Sometimes the unimaginable happens. As a single mom, 44-year-old Carrie was used to a life of struggles, yet she seemed to get through them all with an inner strength. Call it perseverance – or maybe stubbornness – but Carrie did not give up easily.  Carrie worked hard to provide for her daughter. She was independent, but devoted herself to taking care of others. Maybe that’s why it was easy for her to overlook her own needs. So a seemingly harmless wound on her leg felt like a minor issue, not something she needed to get checked right away. What she never would have guessed is how that one decision would change her life forever. On October 28, 2015, Carrie went to bed fatigued, with a fever and chills, hoping to sleep off what she thought was the flu. But she was about to begin a traumatic journey.  Awaking in a delusion, without a sense of place or time, Carrie was rushed to the hospital. She would be flown to the nearest trauma center for emergency surger...

By: Dana Casadei Linda Woolard is a woman of many words. Yet, when asked about the Dream Cruise held in her honor on June 3, she had a hard time describing how she felt about the day. “I laughed, I cried, I screamed, I clapped,” Linda said. “I had every emotion you could ever have.” The 65-year-old has attended all 21 Woodward Dream Cruises but recently entered Angela Hospice’s Care Center as a patient. Linda and her friend of 47 years, Christine Cope, both thought that Linda wouldn’t be able to attend this August’s Cruise. So the two women made a plan for their own Dream Cruise, Linda said. They would go for a drive on a really nice day, put the top of Christine’s convertible down, and get some ice cream. It started off as a simple plan. But Christine had bigger ideas. Start Your Engines On June 1, Christine came to visit Linda and told her that she had called 7 Action News about her. WXYZ then got in contact with Cruis’News and shared Linda’s story, which the...

Trying to plan family gatherings can feel impossible. Everyone is going a million miles a minute, with schedules that are constantly filled and changing. Then once you finally find a day to get everyone together there seems to always be one relative that has something last minute come up, sometimes making the process begin again. While families have the ability to make our heads spin they always show up in a time of need, no matter how packed their schedule is. For LaVerne Andreolli that time was during her mother’s stay in hospice. Alice Grodus with her daughter LaVerne Andreolli LaVerne’s mother, Alice, had spent a year going in and out of the hospital before being diagnosed with T-cell carcinoma lymphoma of the skin. LaVerne said Alice did treatment because “it was supposed to be treatable and not progress into anything else.” In December 2013 though, Alice was taken to the University of Michigan hospital because “something just wasn’t right,” LaVerne said. Three weeks an...