Caro’s beacon: Lighthouse marks 30 years of treating people with brain injuries

The smile on Dorothea Wilson’s face seems permanent, her laugh and pleasant demeanor consistent, but there’s one thing that she seems to get especially serious about: cleanliness.
Specifically, that each of the roughly 100 patients at Lighthouse Neurological Rehabilitation Center near Caro gets a shower every single day.
It might not sound like much, but it’s one of the primary reasons she and her late husband, James Wilson, opened Lighthouse 30 years ago this month.
Her son, Jamie Wilson, had been in a horrific automobile crash in 1978, and after a month-and-a-half was transferred out of the hospital’s intensive care unit to a rehabilitation facility.
“When he got to the rehab I was shocked,” Dorothea Wilson said. “They wouldn’t brush his teeth…they wouldn’t even let us wash his hair. He went from Aug. 7 to December before he could get his hair washed.
“It just shocked me.”
Today’s Lighthouse Neurological Rehabilitation Center is the embodiment of Wilson’s feeling of being “shocked” more than three decades ago. (Read more)

(This story originally appeared in the Jan. 11, 2017 print edition of The Tuscola County Advertiser and can be read online in its entirety here.)