Homeland resident Judy Hess: Adventures in nursing

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Judy Hess has lovely memories of childhood in Hershey, named for the famous chocolate company where her father worked in the Hershey Foods power plant. She would see the renowned founder — Milton Hershey — driving around town.

“Mr. Hershey believed that everything he did was for his workers,” she says. “He was a very forward-looking man, a very bright man. Hershey was a wonderful place to grow up. I think we were really very spoiled.”

Today, Judy is a resident of Homeland Center, where she marvels at the professionalism of the staff and the meticulous upkeep of the building. She should know because she spent a career in nursing, trying new experiences whenever she had the chance.

Looking back on her youth, Judy remembers Mr. Hershey’s majestic movie palace, the Hershey Theatre, with its famous ceiling.

“When you sat down and watched movies, you could look up and see clouds and stars overhead,” Judy says. Then as now, Broadway touring companies would come through, and Judy saw all the shows, including the Rodgers & Hammerstein blockbuster, “South Pacific.”

In Hershey, she met her future husband – Paul Hess – who was her classmate from Kindergarten through 12th grade.

“We never dated at all in high school,” she says. “Never once. But we did walk down the aisle together at graduation.”

They walked down the aisle together as husband and wife after he came home on leave from the Navy at the end of World War II. Judy was in town as well, on vacation from nursing school.

“We had one date, and he asked me to marry him, and I said yes,” she says of the answer that launched their 61-year marriage as a shell-shocked world sighed in relief that the fighting had ended. “We both decided that we were war-weary. It lasted a long time.”

Judy’s contribution to World War II made a lasting impression on her life. She had dreamed of becoming a teacher, but she joined the United States Cadet Nurse Corps when the war started.

The Nurse Corps was founded in 1943 to provide free nursing education for civilian nurses to fill the home-front posts as experienced nurses joined the military.

“I still tell people I’m tired from those three years,” jokes Judy. “I never worked so hard in my entire life.”

Judy served at Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia, where she and her fellow student nurses cared for patients and attended classes without fail – even after working 12-hour night shifts.

“It was a tough life – but worth it,” Judy says.

The young nursing students shared a house where they had a 10 p.m. curfew. With the intensity of the experience, the group stayed in touch for the rest of their lives.

“When we had reunions, we would always say the same thing,” she says. “It was hard, but we would not have wanted to have missed it.”

That experience launched a fulfilling career in nursing. For many years, her nursing jobs “moved with me” as she and Paul traveled for his Navy career, from which he retired as a captain. While Paul was working on his doctorate at the University of Delaware, Judy served as head nurse for the university’s Student Health Center.

Following the Navy, Paul became a respected environmental scientist and retired as the Hershey Foods Corporation environmental affairs department director.

Judy’s career also came full circle when the Hess family returned to Hershey, and she enjoyed 15 years as a school nurse for the nearby Annville-Cleona School District. One summer, she also worked in the psychiatric ward of the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center (now Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center).

Judy and Paul had a daughter, Paula. While Paul conducted research at the University of Delaware Marine Science Center in Lewes, the family spent many summers in that quiet seashore town, watching boats come and go on the Intercoastal Waterway. Sometimes, Paul would say, “I’m going to take Judy on a cruise.”

“And we would take the ferry over to New Jersey,” she says, laughing.

Judy arrived in Homeland Center’s skilled care unit in spring 2021. She has visited many nursing homes in her life, “and this is by far the nicest one I have ever been in. I don’t think there are very many that could compare to this.”

“It’s a wonderful place,” she says. “It’s bright, and it’s cheery, and they keep everything in such good repair. I am amazed at how well appointed it is. Everything is just as you would want it to be.”

Homeland Center Restorative Nursing Program: Respecting the individual, striving for gains

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Homeland Center’s personalized Restorative Nursing Program assures that Skilled Care residents realize their full potential and enjoy the best possible quality of life.

“We focus on their unique needs,” says Roseann Comarnitsky, director of the Homeland Restorative Nursing Program. “They are all individuals that we respect.”

Comprehensive Restorative Nursing Programs combine nursing and therapy with helping residents function at their highest level. According to the American Association of Post-Acute Care Nursing, a well-run restorative program can minimize falls, depression, weight loss, and bed sores among nursing facility residents.

At Homeland, those benefits are central to helping residents maintain a sense of control over their lives.

“We urge residents to try and do things for themselves, which helps their self-esteem,” says Comarnitsky. “They’ve been independent all their lives, so we try to encourage the most independence with them that we can and set goals to improve, step by step.”

Homeland’s Restorative Nursing Program starts before admission, with a review of hospital records for strengths to leverage and weaknesses to address. The Homeland team begins with two universal goals – moving around in bed for ultimate safety and comfort and encouraging residents to dress and groom themselves as much as possible. From there, the team develops individualized objectives.

Homeland staff, including the certified nurse assistants who are the residents’ constant companions, are trained in techniques that help residents take control of their days. It may take longer for a resident to brush their hair or brush their teeth, but it gives them the gratification of completing tasks independently.

The Restorative Nursing Program works closely with Homeland’s therapists. As residents progress in physical and speech therapy, the Restorative Nursing Program works to keep the gains in place.

Liza, Director of Therapy, with the Restorative Aides Antonia, Angel and Marilyn.

Homeland’s specially trained restorative nursing assistants ensure maintaining the hard-won gains residents make in range of motion, strength, swallowing and communicating, skin care, and other core functions of daily life.

Each resident’s personalized restorative plan is posted in their room’s closet for staff to check. If a resident has special exercises, therapy services provide instructions. The approach instills consistency among staff and between shifts so that everyone involved shares the same goals and methods of delivering care.

“It’s a joint effort,” says Comarnitsky. “Homeland works a team.”

Comarnitsky has been with Homeland for 15 years, beginning as a skilled care charge nurse. Opportunity and professional growth are hallmarks of Homeland staffing, so she transitioned, first, to quality assurance and then to the Restorative Nursing Program.

“It’s been good working here,” she says. “If you do your job, they give you the opportunity and show their appreciation in a lot of ways.”

Comarnitsky credits Homeland’s dedicated aides with applying a team approach to the quest for residents’ maximum quality of life.

If they are helping a resident move from bed to chair, they take their time and explain what’s going on.

“We have some of the best aides here,” says Comarnitsky.

Family members get involved by sharing their loved ones’ likes, dislikes, and life stories, which Homeland staff use for communications and encouragement.

“We have some residents who were nurses,” says Comarnitsky. “One was an engineer. He loved to tell us about what he did and how he handled his employees. We find out the backgrounds of the residents and go from there.”

“Our goal is to give the resident the respect they deserve and support their self-esteem and know that they are a person to us,” says Comarnitsky. “This is like our little family here. The goal is for the comfort and benefit of the resident, no matter what stage they’re in.”

Homeland resident Tommi Paynter: A life of service and love

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As a hospice medical assistant, Tommi Paynter saw the best in people. She recalls a family in the all-white town of Gloucester, New Jersey, where most residents “would not appreciate a Black person coming into their town.”

“This woman and her family were so sweet,” she says. “Her daughter, she would always cook something and say, ‘This is for you to take home for your dinner.’”

Today, Tommi is living in Homeland Center’s Skilled Care, receiving excellent care and enjoying all the activities available. Her can-do spirit, positive outlook, and determination in the face of obstacles shine through as she talks about a life lived in service to others and always surrounded by family.

Thomasene “Tommi” Paynter was born in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey, the second of nine children and named after her father, Thomas, who was a steelworker. Tommi’s mother was a preschool teacher and the one who taught her to be strong and resilient.

“My mother was my best friend,” she says. “I wasn’t the best kid. I wasn’t the worst kid, but I had good parents, hard-working parents.”

The kids got in trouble sometimes, climbing out windows and jumping off roofs. There was the time a brother watched plumbers working in the well and decided that he would climb down there himself.

They were also a musical family, playing instruments together. Tommi’s mother played the piano, and Tommi played piano and flute. She didn’t enjoy her piano lessons, given by a mean teacher who wielded a ruler to enforce correct hand positions.

What she loved was singing. Tommi and her four sisters formed a quintet, the Joy Gospel Singers. They toured churches all around the region. As an alto, Tommi loved singing harmony. Her solo hymn was “His Eye is on the Sparrow.”

After earning her GED, Tommi went to technical school to become a medical assistant. She found her calling working in a New Jersey hospice.

“Hospice patients, they know that they’re at the end of their life, and they appreciate what you do for them,” she says. “Whatever you do for them, they give you back far more.”

She thinks for a moment about the things that hospice patients taught her.

“Patience,” she says. “You learn that you can’t take for granted anything in life. Everything that happens is a gift from God. It was gratifying to work with them.”

She was a trustee of her church, and daily prayer helped her deal with the inevitable grief.

Through it all, she was a single mother raising three sons. Tommi’s journey with hospice patients came to an abrupt halt the day her face felt numb.

“They say a doctor or a nurse is the worst patient,” she says. “I had symptoms, but I said it was something else.”

Those symptoms signaled an oncoming stroke, and more followed. Doctors told one of her sons that she wouldn’t survive. She couldn’t speak, feed herself, or write her name using her beautiful handwriting.

“I couldn’t talk and I couldn’t write, but I could pray,” she says. “I sent prayer from my heart to God’s ear.” She knows that angels exist because God sent one that stayed by her side.

She climbed back with the help of speech therapy, physical therapy, “all kinds of therapy.” Thoughts of her six grandchildren inspired her to commit fully to recovery. Her oldest grandson, Christopher, would sit by her bedside and read to her.

She has now seen all six grandchildren graduate from high school, and three are still in college. “I just want to be here for them,” she says.

One of Tommi’s sons found Homeland through a friend who works there.

“It’s been a very nice place to live,” she says. “Everybody has treated me well.” She likes to stay active, so she gets involved in as many activities as she can. She enjoys Homeland’s musical programs. In her room are pictures on the wall that she has painted at Homeland’s art classes – and yet, before her stroke, she had never painted.

“That’s one of the things the Lord enabled me to do,” she says. “Since I don’t have money to leave my kids, I plan to do one painting for each of my sons.”

Homeland Center Assistant Director of Activities Bethany Traxler: Always there for residents

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Even at her busiest, Bethany Traxler intuitively knows when it’s time to slow down and give a Homeland resident a listening ear.

“It’s natural to readjust yourself at that moment,” says the Homeland Center Assistant Director of Activities. “You can be so caught up in the hustle and bustle, but there is something that naturally stops you and makes you reset and refocus on their needs. Our goal is to be resident-focused – their health, their well-being, their safety. Ultimately, that comes first.”

Bethany joined Homeland Center in February 2021, but it was not her first encounter with the Homeland family. For the previous four and a half years, she worked for Homeland at Home, which oversees the continuum of services offered through Homeland HomeHealth, Homeland HomeCare, and Homeland Hospice.

With Homeland Center’s Activities department, she is responsible for various oversight duties, including scheduling entertainers, producing a weekly calendar, helping with the gift shop, and filing regulatory compliance documentation.

“I jump in and help as needed,” she says. “I’m here to be part of the team.”

Activities, Bethany believes, “truly enhance the residents’ quality of life. We have something every day that keeps them engaged.”

Bethany’s mother, a career nurse, now working as a clinical liaison with Homeland at Home, introduced Bethany to the health care field. For many years, Bethany was a certified nurse assistant, enjoying the hands-on care and serving as an outlet for people who need companionship and compassion.

In her Homeland journey, Bethany started in August 2016 with Homeland HomeCare, which provides individualized care plans to help patients stay safely at home. Very shortly, she was elevated to community liaison for Homeland at Home. She was responsible for outreach to doctors, nursing facilities, and the public to raise awareness of Homeland at Home’s high-quality continuum of care.

“I always felt you need to have a relationship with trust built into it,” she says. “You have to provide consistency to your prospects.”
Once those relationships generated referrals, Bethany had the confidence of knowing that Homeland at Home delivered on its promises of compassionate, personalized care.

“You hear a lot of compliments,” she says. “People say, ‘Thank you to the nurse who came in,’ or ‘Thank you for providing the aide who came an extra day.’ Small accommodations make a big difference.”

She also volunteered monthly at Homeland Center, becoming familiar with the operation and the people. Volunteering made the transition from Homeland at Home to Homeland Center feel organic.

“Any time I would think about the transition, I felt at peace about it,” she says. “It felt natural because I’m still part of Homeland no matter which entity I’m in.”

With her career goal of remaining in health care in some form, the change made sense. Bethany is studying for an associate degree in marketing from Central Penn College and then plans to earn a bachelor’s degree in health care administration.

Bethany commutes to and from her home in Lewistown and serves with her husband, a volunteer firefighter, on the fire company’s board of directors. They also share two cats named after favorite “Friends” characters: a gray, white, and orange tabby named Phoebe and Chandler, a long-haired gray.

They enjoy spending days off with family – his and hers. She is very close to her grandparents. Bethany’s father is their next-door neighbor and landlord. Her husband’s father is their church pastor.

Bethany says Homeland Center’s seamless teamwork and can-do attitude assures residents a wonderful experience.

“I hope that residents find peace in knowing that we are there to serve them and that we are doing our best to make them feel as comfortable as possible,” Bethany says. “It’s their home. It’s not our home. We’re the guests.”

LaToya Howard: Pursuing Her Passion and Keeping Homeland Residents Safe

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What is that clinking sound?

LaToya Howard is testing a Homeland visitor for COVID-19. She directs the visitor to a screening room to have their temperature taken and where facemasks and shields are available. Then comes that clinking sound.

“That is the timer,” LaToya explains. “When I test, we set the timer for 15 minutes. At the end of that 15 minutes, we know what the result is.”

LaToya is one of the first faces – masked, of course – that many visitors and staff see when they come to Homeland. As COVID-19 precautions took effect in early 2020, LaToya assumed the detail-oriented job of conducting and coordinating testing.

When LaToya joined Homeland in 2019, she brought more than 20 years of experience in Pennsylvania within senior living. She has been a certified medication technician for 24 years. In her roles, she has developed care plans, supervised med techs, compiled quarterly and monthly reports for regulators, supported admissions, and conducted evaluations.

She grew up in York, where her aunt was the director of nursing at a local senior living community. LaToya’s aunt offered her a position at her facility, and it was a perfect fit.

“It’s where my passion is,” she says. “I definitely love what I do.”

In 2016, LaToya moved to the Harrisburg area with her husband, who serves in the Army Reserves and as an officer at a local prison. She joined Homeland as a medication technician in Personal Care in July 2019.

In April 2020, LaToya was asked to manage the COVID-19 screening, delivering those ubiquitous questionnaires asking visitors about recent health history and contacts with possibly infected people. Then she became a tester, checking staff and visitors for any symptoms and currently assists in compiling information for reports.

LaToya, assisted by Malani Tate-DeFreitas and Zadia McCullough, routinely test between 200 and 240 people a week.

“You have to be able to multi-task, that’s for sure,” says LaToya. “You have to pay close attention to details.”

People skills are her strong point.

“I love being able to help people,” she says. “It’s just my nature.”

At Homeland, she has found role models in several longer-term employees. Just watching them at work teaches her about delivering hands-on care with compassion.

“It’s nice to have people to look up to and one day follow in their footsteps,” LaToya says. “They teach me so much along the way. I really look up to them and respect their work and commitment very much.”

The professional attitude of Homeland’s staff resonates in the lives of residents, who benefit from all that support and collaboration. Homeland is one of the best places where she has worked, says LaToya.

“Everybody knows their job.’’ she says. “Everyone helps everyone. Everybody’s a team player.”

“I just love being able to help people and know that when I leave at the end of the day, I’ve helped them the best I can and gave them 110 percent.”

Homeland resident Caroline Witmer: Soaring into the air, skiing down mountains

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Caroline Witmer brings a wealth of memories to Homeland, with stories from years of adventure, service to the country, and family connections to Milton Hershey and Dwight Eisenhower. The skilled care resident enjoys life at Homeland, where she loves the food and the elegance of the facility.

Born and raised in Harrisburg, Caroline remains proud of the family business, the prominent Manbeck Bakery in Lemoyne, bought by her grandfather in 1915 and continued by her father and brother through the late 1970s.

“They had quite an operation,” she says of the brick structure that today is the Antique Marketplace of Lemoyne. “There’s a picture of me promoting a new type of loaf, holding the bread in a baby carriage. My grandparents and father, and brother put the best in the bread and everything else they made. It was top of the line.”

Caroline recalls when a friend of her father’s called in 1953 to say that he was organizing a birthday party for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. This was no ordinary birthday party. It was Ike’s first birthday as president, and the GOP staged a massive fundraiser. They chose the Hershey Stadium and hosted 6,000 attendees, who ate box lunches under a Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey Circus tent.

The organizer called Caroline’s father and asked for the use of the Manbeck Bakery plant, which roasted the chicken in the bread ovens and then transported the lunches in the bakery’s trucks.

Newsreel footage shows Eisenhower enjoying the party, though Caroline recalls her father being a bit less pleased with the cleanup involved.

“The ovens were kept very clean for bread baking, and my father said, ‘Never again, no matter the friendship, will I ever do that,’” Caroline says with a laugh. “But everyone commented that the chicken was very good.”

Caroline attended a junior college in Missouri and then returned to Pennsylvania to study history at Penn State University. At a wedding, she met David P. Witmer, Jr, and they married in the late 1950s.

Her new father-in-law was D. Paul Witmer, the talented, largely self-taught engineer and draftsman. He oversaw the construction of many Hershey landmarks, including Hershey Stadium, Hotel Hershey, and the Milton Hershey School.

The chocolate magnate lived across the street and often called David’s home to ask if Paul could try a new concoction. Hershey was always experimenting, and Witmer, Sr., never shied from sharing his honest opinions.

“My father-in-law would say, ‘Mr. Hershey, I’m sorry, but I don’t think that would sell,’” Caroline says. “You could disagree with Mr. Hershey, but don’t lie to him. He was very down to earth.”

Caroline’s husband grew up flying his father’s plane. In 1955, he began a 35-year career as an officer with the U.S. Air Force and 193rd Special Operations Wing of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard. He flew combat and special missions in hot spots worldwide, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and the Belgian Congo. He served three tours in Vietnam, and he worked with the Korean Air Force.

While he did not talk much about his missions, Caroline recalls some stories about close calls and tricky landings. One time, she says, her husband grabbed the plane’s controls before it crashed into a mountain range that the navigator only identified as “black spots.’’

“He grabbed the controls and turned,” Caroline says. “My husband was extremely calm. You could have five volcanoes going off, and he would say, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do.’”

David had his own plane, and Caroline loved flying with him. Sometimes, she would take the controls.

Caroline, David, and their two sons lived in Camp Hill, where Caroline volunteered with the Junior League and worked for AAA and Allegheny Airlines as a receptionist. They took full advantage of David’s 33 days of vacation every year and took up downhill skiing when they were 31, visiting slopes across the globe for the next 54 years.

“At age 55, I skied the Matterhorn,” she says. “It took four hours. You skied in sections because it’s so long.”

Caroline and David were married for 62 years, until his death in May 2020. She came to Homeland around that time and says she enjoys playing bingo, attending Pastor Dann Caldwell’s Sunday ecumenical services, and joining functions such as Homeland’s ice cream socials.

“It’s very nice here,” she says. “The facility is wonderful, and everything is kept very clean. The dining room is lovely, and the food is delicious.’’