Florence Soltys – Her Death Thursday, September 27, 2007 Leaves the Elderly of North Carolina with One Fewer Champion

Sarah Brandes Madry – Monday, October 1, 2007 - About a year ago, I interviewed Florence Soltys so that when she retired in the spring of 2007 I could write an article about her life and work. The spring of this year came, but none of us would be really sure she had actually retired, knowing how she loved working, until the very end of April, when it seemed that she had, in fact, closed her UNC office and turned in her key. In the small increment of time between May and September – in that small period of time – we lost Florence Soltys. She died on Thursday, September 27, 2007 from complications from a minor auto accident. So she did retire and I am writing about her, but from not from duty – from grief and admiration. That’s not the way I’d rather have approached this writing project.

Florence was first and foremost a social worker, but she was an aggrandizement of that term, much more than a social worker. She worked for Society, for the Community, as well as the people she encountered as part of her job. A News and Observer eulogy on Friday, September 28, was titled “Soltys’ Good Fight.” I admire the writer of the excellent piece, but the title I have a problem with, because we sometimes use “The Good Fight” as a phrase meaning “well, we tried, anyway.” But Florence succeeded. She fought goodly and successfully for many, many people in their many, many muddles, and sometimes using only her fierce determination to have right raise up over might, she laid low the barriers to care, the obtuse paperwork that prevents proper compensation, the uncompromising, the uncaring, the upside down, and even the purposeful meanness that sometimes shows itself to the very young and the very old.

I can’t think Florence was ever other than an activist, but my interview with her last year didn’t go into the period before she came to Chapel Hill from Boston in 1975 when her husband came to UNC to attend medical school. That was 32 years ago, long before most of the nursing, medical, social work, public health, occupational health, and physical therapy students she was still teaching last April were born. She had a master’s degree in nutrition, but didn’t use it right away. She spent her time doing community volunteer work. By the middle of the 1980s, she was a force to be admired in the local world of helping others. She helped start Hospice, and then, probably having discovered that her passion was an avocation – possibly more – a fate, she went to school at UNC-CH to get her master’s degree in social work. After graduation, she was hired by the School of Medicine and the School of Social Work to teach and practice.

The elderly were her special interest, and she corralled many social work students, as well as other varieties of UNC students, to see, hear, and help the older population around them. Who would not follow her after listening to her for about 20 minutes? Her glinting eyes and raspy, soft voice were perfect carriers for the transmission of stories about her deft outwitting of the incomprehensibly sad and unnecessary things that can happen to people, of her tug of war on behalf of people’s threatened dignity, impending banishment from home, darkening medical situations, and loss of friends and family.

Her stories of helping people dive into their locked lives (she always dived in with them) and the outcomes of some of her unusual and forthright solutions were fascinating to hear. Listening to them was a great way to be made aware that working with older people means “interdisciplinary.” They have issues that are not just medical – their hands sometimes don’t work well anymore, their feet lose feeling of the floor, their medicines taint other medicines and physical problems, their families are meddling, or not caring, or absent, or pushing, or “carrying on” as we say in the South, and does it surprise anyone that depression is hanging around to cobweb all the rest? Who do you go to if you can’t see any more, don’t know why your insurance won’t pay, think your lawyer is cheating you out of money but don’t know what to do? Who does the UNC student who is interested in health leadership and making a difference for poor, elderly people go to? They used to go to Florence Soltys. It’s a real cause for grief that the so often used sentence, “You need to go see Florence Soltys” will be retired now from the list of helpful suggestions that well-meaning people can give to their friends who are in trouble.

She told me, “There’s a fruitful time in our lives and you need to make a difference. People have a lot of good in them. Sometimes we have to look at the negative, but I am always amazed at the number of people who want to do the right thing.”

Doing the right thing, which is one of the hallmarks of a leader, often threatens a person with loss of job, of friends, of money, of position. And so although many people want to do the right thing, only a select few do it when the stakes are high.

Florence did.

The Center for Aging and Health, where she helped to assess the physical, mental, and social status of patients at the Geriatric Evaluation Clinic, will deeply miss her. We all feel as if we’ve taken a hit. But it’s not really us who are debilitated, it’s the elderly of North Carolina who are cheated of a hero, of a Hercules who met successfully so many challenges. Florence would be tickled to think we’d put a club in her one hand and place the draping skin of the Nemean lion on her shoulders, but that’s one of the values of mythology – to properly describe an unusual and powerful person by coupling them with a standard of excellence that is universally known.

Herculean tasks, yes. She took them on with wit and wisdom. And she loved doing it, as we can tell by her late retirement date, spring 2007. She was 72 years old.

And now, for us, a great deficit. Someone must have had a problem that needed fixing – somewhere else.

Note: This article was re-published in The Chapel Hill Magazine, November-December issue, 2007 with permission of the author and the Center for Aging and Health.

Christine Khandelwal, DO

New Fellow in Geriatric Medicine, Christine Khandelwal, DO

Christine Khandelwal, DO, UNC’s newest fellow in geriatric medicine, recommends the specialization of geriatrics to medical students who want to serve a population with “many medical and social complexities.”

Her path into serving that very same population opened years ago during high school when she worked in a pharmacy in Long Island, New York. “The older customers had so many questions, concerns and opinions regarding their own health care, and that made me become curious about how medicines work and about health care in general.”

Khandelwal did her undergraduate work at the State University of New York in Albany. She was a nurse’s aide for part of that time and again felt an interest in the older patients on her service. “I loved hearing their stories, their life journeys, and how appreciative they were for basic care. I felt that what I could do for them was limited, and became determined to be able to do more.”

She graduated from Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine and completed her Family Medicine Residency at the University of Pittsburgh. It was during her residency that she worked with many of Pittsburgh’s underserved older people, which revealed to her the extent of the collective deficits of the health care system for the elderly.

But for Khandelwal, a problem perceived is a problem to be addressed, and so she is stepping into her fellowship at UNC to get training in the advanced and interdisciplinary medicine that older patients require.

She is the third new fellow to join the Division of Geriatric Medicine in 2007, Drs. David Halpern and Michael LaMantia having started their training in early summer 2007.