Gray Monday

In this Issue:

• A couple of health-related Q&A I have gotten lately
• Calendar Q&A
• WFU in the News: in praise of weighted vests
• P’28s: Letters So Dear for your students; weekly message for you

It’s one of our best weeks on campus: Hit the Bricks, our signature fall event where students walk/run laps around the Quad to raise money for cancer research, is happening on Thursday, and Family Weekend begins Friday! I’m anxiously looking at the forecast and hoping we don’t get rain for HTB, and I am also anxiously awaiting an xray to see if I broke a toe (and thus can’t walk my HTB shifts). Stay tuned!

Now to a few questions and updates!

A couple of health-related Q&A I have gotten lately

I have received a couple of questions that relate to healthcare, and wanted to address them here, since I expect other families may also want this info.

The first was “Does Deacon Health give COVID shots?” They do not. However, students can schedule them off campus at places like CVS, Target, etc. If your Deac doesn’t have a car, there is a weekend shuttle that stops off at Target or at River Birch/Sherwood Plaza (which has a CVS right across the street).

The other question was about students managing chronic illness: “I have a student with a chronic illness that they manage well, but has occasional flares or times when it does affect their ability to attend class or complete her work. Is there someone at Deacon Health I could talk to so that they are aware and could be the point of contact for my student in case they need their help?“

My trusted source at Deacon Health said the following: “The student can reach out to us while they are doing well and not having symptoms and be seen by a provider. We then will be able to discuss [their condition] and have a full picture of what happens with them. We then will have all of the info necessary if there is a flare and we need to help them. If they have not already provided them, it would be helpful to have the student’s records sent to us (meaning, a letter from their provider about the situation so we know what usually happens for the student). If we get the records, then our Nurse Case Manager would be able to help the student with everything they should need.”

Calendar Q&A

A parent in the Daily Deacdom had written me about trying to plan an important family event and wanted to know if dates for future years were available. The Office of the University Registrar has a calendars page that is worth bookmarking.

On this page, the most comprehensive set of dates is typically in the Academic Services calendar section (see grey box at top right of the screenshot).

I would not save the PDF of the actual calendar, just in case something changes; instead, I would bookmark this website and consult it as needed. While it is very rare that those dates change once published, it is not impossible. So going to the source website always ensures you see the most up to date info.

WFU in the News: in praise of weighted vests

My colleagues who work with news stories have redesigned their website, and now you can see WFU in the News not as a weekly installment, but a running list of stories. This story about weighted vests and exercise caught my eye, because I had used one of these vests in a WFU lifestyle and health program (and loved it!):

“A big highlight of the weighted vest, according to health and exercise science professor Kristin Beavers, is that it gives older adults access to exercise equipment that can easily be used at home. “Getting people to exercise is hard,” Beavers said. “So if this makes it a little easier, I do think there are some real advantages from an access standpoint. You can walk around your neighborhood and sneak resistance training in, which I do think is important for your muscles and your bones.”

P’28s: Letters So Dear and Life in the Forest message for your students; weekly message for you

It’s Monday, which means our ’28s got their weekly edition of Letters So Dear, and they also got a Life in the Forest email from the Office of Residence Life and Housing. One of the things I particularly liked about this message is they told our first-year students that each residential community has a Hit the Bricks team they can join!

And for our P’28s, we have a new weekly message: this week, we talk about what I call the Frantic Phone Call/Text/Facetime.

It is inevitable that parents and loved ones get the Frantic Phone Call/Text/Facetime. I had my first one from my ’27 maybe a week in to the fall semester, and it won’t be the last one 🙂