PUEBLO, Colo. (AP) - When she was 29 years old, Dorothy Perry stood at death’s door.
A tumor had broken through her brain tissue and had wrapped around the carotid arteries feeding her brain. While the mass was not cancerous, it was squeezing one of her arteries, a critical source of blood to the organ.
Perry, then a counselor, underwent surgery, chemotherapy and 30 days of the highest-level radiation a human being can survive.
“When I was done, I decided I was going to finish my MBA because I had a vision for health care,” Perry, 60, said.
Today, that vision is on display in full color in the courtyard, vestibules and hallways of the Health Solutions central campus in Pueblo’s Belmont neighborhood. Perry is the president and chief executive of the organization, which provides behavioral health services, primary medical care, creative therapies such as art and horticulture and substance-abuse treatment, including a residential opioid treatment facility, among other services.
She is also the organization’s designer and primary artist.
Whether it be the outdoor fountains that greet guests during the warmer months, the comfortable waiting areas, or the stone, glass, ceramic, mirrored and beaded mosaics that are sprinkled around the 40,000-square-foot building, there’s nothing on the Health Solutions campus that Perry’s eye and touch has not influenced. Or, in many circumstances, made.
“I tend to be right-brained and left-brained,” Perry said. “I can sit and pour over spreadsheets at my desk and then go home and flip on the other side.”
TAKE ONE CREATIVE CALLING…
As a child, Perry wanted to be an artist.
“But I took a class and it was horrible,” the soft-spoken CEO said with a laugh.
Not one to be deterred, Perry eventually took up fiber work, learning to weave, use a loom and make Navajo blankets. An original Navajo in understated black, red and white rests in a corner of her office.
On the opposite wall hangs a mirror with a customized frame made of ceramics, beads, glass and buttons, to start. The brightly colored reds, greens, golds and creams of the mosaic frame lend a joyful atmosphere to the office suite.
Nearby, a series of hand-decorated bowls, platters and trays depicting everything from a large flower to an abstract cubist pattern bedeck an antique-looking wooden dresser. A large mosaic platter decorated in rings of descending size hangs above this collection. The palette of the eye-catching piece comprises cool hues of greens, purples and blues set against a white background.
All of these are original Dorothy Perry works. For it was in the multi-media world of mosaics that Perry found her medium of choice.
“I am absolutely absorbed in it,” she said. “There are so many ways to do mosaics, it’s endless.”
… ADD INSPIRATION …
Backtrack a half a lifetime, now, to that not-yet-30-year-old’s brush with mortality. Following surgery, Perry spent long hours receiving chemotherapy. Treatments ran five days per week over six weeks, and she said sitting alongside and chatting with her fellow patients - some of whom faced terminal illnesses - changed her perspective on health care.
“It was heart wrenching,” she said. “I would go out to my car and just cry sometimes.
“It was so impactful, and I had to do that every day for six weeks.”
Perry went back to school in pursuit of a Master’s of business administration, her second master’s degree. (Her first is in education with an emphasis on counseling, and she in 2005 she earned a doctorate in human services with an emphasis on health care administration.) Eventually the highly educated and driven Arizona native made her way to Pueblo and, from 1998 to 2010, a stint as executive director of SyCare.
In April 2011, Perry joined the staff of Spanish Peaks Behavioral Health. Under her guidance, the agency rebranded itself as Health Solutions and, in mid-2015, purchased its current campus.
… AND PUT IT INTO ACTION …
To say the building needed some work would be an understatement. The dilapidated campus had its share of infrastructure problems and had been occupied by, for lack of a better word, squatters.
“We had waste issues, electrical issues,” said Dawn Yengich, Health Solutions’ public relations and marketing director.
Under Perry’s direction, and with the blessing of the agency’s board of directors, the building was all but gutted and renovated from scratch. Two tenants - a dialysis provider and internal medicine office - remain from that original building.
With a clean canvas on which to work, Perry set about designing the building in such a way that it combines both her artistic passion and her fervent belief that the facility should feel welcoming to all of its clients.
Health Solutions has a $30 million budget, and about 80 of its patients are on Medicaid, Perry said. The agency counts the chronically homeless and some of the most seriously, persistently mentally ill members of our community among its clients.
So it is important to Perry that when any client, regardless of socioeconomic background or illness, walk through the bright and airy hallways with the vaulted skylights and park-type benches, they feel like they belong.
That’s just good medicine, Perry said.
“In my mind you have to .?.?. provide good services, but you have to provide them in an atmosphere where the patient feels, ’I deserve this. I am welcome,’?” she said. “It’s not enough to provide a warm place to come. .?.?. If you’re comfortable with the place you come to get health care, you’re more likely to continue” with treatment.
Call it a case of early realization lovingly taking shape in a vision that was built to last.
“Occasionally I think about (the tumor) and think ’Wow, that was 30 years ago,’?” Perry said. “Wow. Why have I been blessed to be able to live all these years?
“You just have to pinch yourself: I’m still here. Thank the Lord.”
___
Information from: The Pueblo Chieftain, http://www.chieftain.com
Please read our comment policy before commenting.