Home Accident Victim Becomes Advocate For Persons With Disabilities

By Kaaren Valenta

Homes are among the most hazardous places. It’s easy to fall down steps or trip over electrical cords or toys left on the floor.

Just such a home accident in February 2000 changed Cathy Sullivan’s life forever and left the Sandy Hook woman with a new appreciation for the difficulties experienced by persons with disabilities.

“I was standing in the kitchen using a crank-style ice crusher when it tipped over and a few slivers of ice fell on the floor. I slipped and fell. I tried to get up and fell again,” she said.

The accident shattered her leg right above the ankle.

“It’s called a distal tibia fracture,” Mrs Sullivan said. “The bone came right out the side of my leg.”

Most broken bones can be fixed and with a few months of recuperation the accident is only a bad memory. But Cathy Sullivan’s broken leg was one of the exceptions.

“It was a total disaster,” she said. “I was in the hospital on heavy antibiotics for seven days. I was told at the time that 12 to 15 years ago, they probably wouldn’t have even tried to save my leg. It wasn’t [caused by] osteoporosis – it was just a freak accident.”

Four surgeries took place over the next 16 months, forcing Mrs Sullivan to alternate between crutches, a walker, and a wheelchair, and to leave her job as a legal assistant in the office of attorney Judy Nickse. But she was determined not to give up her volunteer position as president of the Newtown Fund, which operates the annual Depot Day holiday basket program.

“Depot Day is absolutely the best day of the year for me,” she explained. “Obviously I couldn’t do any of the running around, so I took on the role of adopting the families out. I set up a home office where I’d talk to people on the phone, send them emails or faxes or a letter. I was also able to fax the Junior Woman’s Club, which does the Tag-A-Gift program. The evening before Depot Day, I sat at a table putting the food donated by local school bus drivers into baskets, and the next morning as the baskets were delivered, I checked them off. Then I went home, exhausted but happy.”

After a lifetime of volunteer activities, a career, and the joys of raising three sons, Cathy Sullivan found it frustrating to be incapacitated. But fixing her leg became the focus of her life.

“In the first surgery, the surgeon put the bones back in place and put on an external fixator. But a later x-ray showed the bones were not quite lined up, so I had to go back to surgery,” she said. “This time they straightened my leg, moved the metal bars around and screwed them into the bone. I looked like a had a medieval torture chamber on my leg.”

In May 2000, she had her third surgery, in which a portion of her right hip, the iliac crest, was chiseled out and made into a bone graft by mixing it with sea coral. “The pain from the hip surgery was worse than when I broke my leg,” Mrs Sullivan said. “But afterwards the bone graft wasn’t growing. That part of the leg is the hardest place to heal because the body is very thin there.”

A great deal of therapy followed, during which she wore a bone graft stimulator, powered by a battery pack, which used electrical current to stimulate the bone to grow. But a CAT scan a year later showed that the bone had only grown 25 percent. The scan convinced her doctors to refer her to Dr Bruce Browner, an orthopedic specialist at the University of Connecticut Medical Center, who deals only with difficult tibia fractures. He re-broke Mrs Sullivan tibia and fibula, removed a section of bone and what was left of the bone graft, ground the two together into a paste, and used it to fill in the gaps when the bones were realigned.

“My leg will be a little shorter, and I may have a limp, but I don’t care as long as I am back on my feet,” Mrs Sullivan said. “The electrical stimulator will be in there forever, like a pacemaker.”

“Dr Browner assured me that my first doctor, Daniel Fish at Brookfield Orthopedics, had done everything exactly right. My body just didn’t cooperate.”

And by this time, Mrs Sullivan’s knee in her other leg was failing. “The knee was blown out because I had hopped around so long on that leg,” she explained. “The damage showed up on the scan. Now I need a knee replacement too.”

Mrs Sullivan’s husband, Don, has become her chauffeur, driving the car she bought for herself four days before her accident, and is an invaluable helpmate, but leaving the house to shop or to go to restaurants often is frustrating.

“Restaurants may have a handicap ramp, but then there may be a step in every doorway,” she said. “That happened to me in Brookfield, so we then went to a diner. When we got to the top of the ramp there was a bump, and inside the door all the chairs were stored there. The diner had booths, so they set up a table for me, but when it was time to leave we had to ask another party of diners to get up so we could get through.”

Restrooms are another problem. “A place will say there is a handicapped bathroom, and you can get a wheelchair into it, but then you can’t reach the paper towels or soap, and there’s no button inside to open the door – I’ve been trapped in there,” she said.

The Sullivans do their grocery shopping at the supermarket on Queen Street in Newtown, which has motorized carts for the use of people with disabilities. “They store the carts by the exit door, but the keys are in the middle of the store so you have to walk halfway across the store and back. It takes an extra 20 minutes for me to get the cart and Don to get the key; and what about (disabled) people who shop alone?”

Some businesses, on the other hand, have responded immediately when the Sullivans pointed out problems. The Pizza Palace immediately moved benches that were hindering access from the handicapped parking area to the restaurant entrance, Cathy Sullivan said..

“If business owners want to test their handicapped accommodations, they should try riding around in a wheelchair for two days,” she said. “A lot of people want to help, but [people with handicaps] shouldn’t have to rely on other people.”

A driver for years for Meals on Wheels, Cathy Sullivan was elected to the organization’s board of directors just before her accident. “I resigned because I didn’t want to take up the space of someone who could be very active,” she said.

The Sullivans have adapted the house they have lived in for 22 years on Paugussett Road in Sandy Hook to accommodate her disability. “We had to put in a motorized stair chair to get in and out of the house because the garage is under the house,” Mrs Sullivan said. “But soon our house will be for sale. We have decided it makes sense to move into a 55-and-over condo.

“It has been a tough couple of years,” she admitted. “But when I felt bad, I thought about people like Christopher Reeve [the actor who was paralyzed in a fall from a horse] and knew they would be happy to only have the problem that I have.”