The Gifts Among Us

Maybe medical centers attract a certain type of employee. Employees who share their hearts, time and resources to assist those who are disadvantaged or protect others from calamity. Employees with such an ingrained sense of humanity that they deliver acts of kindness throughout the year, not just during the holidays. Maybe we're just lucky here at UCLA Medical Center to have colleagues like Emily, Elizabeth, Kathy, Raafat and Kevin. Here's how they spread cheer.

In 2003, the parents of Elizabeth Overbeck, UCLA RN, built and moved into their dream home — a vacation hideaway in Northern Michigan. Here, they had planned to welcome and entertain their four children and eight grandchildren. One day upon returning from errands, Elizabeth’s parents accidentally left their car running. They both died of carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning.

From that tragedy, Elizabeth and her siblings started the Overbeck Foundation, an organization to increase the awareness of carbon monoxide poisoning and what can be done to prevent its occurrence. Elizabeth now speaks at events on the importance of education and changing CO detector installation code laws to help prevent related unnecessary deaths.

With regularity, you can find Emily Bahruth, UCLA RN, with a medical team in Haiti, traveling on average to nine rural villages and treating 3,000 patients. Emily explains, “Patients in underdeveloped parts of the world with limited or no access to medical attention have come to rely on care given by nurses on short-term trips. Once word travels that a medical team is in town, patients often travel by foot, some without shoes, for miles to be treated by a medical team. I feel I get more out of the experience than the patients we treat.”

Raafat Attalla, senior physician assistant at the Clark Urological Center, knows first hand the healing power of love and care. He and his wife, Xochitl, are raising nine children. Six are foster children with special medical needs due to complications from prematurity to seizure disorder to blindness from shaken-baby syndrome.

Xochitl Attalla’s commitment to foster care began in 1991 while she was working as an infant-stimulation therapist in foster homes with dreadful conditions. “She thought she could do much better,” Attalla said, “so she applied for a license and started taking care of the kids to provide a much better environment.”

The Attallas bought a second home in 2003 and equipped it to accommodate the medical needs of their younger charges. A support staff of eight, including nurses and a pharmacist, help the Attallas care for three children under the age of two years.

While their foster children come and go — each stays about two years — the Attallas remain dedicated to helping them. Because they can.

“God’s given us blessings,” Attalla said. “And we try to teach [our] kids that all the things that are good are to be shared, and not just wasted and washed away with greed.” continued on back.

For many years, Kathy McCloy, RN, Cardiac Nurse Practitioner at Santa Monica – UCLA Medical Center, has served as a Director of Nursing for Camp Del Carazon, a camp that gives children with life-threatening cardiac conditions the opportunity to participate in exciting activities like other children. Each year Camp del Corazan takes a group of children to Catalina Island for three to four days, an endeavor requiring a team of skilled volunteer nurses and physicians to watch over the children and provide them with medical care.

Preparation for the camp extends throughout the entire year. Kathy recruits and trains the nurses, stocks the infirmary with medical supplies and equipment to address any possible need or emergency and attends the camp as a volunteer nurse. She also volunteers for patient trips to Mammoth Mountain and Catalina Island during the winter and spring.

Shortly after Kevin Clark joined UCLA 28 years ago, he was invited to an office party. It was December, so he impulsively turned up in a Santa suit. “Nobody knew who I was but I knew everyone,” he recalls, adding: “I was saying things to people and their reaction was, ‘Hey, how does Santa know that?’ ”

Since then, Clark, an administrative analyst in the Blood and Platelet Center, dresses up as Santa every year. He plays Santa for seriously ill patients at the UCLA Medical Center and organizes and manages an annual toy drive to benefit the pediatric patients and families at the Mattel Children’s Hospital.

Clark averages some 40 Santa appearances around town every year.

What prompts Clark to spend so much of his time spreading Christmas cheer? “It isn’t about me — it’s about the (Santa) suit,” he explains. “When people look at it, their hopes and dreams get magnified and reflected back.”

To sponsor a toy barrel, contact Santa Clark.