When Amy Blanc gets ready for work in the morning, she reviews her plans — and those plans are almost never set in stone.
That’s part of the job.
“There is no set schedule whatsoever,” she said. “You have to be able to go with the flow.”
Blanc, 41, has worked in the social work department at the Fulton Center for Rehabilitation and Healthcare near the West Bush hamlet for more than a decade, including the last five years as a director.
Currently, she oversees two staffers. It hasn’t always been that way in the wake of post-COVID-19 worker shortages. For a three-month window in 2022, she was a one-person department, managing hundreds of cases.
Sometimes the days can still get rough. Early in March, she recalled one day when it seemed as though “every time I turned around, I was just getting screamed at.”
It takes a hard shell to stay in the industry, Blanc explained. She aims to focus on the grand scheme of things.
“In the whole picture, you know you’re here to help others,” she said. “It’s to help them find their goals, help them be able to be empowered by their own goals, project what they need and help them get there.”
The lifelong Broadalbin resident has had her eyes set on working in the human services field since high school. She pursued a psychology degree at Schenectady County Community College and Russell Sage College.
Having a baby rerouted her academic career. Hoping to make ends meet as her husband focused on running a bible camp with his parents, Blanc, then 28 years old, stalled her academic goals to work as a housekeeper at the Fulton County Residential Health Care Facility.
Fulton County chose to sell the facility to the Bronx-based Centers for Specialty Care for $3.5 million in 2010. The state Health Department approved the sale in 2012.
Around that time, Blanc made clear that she wanted to do something different at the freshly renamed Fulton Center.
“I was pretty blunt to go to the administrator and be like, ‘I’m done with my degree and I need to move on. Is there anything here for me?’ ” said Blanc, who ultimately got a bachelor’s degree from the New York Institute of Technology. “And that was it. I knew I wasn’t going to stay in housekeeping.”
As a social worker, Blanc has worked with a wide mix of populations, ranging from people with chronic pain to those struggling with short-term ailments.
In her current role, she focuses primarily on servicing long-term residents while assisting other staffers as needed.
“Even the residents are always seeking me out instead of the social workers. So I have to keep driving them towards their own social workers,” Blanc said.
Over time, she’s developed a rapport with a number of the residents and their families, including Niel Tebbano of Saratoga Springs. His aunt Louise and uncle Salvatore Bonafede of Rotterdam once lived together in the Fulton Center late last decade.
“[Blanc] is very terrific as a person in terms of her own experiences, but also as a professional,” he said. “I was just totally impressed with her commitment and dedication to those people.”
Salvatore died in 2019. Louise, who has dementia at 90 years old, still lives at the Fulton Center.
In her first year as a social worker, one of Blanc’s residents was her grandmother. She said that she used to cry frequently.
“She helped raise me when I was a child, too, so it was hard to see her in that capacity,” she said. “It was very challenging, but I guess all the challenges I’ve been through made me stronger.”
One of the biggest challenges, Blanc said, has been addressing the rise of patients coming in after facing homelessness and substance abuse since COVID-19.
During lockdown, she watched patients emotionally struggle as they were separated from their families. As restrictions eased, Blanc began to see some improvements.
“On top of that, just uprooting the residence and just even with room changes,” Blanc said. “It was a nightmare during that time.”
The toll was high. More than three dozen residents of the Fulton Center died from COVID-19. Neighboring Montgomery County reported 50 nursing home deaths, in addition to 10 deaths from residents of their facility.