surgical technologist at Providence Little Company of Mary Medical
Center in Torrance, Calif., began to remove blue wrap from the trays,
checking for holes and strikethroughs. She happened to glance over
at her colleague as he was tossing mounds of the used material into
the trash. "I thought, if all this wrap is being wasted, maybe I can do
something with it," she recalls.
M A R C H 2 0 2 0 • O U T PA T I E N T S U R G E R Y. N E T • 3 7
Ms. Marella rubbed
a piece of the soft
polypropylene plas-
tic between her fin-
gers. She knew the
material repels
water, is durable and
retains heat, and
thought back to her
past career as a
deputy sheriff when
she saw homeless
people with nothing
between them and the hard ground except newspaper or cardboard.
The flicker of an idea danced in her head. Ms. Marella set aside two
pieces of wrap and took them home later that night. A plan began to
take shape as she held the four-foot squares out in front of her. She
carefully folded the two pieces in half, sandwiched one inside the other
and stitched the edges together around all four sides. In a matter of
minutes, she'd produced the prototype for a blue wrap sleeping mat
that would eventually be handed out to thousands of homeless individ-
uals across the country. To make the mat easier to carry, she attached
elastic loops on one end so it could be rolled up like a yoga mat. (See
how Ms. Marella creates the sleeping mats by watching her instruction-
• FORM OF FLATTERY Surgical teams across the country have launched their own
wrap-to-mat programs.
