Mission Moment: A Mother on a Mission

Shepherd Center, ranked among the country’s top rehabilitation centers, is populated by people whose plans and goals have been upended by unexpected events. But instead of gloom, the atmosphere is upbeat, even cheerful. Positive messages are everywhere. Elevator doors display life-size photos of people who have reclaimed their lives. The late James Shepherd, co-founder and longtime board chairman, set the tone years ago with his famous quote: “Shepherd Center is the bridge between ‘I can’t’ and ‘I can.’”

Nonagenarian Alana Shepherd, chairman of the board and 50-year volunteer, is in the middle of it all. She frequently uses a scooter, but this morning she is leaning only slightly on her sparkly cane as she makes her way to her office. Patients and staff greet her almost reverentially. If she is regarded as royalty, there’s a reason: The hospital has been her domain since 1975, when it consisted of six beds in a rented space in a now-defunct Atlanta hospital. To emphasize her significance, the staff insisted one Halloween that she dress up as Queen Elizabeth II, complete with toy Corgi. With trademark humor, Alana consented. 

Alana is here today, as she is almost every day, to tend to hospital business and make her rounds, buoying up patients and their families. She and her late husband, Harold, late son, James, and founding medical director David Apple, M.D., are responsible for what supporters call the “culture” of Shepherd Center—a commitment to infusing extraordinary care and compassion into every interaction, every treatment, and every outcome, so that patients and families can begin again. 

The founders considered every aspect of the ambience. Paintings on the walls of the long hallways give patients and their families something to look at, Alana says. Employees across all disciplines are expected to make eye contact and smile. And what other hospital includes “the appropriate use of humor” as a criterion on staff evaluations? 

Each feature of Shepherd Center culture is rooted in the Shepherd family’s own experience, the life change that began when Alana and Harold got what she describes as the “call from hell.” Son James, on a post-college graduation trip to Brazil, had been paralyzed in a bodysurfing accident. 

As Alana switches from her cane to her red scooter for her rounds, she is determined to give patients and their families the reassurance her family so desperately needed when James was injured. After all these years, she is still a mother on a mission.

A Day in the Life

Alana travels from floor to floor, smoothly backing into elevators, maneuvering between pieces of therapy equipment, and, all along the way, greeting staff, patients, and family members by name. She has already met the newest arrival, a woman named Tiffany who came in by ambulance a couple of hours earlier. 

Alana’s first visit of the day is Christopher Peixoto, an honor student and soccer player at Cobb County’s Lassiter High School, who was severely injured in a car crash. Alana greets him warmly, as if she has known him since his childhood. 

“Hi, Chris,” she says. “Remember yesterday I came to see you? Oh, look at you! Your neck’s even moving better today. I’m so pleased!” Because he can’t yet speak, she asks him to raise his thumb to answer “yes” to her questions. “Did you like your therapist today?” A thumb moves up slightly off the arm of his wheelchair. 

“We’ve had a very good morning,” his mother, Flavia Rocha, tells Alana. “It’s amazing how he’s changed. I’m so grateful to be here. I can feel the peace and true love!” As Alana starts to leave, Flavia wants to take a picture with her. 

Riding through a therapy gym, Alana stops to say to a patient, “You got your hair cut. It looks good!” 

“How far did you walk?” she asks another. 

And to yet another, “How long is your brace on? A neck brace in hot weather is no fun.” 

She stops for a longer conversation with a man who is about to undergo electrical stimulation to help him move his hand muscles. He is Svetolik Djurkovic, M.D., a physician at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Washington, DC, who is originally from Slovenia. She asks whether he misses his home country. “Right now, I am the happiest person in the world that I’m here,” he replies. As his therapist starts the stimulation, Alana jokes that it will make his hair curly. “I always wanted curly hair,” Dr. Djurkovic replies, going along with the gag. 

Heading back to her office, Alana passes Shepherd’s Wheelchair Seating & Mobility Clinic, where Sondra Anthony is trying out equipment. Sondra is not a hospital patient, but her arthritis is becoming more debilitating, and she has come to see which wheelchair or scooter will best suit her needs.

Alana talks to her about cushions and back support and urges her to put the word out about the clinic, which is open to the public. 

“Ma’am, I’m sort of new to this Shepherd Center,” Sondra says. “Are you the founder?” 

“One of them,” Alana says. 

“And you come in every day?” 

“Every day. But I’m the chairman of the board, so I have to know what’s going on.”

Written by Gayle White

This story is an excerpt from “Mission Moments: 50 Years of Rebuilding Lives One Moment at a Time,” a book celebrating Shepherd’s 50th anniversary in 2025.