Scrubs made by Mom add soft touch to Rainbow ER

By Kaye Spector
Health and Medical Reporter, The Plain Dealer 

You can buy scrubs at lots of places: uniform stores, discount stores, on the Web.

But nurses at Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital have a source for custom-made, child-friendly scrub tops: Dorothy Riedel.

Riedel, who lives in South Euclid, is the mother of Rainbow emergency-room nurse Kristine Vehar.

Riedel began sewing and selling holiday and seasonal-themed scrubs to the Rainbow ER nurses about five years ago, after the ones she made for her daughter generated admiration from Vehar's co-workers and the question: Will your mom make me one?

So now there's a plastic tub in the Rainbow ER nurses' lounge, piled high with fabric. Nurses pick out the fabric, pay $15, and receive their custom-made scrub top in a few weeks. Riedel charges $25 for two, or $10 if the nurse supplies the fabric.

Riedel estimates she's made about 400 scrub tops over the years for the Rainbow nurses. She recently filled orders for 19 tops with holiday prints, such as snowmen or Peanuts characters.

Riedel thinks the kid-friendly prints help the ER's scared children connect with their caregivers.

"When a child is in the ER, there's a lot of strangers in there with them. If they see a nurse with a Charlie Brown top on, they'll feel more relaxed," Riedel says. "It gives me pleasure to do that."

My daughter, my co-author

When Dr. Tommaso Falcone decided to include a section about nutrition in the second edition of his book on infertility, he only had to look across the dining room table for help.

The chairman of the Cleveland Clinic's Ob/Gyn & Women's Health Institute turned to his daughter, Tanya Falcone, a graduate student in nutrition and dietetics at Kent State University.

Father and daughter spent about a year going through the concepts for the book. Then the young woman wrote a chapter on nutrition and supplied menus for the appendices.

Falcone says he learned a little bit about his daughter as the two worked together.

"She is the type of person who has her own ideas," about the medical part of the book, Falcone says. When he would raise questions about some of her ideas, "she was quite firm."

Falcone describes his book, "The Cleveland Clinic Guide to Infertility," as an expanded version of information he would tell patients during their first office consultation.

Nutrition is "a very important part of fertility enhancement," he says, particularly because excessive weight is one of the four main causes of infertility. Eating well also is something the patient has direct control over, he says.

"With most other things, I am controlling the most intimate aspects of their lives," Falcone says. "This is something that they can do."

Tell me about it

It's National Hospice Awareness Month, and Hospice of the Western Reserve is marking the observance by telling stories about hospice and inviting others to share their own.

Every day in November, the hospice is posting a new story on its Web site.

There, you also can download brochures about hospice's services and planning for end-of-life, and find links to information about advocacy at the state and national levels.

The hospice stories reflect the experiences of the staff and volunteers.

Like the story about an information-services worker who spent half a workday and a Friday night to help a dying patient set up Skype, an Internet communication service that allowed the patient to talk to his loved ones all over the country. It was the young patient's final wish.

To read the stories -- or tell one of your own -- go to the Web site and click on the large brown box at the bottom of the page.

Hospitals in the news

High-profile patients who have been treated at Cleveland's big hospitals have been grabbing the national television spotlight in recent weeks.

On Nov. 11, talk-show host Oprah Winfrey broadcast her interview with Charla Nash, the Connecticut woman hospitalized at the Cleveland Clinic after being mauled by a chimp. Nash arrived at the Clinic in February, three days after a friend's 200-pound chimp tore off much of her face and hands.

That same day, ABC's Nightline program broadcast a story reported at University Hospitals Case Medical Center on adults developing serious cases of H1N1, or swine, flu.

On Nov. 13, ABC's 20/20 featured a story on Johanna Orozco, the Cleveland teen who was shot in the face by her ex-boyfriend, with video and interviews of the trauma doctors who treated her at MetroHealth Medical Center.