Rockwood parishioner Laura Thomson, a nurse at Beaumont, says seeing patients without shoes broke her heart: 'I try to see God in them'
TRENTON — A patient was being discharged from Beaumont Hospital in Trenton when Laura Thomson, a registered nurse with the progressive care unit, noticed something pretty disturbing.
The patient didn’t have any shoes.
Looking at the cold, wet conditions outside, Thomson asked the patient whether she had a ride to take her home. The patient replied that she didn’t; she would walk. Again, without any shoes.
“She said she lived pretty close to the hospital, and she was going to walk home; she didn’t have a ride and didn’t want to pay for an Uber or anything,” Thomson told Detroit Catholic.
Thomson went home that night and spoke with her husband, Brandon, about what she saw. What good is it, she asked, to treat a patient’s symptoms if they were just going to send her out with no shoes?
So Thomson decided to borrow a page from other hospitals' playbooks and begin a clothing closet for patients in need.
Brody Garrett’s Closet is named after Thomson’s 12-year-old son, whom Thomson describes as a “giver.”
“He would give the shirt off his back to anybody,” Thomson said. “He’s 12 years old and acts like he’s 30. He is very mature for his age, but always has been very kind, very giving. It was my way of honoring him, because it would be something he would do.”
Laura and Brandon Thomson, along with their four sons, Brody, 12; Brennan, 7; Bryor, 5; and Bruce, 2; are members of St. Mary, Our Lady of the Annunciation Parish in Rockwood, with the three eldest boys attending St. Joseph School in Trenton.
Thomson sees the clothing closet as a way to bring evangelical charity to the public sphere. The closet is just that — a spare closet for storage — which Thomson convinced her supervisors would be put to better use as a place for hospital staff to donate unwanted clothing, which the entire team can use to equip patients in a pinch.
The closet features male and female clothing, ranging in sizes from extra small to 3XL, underwear, shoes, socks, shirts, pants and anything else a person might need.
Donations from the community started rolling in after local TV news featured the project, so much that the hospital had to stop accepting donations after a massive influx of clothing, coupled with increased infection protocol with the rise of COVID-19 cases in Metro Detroit.
“When you have someone who comes into the hospital who is sick, they clearly don’t want to be there; nobody wants to be in the hospital,” Thomson said. “But when I look at the person as a whole, I always try to think of this as a family member to somebody. I see my family in the people who come in. You get to know their story, and I just try to really see God in them.”
The seemingly small gifts — a used sweatshirt that hasn’t been worn in years or shoes that have been outgrown long ago by a child of a staff member — mean the world to the patients, and have been a morale boost to the staff.
“Patients are actually shocked when we open the closet up to them; they didn’t know something like this existed,” Thomson said. “They are surprised by how much we actually care about how they look or feel when they leave.
"It’s a great feeling to able to clothe somebody," she added. "One day, we helped a patient with clothes, and they left with a shirt that belonged to the husband of one of the nurses I was working with, and the nurse said, ‘He’s wearing my husband’s old shirt, that’s so cool.'”
As COVID-19 cases ebb and flow, hospital staffs are nearing a breaking point, Thomson said, but it's the small acts of kindness that can create a ripple effect that spreads across towns, states, and even the world.
“The past two years have been very draining,” Thomson said. “No matter if you are in the hospital or working outside of it with the news on about COVID, it’s exhausting. We needed some spark of something positive to remember why we are doing what we're doing. That definitely helps the employees here. We all got engaged in the project, coming together and bringing a spirit a giving, a spirit of caring. It reminds us all why we’re in the field.”
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