Olive Martin is 3. She loves to ride the red tricycle and wear the orange helmet at WellSpan Rehabilitation – Herr’s Ridge in Gettysburg. She enjoys using the lighted spoon to scoop up colorful stars and loops during the Crazy Cereal game. And in the pool, she giggles as she pulls the polka-dotted Floating Purple Octopus off someone else’s head.
Thanks to the generous donations of others, Olive, who was diagnosed with conditions that affected her brain development before she was born, can enjoy the tricycle and games when she receives physical, occupational and aqua therapy at Herr’s Ridge. Donations from generous supporters paid for these toys and others, including vocabulary flash cards, tablets with speech therapy programs, and even a pool exercise bike, for the patients at Herr’s Ridge.
Tuesday, Nov. 30, is GivingTuesday, a day in 2021 when everyone across South Central Pennsylvania – and around the globe – may consider a gift that helps kids like Olive at WellSpan. Donors also may choose to give to other WellSpan outreach efforts including our Cancer Patient Help Fund that provides financial assistance for non-medical needs for our patients undergoing cancer treatment, programs that provide increased access to healthy foods for seniors and families in need in our region, stress reduction classes in our communities, cribs and sleep sacks for infants in our neighborhoods, suicide prevention programs for at-risk individuals, and other programs.
You can designate where you want funds to go, with 100 percent of your donation benefiting your choices, here.
“These gifts help us to help our patients live healthy, full lives and enrich our communities,” said Kristin Vought, director of development at the Gettysburg Hospital Foundation. “We are so grateful to those who generously support our programs.”
WellSpan Rehabilitation – Herr’s Ridge serves about 90 children and young people, ages birth to 21 years old. These patients include babies who are working on turning their heads, toddlers who are working to walk on their feet instead of just on their toes, kids working to overcome speech delays or sensory challenges, and teens who are perfecting daily activity tasks like dressing or feeding themselves.
“We try to provide comprehensive care for these kiddos,” said Adrianna Fletcher, a WellSpan physical therapist at Herr’s Ridge. “With their varied diagnoses, our equipment needs are vast.
“Donations mean that a kid can come to therapy and play with something age-appropriate that is encouraging and fun. Kids can come and learn and thrive and grow and still be a kid. It’s sparks creativity and confidence. These seem like just games, but it truly is a life-changing thing.”
Olive, the daughter of Lindsay and Drew Martin of Aspers, Adams County, has been receiving services at Herr’s Ridge since she was about 1. She walks on stepping stones, pulls sticky toys off the side of the pool and plops them in a bucket, plays a game called Pop the Pig that teaches colors and numbers, and does other activities that help her use her hands, arms and legs and address her vision challenges.
“We were told she may not even survive after birth,” Lindsay said. “Considering that, she is doing so well … she’s always improving.”
“With kids if it’s something different than what they have at home, they have a lot of interest in it because it’s new and fun,” she says. “It’s good too because it’s therapy but she doesn’t think of it as therapy. She goes there to play. She thinks it’s fun but it’s working for her.”
