Naugle is heading up the Stardust Ball & Casino Gala, a benefit for the center.
The Plummer Movement Disorders Center at Scott & White Memorial Hospital, within the Neuroscience Institute, offers a variety of treatments for patients suffering from movement disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease, tremors, restless legs syndrome, chorea, dystonia and jerks.
The center provides outreach and education to communities and health care providers in Central Texas.
The Stardust Ball, sponsored by Cat’s Corner Community Organization, a local volunteer fundraiser organization, will be 7 p.m.-midnight Saturday, March 7, at Temple’s Country Lane Senior Apartments.
Cat’s Corner Community Organization took its name from a legendary corner of the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem where the best dancers gathered during the swing dance era, trading moves and steps.
Naugle said she had been looking for a way for the Central Texas Area Agency on Aging to become more involved with Parkinson’s disease when the opportunity to raise funds for the Plummer Center came to light.
As the disease began to take its toll on Naugle’s father, John Russell, it became difficult for her to witness his struggles.
“It was very hard to watch someone who was so strong and so talented to waste away,” Naugle said of her father. “He was a band master who took his band all over the country and overseas. He knew every musical instrument.”
Eventually becoming the primary caregiver for her father, Naugle said she knew the symptoms of Parkinson’s like a book, but she still went through a period of denial, even when her father was displaying all the symptoms.
Naugle also knew little about caring for a person with the disease.
The staff of the Plummer Movement Disorders Center works to make sure the individual is diagnosed with the correct disorder, to provide therapy services, and support groups for the patients and their caregivers.
“My personal agenda is to get the information out on how to care for somebody with Parkinson’s and make sure the caregiver gets all of the knowledge they need,” Naugle said.
At one point, while living in a nursing home, Naugle’s father lost 20 pounds in a month because he wasn’t physically able to pull the plastic off his meals. The nursing home personnel picked up the untouched food trays and noted in his files “meals denied.”
“It breaks your heart,” she said. “There’s just wasn’t enough education at nursing homes and assisted living on how to care for a Parkinson’s patient.”
Getting the correct diagnosis is a challenge and Naugle wants patients and their families to feel confident enough to keep going back until they get answers.
Naugle and Kelly Starr-Sebek, senior director of business development for Tex Med Home Health and Cat’s Corner fundraiser coordinator, see the degenerative disorders as thieves that stole their parents’ years before their actual deaths.
Sebek’s mother, Nancy Howard, died of Lewy Body Dementia, a disease-related to Parkinson’s.
Sebek’s mother was misdiagnosed for years. Howard was in her early ’50 when she began having problems with rigidity. Within seven years she was dead.
Parkinson’s with dementia was the first diagnosis, followed by Alzheimer’s, Sebek said. In the mid 1990s, Scott & White determined it was probably Lewy Body Dementia.
Both Naugle and Sebek were the family members to take charge of their parents’ care.
Naugle said she felt her siblings were quick to judge when things went wrong, but she also admits she expected them to read her mind.
Sebek said she micromanaged her mother’s care, blowing up over the smallest thing because of the frustration in not being able to fix her.
The gift, Sebek said, is that she has since found compassion for family members of clients who lash out because they are feeling overwhelmed by their loved one’s illness.
The regret of both women, they say, is not appreciating their parents and their achievements before they became ill.
Through education, Naugle and Sebek believe others caring for Parkinson patients will have fewer difficulties and locally, the Plummer Center will be the source of that information.
