“It’s tough to give that independence up and have others take care of you,” Michelle Thompson said, who as a medication aide is so used to administering the care herself.
But a spinal cord injury required her to learn to be patient and gave her a new perspective to take back to her medical profession.
After suddenly weak legs caused her to fall in her driveway in March, Michelle ended up in the emergency room. In the hospital in Deadwood, South Dakota, doctors initially remained puzzled about the cause of Michelle’s weakness. However, several MRIs later revealed the problem: a collapsed vertebrae along her spine had pushed into another one.
“They found the collapsed T4, and it was pushing on the T5,” Michelle said. “So I had surgery to put screws in the thoracic area from T1 to T8.”
In a neck and back brace, Michelle arrived at Madonna Rehabilitation Hospitals’ specialized spinal cord injury program unable to do anything with her lower extremities, except wiggle her toes. She spent two weeks in Madonna’s Specialty Hospital, where she received physician-led care and regained her stamina. When she became strong enough to handle a daily rigorous therapy schedule, she moved to Madonna’s Rehabilitation Hospital.
“When Michelle came down, she needed a lot of assistance with transfers, getting in and out of bed, and was unable to stand,” Sara Hohensee, PT, DPT, CBIS, her physical therapist said.
Determined to strengthen her legs and gain back that independence, Michelle worked hard in her physical therapy sessions.
“She was always up for whatever the therapists had in mind for her – no matter how ambitious or crazy it may have seemed at the time,” Hohensee said. “From the very start of her stay, we made it a goal to get up on her feet as much as possible. We incorporated the use of the Lokomat robotic gait training system and a lot of body-weight-supported standing and walking until Michelle was strong enough to walk on her own without body weight support.”
Meanwhile, in occupational therapy, Michelle re-learned how to do self-care tasks as well.
“We worked a lot on self-cares to decrease the burden of family having to help her with those self-cares and just give her that functional independence back,” Kelsey Elting, OTD, OTR/L, her occupational therapist, said. “So we worked on different techniques of managing her lower-body clothing and going to the bathroom on her own and bathing herself.”
A cancer survivor of five years’ standing, Michelle wasn’t about to slow down during her rehabilitation.
“I had this ‘I’m-going-to-beat-this’-kind-of attitude,” Michelle said. “A lot of it is the unknown and how long is it going to take. But there are people who were at the cancer center and here at Madonna that had a tougher road to recovery than I did.”
South Dakota woman no stranger to medical rehabilitation
