Over the last 25 years, Bruce Waddington has become a familiar face in the halls of Madonna. His first position was as a nurse at the bedside, before transitioning to outpatient services. Currently, he works at Madonna’s physician’s clinic as a front office supervisor. He says he’s stayed with the organization for so long because he believes in the mission and enjoys the culture.
“You can’t get a better atmosphere,” Bruce said. “The patients, the camaraderie between our staff. We work together to make sure that [positive] outcomes happen, along with our doctors and our therapists. We rebuild lives.”
Bruce knows firsthand what it means to see care in a new light, one of Madonna’s mantras. At the beginning of the year, he sought Madonna’s services as a patient needing rehabilitation.
“On January 1, 2025, I had a massive cardiac event at the store,” Bruce remembered.
Fortunately, other shoppers jumped in and performed CPR and other life-saving measures. When first responders took over, they rushed him to the emergency department at Bryan Medical Center East Campus.
“I believe there were three cardiac events in the matter of roughly six to seven hours that evening,” Bruce said. “I was told it was many, many minutes before they could find a heartbeat after they were doing rescue treatment.”
Dr. Adam Kafka, MD, who works with Bruce in Madonna’s physician’s clinic, says Bruce is very lucky.
“[It’s] a situation a lot of people don’t make it out of,” Kafka said. “When I came back to work the day after New Year’s and heard about it, it was pretty scary for everyone up in the office.”
At the hospital, Bruce developed a pulmonary embolism, which Kafka said set him back in terms of lung function. He was grateful he could be Bruce’s attending physician at Madonna, rounding with his patient every day and coordinating his care plan.
“When he came to us, he was on oxygen, and he was just very fatigued, very deconditioned,” Kafka said. “A lot of what we did was just trying to really tune up his pulmonary status and then slowly build up that endurance and capacity so that he could participate in therapies and be able to get back home and be independent with everything.”
Bruce says the decision to come to Madonna for post-acute care rehabilitation was easy.
“I didn’t hesitate,” Bruce said. “I said, ‘I want to go to Madonna. I know my family is going to take care of me. My nursing family, my therapy family. My doctors.’”
That feeling of family was a sentiment echoed by Bruce’s colleagues-turned-care team.
“Before he was working with the clinic, he was on the floor, so he was somebody that knew people here at the hospital, had worked side by side with them,” Kafka said. “Now, for them to kind of give back and help him during his journey, I think, was special, not only for him, but also for the people that he works with.”
Feeling emotionally supported, Bruce knew the real work would come on the physical side of things. Therapy had to start slowly, focusing on strengthening Bruce’s muscles and retraining his body to breathe.
“After cardiac surgery, you have all these precautions where you can’t stand and you can’t do a lot of bending, so you’re kind of limiting your ability to move around,” Amy Potter, a Madonna speech-language pathologist, said. “Then you’ve got the sutures, and you just can’t expand those lungs. Bruce was soft-spoken. It was hard for him to get that air, so we started with him using an expiratory muscle trainer.”
Breathing on his own without pain or fatigue was the first victory.
“That was major,” Bruce said. “It’s hard not being able to breathe. It was a good feeling when I finally took that deep breath I could take without having all that pain.”
Speech therapy collaborated with physical and occupational therapies to build up Bruce’s stamina and endurance. He was able to participate in more therapy sessions and add in more intensity each time.
“They increased my activity tolerance to the point I could actually walk without a walker, and then I wanted to run,” Bruce said. “And they said, ‘Not yet!’”
After just three weeks in inpatient therapy, Bruce moved through Madonna’s continuum of care to the Rehabilitation Day program, attending outpatient therapy sessions three times a week. Having cleared his physical hurdles, he started to focus on a return to work and beloved hobbies. He improved his hand-eye coordination, worked through mobility challenges, and tested his cognition with a simulated office environment.
“For work re-entry, we worked on typing things up, and we started doing the scheduling where he had to type it into a spreadsheet,” Grant Baker, OTD, OTR/L, Bruce’s occupational therapist, said. “He was even catching some of the errors that the companies had made in the sheet and being able to fix that. That’s when I knew, ‘Ok, you’re going to be just fine to go up there.’”
Once he got the green light to return to work, Bruce was ready to jump right in.
“I got to return to work on April 1,” Bruce said. “I thought it was an April Fool’s Day joke when they told me I could go back. I think the office thought it was a joke, too, when I told them.”
He started slowly, just a few hours each day, but gradually, Bruce built up his schedule until he was back to his full-time workload. His smiling face is a welcome sight to his friends and colleagues.
“He’s fun to work with, has a good sense of humor, and has been a good addition to the office,” Kafka said. “I think when you go through something like that, it definitely refocuses you, gives you a new perspective on just life and the blessings that you have, and I think that he is certainly not taking any of that for granted.”
Bruce says he feels on top of the world, and he’s beyond grateful for everything his co-workers have done for him in his rehabilitation journey.
“Physically, I feel like I could conquer Mount Everest because of what they did here at Madonna,” Bruce said. “They rebuilt my physical and emotional life.”
He’s always believed in the work he does and lived the core values, but now, Bruce says he’s even more bought into Madonna’s mission. Now that he’s received it firsthand, he adamantly tells everyone he knows that Madonna is the place to go for post-acute care rehabilitation—both when he is working and when he’s off the clock.
“The therapy you’re going to get from Madonna is astronomically fantastic,” Bruce said. “You can’t ask for any better. Madonna’s therapy team and nursing staff and doctors do rebuild lives. I promise you. They rebuilt mine.”