It's hard to believe the dynamo who is Fernanda Machado needs help, but she does.
At
61, she's been on a disability pension since 1989, when she was forced to leave
her much-loved job as an educational assistant for the Toronto District School
Board.
The cartilage at the joints on both hips had given out. She could
barely make it up or down the stairs at school. The pain at the end of a work
day, she remembers, was so intense all she could do was make her way home - somehow
- eat something, then lie down and rest up for the next day.
"I had
no life," she says.
For years she was afraid to go out. Even after
two operations, she never knew when her hipbone would slip out of its socket and
she'd crumble to the floor, screaming in pain. She remembers not being able to
dress herself, wearing an old housecoat all the time, eating only dry cereal because
she couldn't cook for herself, and being worried sick about the crumbs on her
floor.
"What if they attract cockroaches? Or rats?" she'd ask
herself.
That's when she called Toronto's St. Christopher House to ask for
help. It sent Isabella.
"She's saved my life, I'm telling you,"
says Machado. "She's real good to me. I've had a lot of help from her and
a smile and everything. She says jokes to me. I felt so at ease with her."
Machado
had a third hip operation last spring.
"Now I get around a lot more,"
she says. She gets picked up in a van and taken to St. Christopher House in downtown
Toronto for bingo, for the summer Friday barbecues, for lunches on other days
of the week. It's her life.
And Isabella? She's still helping Machado at
home, allowing her to have that life.
.
Learn all about this and other options in Toronto senior care.
