, I disclosed I was a legal resource with Ensign Services, and he grabbed my hand, crying, and thanked me for doing my job.
All I do with contracts and licensing got a new sense to me. It’s about people. I was grateful for his life, and my heart was full of gratitude for being part of the work that we do – in other words, the “miracle.” As he said, I thank each of you for doing your job and building together the “miracle” in the life of many people around the country. In fact, we are “through moments of truth, [dignifying] post-acute care in the eyes of the world.”