TOGETHERNESS, FAMILY STYLE
An accident that took an instant—and an illness that lasts a lifetime—reshapes the relationship of a husband and wife.
BY:ANNE HOSANSKY
On a foggy July morning in 1983, Sandy Lobitz of Crystal, Minnesota, was at her job as a patient-account representative at Ridgeview Medical Center when she kept hearing sirens. Someone said there’d been a terrible accident and she knew her husband was driving to his carpentry job.
“I tried calling Tom at work,” Sandy says, “but he hadn’t arrived.” She had an eerie feeling that she should drive the four miles to the scene of the head-on collision. When she got there, it was just in time to see Tom being lifted into an ambulance. “Thank God I didn’t see him being cut out of the car.”
In those days, Sandy recalls, they didn’t have air bags or use seat belts. “It was a sporty car with the shift device on the floor, and that’s what went into his left femur.” He also dislocated his right shoulder, broke a wrist and had upper-torso contusions.
Tom was rushed to the nearby medical center where Sandy worked. That night, emboli traveled into the 33-year-old man’s brain, forming a blood clot. The next day, his left side was totally paralyzed.
Tom was moved 25 miles away to Fairview Southdale Hospital in Edina, a Minneapolis suburb. For over a week, he was in and out of a coma. “We didn’t know if he’d make it,” says Sandy, who also was 33 then. When Tom regained consciousness, she told him the doctors didn’t know if the paralysis would be permanent. “They said they’d have to wait until the swelling goes down.” The neurologists were fairly certain the paralysis was incurable but, Sandy states, “They wanted us to be somewhat hopeful.”
In September, they transferred Tom to the Sister Kenny Rehabilitation Facility, a part of Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis. He remained there another five months. “From July to February, I rarely missed a day,” Sandy says. She helped Tom with his physical therapy and the “baby steps” he was learning to take with the help of a specially made leg brace and tripod cane. A four-pointed “quad cane” later replaced that.
At home, Sandy continued to care for their two young daughters. Then seven years old, daughter Jill was very shaken. “Every time I turned around, there was a call from school that Jill was sick,” explains Sandy. “She had a stomachache, a headache. They kept telling me I should come. I said, ‘I can’t be in two places at one time.’” Fortunately, Tom and Sandy’s older child, then–10-year-old Jacqueline, was better able to deal with the traumatic situation and stepped in to become a second mother to Jill.
After Tom was dismissed from the rehab center in February 1984, Sandy for months drove him back and forth to therapy. “But just when you think you can see your way through,” she says, “there’s one thing more.” That would be the relapsing-remitting form of multiple sclerosis, which Tom developed a year after the accident. “It comes and goes,” Sandy explains.
For the next 11 years, Tom could manage to walk. Since then, he’s been in a wheelchair. In an effort to help Tom help himself, Sandy, Jill and Jacqueline would set out everything Tom needed to start his day on the kitchen table, including his toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving cream and razor. But because of the shakiness that developed in his arm, Sandy increasingly had to do even the basics for Tom. “I wash him, brush his teeth, get him on and off the toilet with the help of a lifting device,” she says. She also maneuvers him in and out of the tub with the aid of a pivot transfer.
Nurses at the hospital where she was working warned Sandy that she was burning the candle at both ends, so 10 years ago she began using home health aides. One comes in the morning, when Sandy goes to work; another comes in the evening to give Tom supper. As Sandy and Tom’s daughters grew older, they did these duties. But they’re both now married and have moved away from home.
To keep Tom active and involved, Sandy urges him to go to the MS Achievement Center once a week for exercise and counseling and to a day-care center for physical therapy, including the use of a therapeutic pool. He gets to the centers via Metro Mobility, a wheelchair-accessible public transportion system.
In 1997, the family had to make a wrenching decision. The house Sandy and Tom had lived in throughout their marriage—which Tom had built himself—was 25 miles from Minneapolis, too far for help to reach them easily and too distant from the therapy centers. “Our girls,” says Sandy, “wanted to get us into another place before they each got married.” So Tom and Sandy decided to move to Crystal, which is only five miles from Minneapolis.
But moving put a heavy burden on their already shaky finances. “The community got behind us,” Sandy says. In 1997, her three closest friends organized a benefit, featuring a raffle, dinner tickets and an auction of donated items. They raised several thousand dollars, which purchased the power lift for the bathroom of the home they moved to in 1998.
In the meantime, Sandy had made another decision. Since she had to support the family, she would go back to college so she could qualify for a higher-paying job. When she was younger, she’d gone to college for two years but dropped out because, she says, “I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life.” When she went back, she was told that since it was 20 years later, only a handful of her credits could be transferred. That meant it would take longer to get her degree. In addition, because she was working fulltime as well as bolstering the family finances by doing product demos in stores and cleaning houses, she could only go to class at night and on weekends. To help facilitate that, Jill and Jacqueline filled in, getting Tom to bed and helping him in the bathroom when Sandy couldn’t be home. “It took five years to get my Business Administration degree,” Sandy says, “but I had to do it.” She is now an administrative assistant at a college preparatory school.
Still, Sandy confides, “it’s very difficult financially.” Tom initially had short-term disability from the auto insurance, but that was long ago used up. They rely on Social Security disability, which pays for the home health aides and the centers, and they have health coverage from her job. But the medical bills keep piling up, swelled by student loans for their daughters’ college educations. “I’ll also be paying off my own student loan for a long time,” she says. Two years ago, she and Tom filed for bankruptcy.
Tom used to like to read and to play cards, but his increasing shakiness makes this difficult as well. Sandy reads newspaper articles to him and they watch TV together, mainly news and sports. To keep him busy, Sandy often drives him to places such as the enormous Mall of America. “There’s so much to see there,” Sandy adds, “and he enjoys it.” Formerly, she drove him in a van that had a seat that came out. She’d get him onto it with the help of a lifting device. But last May, the strain tore the cartilage in her knee and she had to have surgery to repair it. They now have a different van, with a ramp upon which Sandy can wheel Tom.
As devout Catholics, Sandy explains that their religion sustains them. “Faith,” she states, “is what gets you up in the morning.” But Tom, understandably, is finding it increasingly hard to surrender his independence. Lately, he’s having what Sandy calls “MS tantrums,” screaming at her and the girls. “We’re dealing with a lot of frustration and the pent-up anger of twenty-two years.” And, Sandy admits, she has less and less patience as she gets older. So, recently she and Tom went into counseling. “We need to open up the lines of communication.” It takes commitment, as well as faith, to survive what they’ve gone through. “I won’t kid you,” Sandy concedes. “It’s not easy. But we’ve grown to be a very strong family.”