A new craze has been sweeping the country: rock painting! It’s being hailed as a new way of spreading happiness and kindness throughout your community. Now the concept has even been used to give a designer look to the cover that holds your POC in place.

Meet Anita Ross, a retired resident of Clinton, OH, who paints rocks for sheer happiness. Because of COPD, she has been on oxygen for years. For the past six months she has used her background as an artist to paint rocks and then hide them in plain sight—maybe at a post office… maybe at a grocery store… maybe on a hiking trail. The front of the rock has her drawing. The back has a label asking the finder to take a picture and post it on the Facebook group page, along with information on where it was found. When they are found, people smile, take the photo, and post it on Facebook.

The word spreads quickly. In NE Ohio there are several thousand Facebook members of a rock painting group. In Washington State, where the fad started about seven months ago, some rock painting groups have over 40,000 members. It’s estimated that today there are over 70,000 members of Facebook rock painting groups nationally and the number continues to grow.

The idea is to spread the virtues of kindness and happiness throughout your community. When people find a painted rock it brings smiles. They log on to the group’s Facebook page to say where the rock was found and then they often hide them again. It’s fun for those who hide them to see where they end up. Some pop up in other states. One made it all the way to Spain!

While painting rocks one day, it occurred to Anita to paint the carrying bag for her OxyGo® POC. She decided to decorate it with flowers and make a designer bag out of it. “People comment all the time about how cheerful it makes my concentrator look,” Ross told Home HealthCare TODAY editors. Other POC users have seen how nicely decorated her POC looks and have inquired to Anita as to how they might paint their own POC cover. She has suggested such diverse possibilities as using baseball or football team logos, cartoon characters—whatever would make the POC owner smile.

Ross, who managed a machine shop for thirty years, is a talented enough artist that she once made a nice income selling her paintings. Art talent runs deep in her family and, like her mother, Anita joined the Ohio Tri-County Art Association. “I started with oil paints and sold lots of paintings. Some were seascapes, some barns, some trees—just about everything,” said Ross.

But she stopped selling her artwork commercially when it became a job and she lost control over what the subject of her painting would be. “I enjoy painting just for the sake of painting and always wanted to put some form of life into my paintings,” said Ross. “That became less and less possible to do with paying clients,” she continued.

Ross didn’t know anything about rock painting groups on Facebook until a niece told her about them. Some of the pictures she has posted have drawn as many as 320 likes. She finds that painting rocks puts a smile on her face and at the same takes her mind off her breathing challenges. She credits the OxyGo unit she has with freeing her from the burden of heavy tanks and giving her life back. “I absolutely love my OxyGo. It’s wonderful. Now I can travel to Arizona to see my grandchildren. My husband and I are going to drive there and I will just plug my OxyGo into the cigarette outlet and keep going,” she said.

Home HealthCare TODAY would like to feature YOUR original OxyGo carry bag artwork in a future issue! Send your photos and contact information to: vmarquard@applied-inc.com