Willie's Story
Willie Wilson didn’t believe he’d ever walk again.
The 70-year-old had covered a lot of blacktop over the years, taking 18-wheelers as far west as Portland, Oregon, as far East as Boston, Massachusetts, with countless stops to Brownfield, Texas, and Carson City, Nevada, in between. He’d retired from an electric company as a heavy equipment operator after working there for 41 years, been married 28 years, and watched his family grow like a forest he’d planted. Three kids. Seven grandkids.
But recently he’d buried two friends. And when a fall put him in the hospital with a traumatic spinal cord injury, Willie couldn’t help but wonder if all his wanderings had reached their last stop.
Then he met a team of physical, occupational, speech and recreational therapists at TriHealth Rehabilitation Hospital. Led by a physician and joined by nurses, a dietitian and a pharmacist, the group armed themselves with electronics, flat trays that called “slide boards” and even watercolor paints with skinny brushes with one thought in mind: finding more highway for Willie.
“At first,” he said, “I didn’t believe I’d ever get there.”
The fall
The night of the fall, Willie’s mind had been awake, but his body hadn’t.
Sometime after 2 a.m. he’d awakened in his bed in Silverton, Ohio, needing the bathroom. He took a step and fell to the floor, banging his head on the hardwood. He tried to stand and found he couldn’t.
Then his body seemed to wake up, but his brain was no longer calling the shots. His fingers drummed the floor against his will. “It sounded like wood on wood,” he said. Something warm bathed his legs, and for a moment he was afraid he was bleeding. He wasn’t. Somehow, his body’s signal callers were on a different frequency than the rest of his body.
He yelled for his grandson, who dialed 911. An ambulance rushed him to The Jewish Hospital – Mercy Health in Cincinnati. Before his memory went black, Willie remembers lying face down as doctors perform test after test to determine what had happened when he fell.
It turns out, he’d suffered a severe spinal cord injury. And when Willie came to, nothing worked. He couldn’t raise his arms or sit up in bed. Feeding himself was impossible. So was going to the bathroom, taking a shower or dressing himself.
Standing up
After a surgery and nine days in the hospital, doctors told Willie that he might benefit from a different kind of medical facility – one that could offer him a private room and round-the-clock access to therapists and specialized equipment. One of his daughters, who works as a nurse in Oklahoma, knew patients who had rehabilitated at TriHealth Rehabilitation Hospital and raved about it. So that’s where he decided to go.
When he arrived, Willie had lost all the strength in his hands, arms, core and legs. He lacked the balance to sit up and didn’t have the stamina to do much of anything for very long. He couldn’t move his left leg at all. At first, he had to have help from two people and a special lift to get from his bed to a wheelchair.
Early in his stay, Willie practiced balancing in a sitting position. His physical therapist gave him exercises to begin regaining some of the strength he lost in his legs and mid-section.
From there, Willie was able to start using his slide board to transfer from his bed to a wheelchair. Initially, he needed maximum assistance but his core work began to pay dividends and soon Willie was sliding across the smooth surface on his own.
That was when Willie could see it. Maybe the softball games he used to play with his friends wouldn’t happen right away, but playing cards and jumping on the computer to play a game with his grandkids felt close.
“I felt like I was probably going to heal 100%,” he said.
Willie completed some of his training on a rehabilitation table that therapists could raise or lower to gradually acclimate him to standing. They also used a standing frame – a device that allows his therapists to slowly ratchet their patients upward from their backsides to their feet safely.
So once again, Willie was upright.
The skinny brush
Willie loved the activities and games of recreational therapy. He brought a humble energy and willingness to try that was infectious to his therapists and his fellow patients who joined in. His fine motor skills and ability to grasp board game pieces grew firmer. He even tried a hand at watercolor painting, starting with a brush with a larger handle to accommodate the weakness in his hands. Within two weeks he was painting jewelry with a skinny brush.
“I never thought I would be doing this,” he said, chuckling.
His returning hand strength was the result of work with his occupational therapist, who used a device that pulsed his hand muscles with a mild electrical current that made the muscles contract. It retrained his nerves to make the movements again.
Bending was a challenge for Willie – making reaching his feet impossible. His occupational therapist offered him a reacher to grip the waist of his pants to pull them up. He used a long-handled shoehorn to slip into his shoes. In the shower, he wielded a long-handled brush, so he could reach his own feet to clean himself, instead of having to rely on an extra set of hands.
The big moment
Willie’s leg muscles grew a little stronger every day until he gained enough strength to graduate. Graduation meant getting into the therapy gym’s parallel bars. During his daily workouts, he gripped two cross beams as a pair of therapists helped him move his legs.
Then, the big moment arrived. Willie stepped away from the bars and gripped a walker. A therapist followed him with a wheelchair in case he needed to rest and two people held onto him for safety, but Willie crossed a threshold he never thought he accomplish. As his therapists watched through teary eyes, he took a few steps forward on his own.
Willie was becoming more independent.
Exit via shower chair
Willie wasn’t the only one preparing for his trip home. Two of his grandsons came in for family training through the hospital’s Care Partner program. They learned how help Willie in and out of his bathroom, help him shower safely and get in and out of his bed. They also practiced with Willie using the hospital’s car simulator to learn how to get in and out of a vehicle once discharged.
Willie’s grandsons also watched him perform one of his greatest feats in therapy.
To get to his front door, Willie had to scale a short flight of steps. Despite all his strides, stairs were still a challenge. His therapists discussed strategies.
They settled on the staggered-leg shower chair method. Willie would use a chair from his shower with four adjustable legs. Adjusting one side to be shorter than the other, the seat could sit flat over two stairway risers.
They presented the idea to Willie, who gave it a test drive. From the very first try, he could do it perfectly.
Once again, his therapists had tears in their eyes. They’d grown fond of the man who had come so far – from needing a mechanical lift and a wheelchair to move around, to walking 68 feet on his own with a walker and going up and down stairs under his own power.
Forty days after arriving at TriHealth Rehabilitation Hospital, Willie went home with his family.
He continued to receive care from a home recovery care team. But he was sleeping in his own bed again and playing with his grandkids.
At 70, the experience changed Willie, who learned he still had more roads to travel.
“It made me see myself as a person that things can happen to,” he said. “I never thought anything could happen to me. I was always an independent person, and this helped me learn how to accept help from others.”