Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 7, 1993 TAG: 9303070112
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MAG POFF STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
EASY STREET: WHERE LIVING IS LEARNING
A car in a garage, steps to a front porch, a restaurant, supermarket, post office and bank all line Easy Street.This particular community, however, is being created on the fourth floor of Lewis-Gale Hospital.
The auto, a Chevy Nova without an engine, was hoisted there by crane Saturday.
Patients will use it to practice getting in and out of a car, perhaps from a wheelchair. Or they can fill its gas tank from a pump that contains no fuel.
When they progress further, patients can try using some of the handyman equipment inside the garage workshop.
Easy Street will fill about 4,000 square feet of the hospital's fourth floor, where the rehabilitation department helps up to 35 patients at a time learn to overcome strokes, amputations and spinal-cord injuries.
Susan Lowe, director of the rehabilitation center, said Easy Street, which has been in the planning stages for about a year, will simulate actual situations in the community.
The supermarket, for instance, will have a freezer chest, racks of fruit, scales for weighing produce and cash registers. Some of its shelving, like the real thing, will be high, low and hard to reach.
These are the practical chores that patients must learn to do all over again.
Easy Street itself will meander through the other simulations.
That hiking trail will offer different surfaces such as cracked pavement and flagstone to challenge an amputee with a prosthesis or a spinal-injury victim in a wheelchair.
To enter a business, the patients must negotiate a curb.
Lowe said the front porch will come complete with daunting steps, a swing and a door. A stroke patients using a cane must learn to balance while he or she turns the knob and reaches to open the door.
The restaurant won't have a grill, but patients can sit down and order refreshments from the unit's kitchen.
Like the supermarket, the restaurant will provide an opportunity to consider proper nutritional choices.
The bank will have a teller's counter and perhaps an automated teller machine. While they are in that facility, patients will learn something about money management.
Susan Wirt, a spokeswoman for Lewis-Gale, said the idea for Easy Street came from a company in Phoenix.
It is a supplement to traditional rehabilitation equipment such as stairs and treadmills.
Easy Street, Wirt explained, proves to patients that they can still negotiate real-life situations such as buying groceries and making bank deposits.
The simulated community will be surrounded by three-dimensional photographs to lend an air of reality. Some of them will picture local scenes such as the Mill Mountain star and the skyline of downtown Roanoke.
Wirt said small groups of patients now sometimes go out into the valley to practice running errands.
But she said that some people, such as those waiting in teller lines at a bank, often show their impatience with the learning exercise. And this destroys patient confidence.
With Easy Street, Wirt said, the patients can work at their own pace getting in or out of a car or filling out a bank form before taking on the reality.
They also can walk up the porch steps and open that difficult door more frequently.
Proving that they can perform these routine chores builds self-confidence and self-esteem, Wirt said. That enables people to get back home and into the community faster.