“I guess I
passed out while riding my Harley from dehydration and altitude sickness,” said
Marlene Mohan, a retired Utica teacher who occasionally subs in the classroom and
lives in Sterling Heights.
“My
husband was riding behind me. He said I drove off the side of the road, hit a
sign and then the mountain,” Mohan said.
She
suffered a broken pelvis and nose and had fractures to her ribs. The pain woke
her up after a short time on the ground, she said.
But Mohan
was lucky. The first car her husband, John, said came over the Rocky Mountain
pass was driven by a doctor. The physician gave her emergency treatment to
stabilize her vital functions and called EMS, she said.
“It took
the emergency medical workers 45 minutes to get up there,” said Mohan who spent
most of her career teaching at Bemis Junior High School in Macomb County.
After
three days of being treated at North Big Horn Hospital in Lovell, Mahon and her
husband flew back to Detroit.
“It was a
very painful journey. It took 13 hours to get home, but everyone at Detroit
Metro Airport was great.”
Mohan’s
2012 Harley was totaled. It was sent home a while after she started the road to
recovery.
Mohan
chose to have physical therapy at the rehab facility at the Macomb-Oakland
Regional Center in Clinton Township. The facilities include traditional
physical therapy equipment and a zero-entry pool where a recovering patient can
learn again to bear weight.
“I have probably got 90 percent (of my
strength) back,” said Mohan after describing how she had six-and-a-half-months
of physical therapy by aquatic and physical therapist at MORC, including
physical therapist Jennifer Krieter and physical therapist assistants Janice
Brackenbury and Vicki Helhowski.
“Everybody
worked together,” she noted.
Mohan did
therapy three days a week, twice a week in the pool and once in a normal p.t.
room.
“I did my
exercises at home as told to do,” she said. “That was the whole thing. I pushed
through. They (therapists) encouraged me to work out at a gym and I did. There
were days I really was ready to give up, but I am back in the saddle again, on
my brand new Harley-Davidson.”
Jerry Wolffe is the Disability
Rights Advocate at Large/Writer in Residence at MORC. He can be reached at 586
263 8950.
