Donnie Missouri, 58, doesn’t have medical training. He started his health career in the linens department in Johns Hopkins Hospital. Now, he works on the front lines — one of the hospital’s non-medical workers who reaches out to patients who doctors think are at risk of suffering setbacks that will force them to return.
One recent day at the end of March, he visited Vincent Berry, a 28-year-old man who’s paralyzed from the waist down, a condition resulting from a years-ago gunshot wound after a drug deal went sour. Berry’s doing well medically, but he lives with his aging grandmother, in the upstairs bedroom of a narrow apartment where he relies on help from friends and family to be able to leave. Missouri has been trying to help him secure independent, wheelchair-accessible housing that will make it possible for him go to school or pursue other activities that might move his life forward.
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