Nurse transforms her life and calls her wheelchair "a gift"

 

Deborah Sherman wrote this piece about Dr. Terry Chase. 

"One moment, 32-year-old Terry Chase was leaning over the handlebars of her road bike feeling the sun and wind caress her face while her lungs and legs pumped and burned along a 10-mile route in Grand Junction. The next moment, she was airborne."

"She landed on the hot hood of a Lincoln Continental, sprawled across the windshield. It kept going. Chase heard crunching as the car demolished her bike. The driver swerved hard and she rolled off, slamming into the pavement. As he sped away, strangers ran over to help. She couldn’t move. Chase cried, “Where are my legs?” Her back was broken."

In one breath, Chase had gone from an athlete to half paralyzed as her spine shattered leaving her in a wheelchair for life. But today, after living with a disability for 35 years, Chase calls that wheelchair “a gift”.

“The accident knocked the crap out of me or perhaps what was holding me back,” wrote Terry Chase, ND, MA, RN, CEIP-ED, in her book Spoke by Spoke: How a Broken Back and a Broken Bike Led to a Wholehearted Life.

“It turns out the injury that seemed to take away so much actually gave me more and allowed me to live a fuller, expansive life. It’s ironic that after getting hit by that car…and being left half-paralyzed, I finally learned to take the first step toward creating my life.”

Please read more about Dr. Chase at https://news.cuanschutz.edu/nursing/former-cu-nursing-grad-transforms-life-after-near-fatal-cycling-accident-finds-new-reason-to-live-and-serve and view this YouTube video CU College of Nursing: Alumna Terry Chase, ND, MA, RN, CEIP-Ed - YouTube

Cheers!

Donna

For nurses with joint hypermobility: A New prototype could be a game changer!

Chloe Cottone uses prototype 3D finger braces to help with her hypermobility issues as she practices using sutures. Photo: Sandra Kicman

Bill Bruton reported this exciting development in UBNow.

"First-year UB medical student Chloe Cottone had a problem that could have quickly derailed her dream of becoming a surgeon. But a collaboration between the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences is keeping that dream alive."

"Cottone deals with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a group of inherited disorders that affects connective tissues — in this case, her joints. She has hypermobility in her joints, which means she has an unusually large range of movement and is at risk of injury because her joints are too flexible."

“When I was in gross anatomy lab, I struggled to use some of the surgical instruments in conventional ways because of the hypermobility — specifically in my thumbs,” she explains. She tried swan splints, which can be worn on the fingers or thumb and are designed to block hyperextension without limiting flexion.

“There are some companies that make metal ones, but they’re extremely expensive. They were like $100 a pop. And I couldn’t find anything online that did what I needed and could be used under a surgical glove,” Cottone says.

"As a medical student without a lot of extra spending money, she got creative. She went to Michaels, an arts and crafts store, and bought a ring sizer and some copper wire to make something herself. “They worked for a little bit. Unfortunately, they ripped through the surgical gloves,” she says.

"Her gross anatomy instructor, Stuart D. Inglis, instructor in the Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences, saw she was struggling. “What she was finding was that when she was holding the scalpel, her fingers would bend in an awkward sort of way and pop out of joint and pop back in, causing her a great deal of pain,” Inglis says.

The prototypes later developed could be a game-changer.

“Surgeons are very dedicated to their job,” McLaughlin-Kelly notes. "They don’t want to give up the operating room, so they operate right up until they can’t. But if they have braces like this that allow them to work longer — the same with people out in the work force in other occupations — this can help prolong their careers,” she says. “It can also be used as a preventive measure. This can make a huge difference in terms of medicine.”

"Cottone says that what started as a small personal project is now something that can have a much larger impact. “Now we are thinking of how we can make these available to other people who work in health care who have hypermobility, who can’t afford several hundred dollars on metal splints.”

Read more about this at:

https://www.buffalo.edu/ubnow/stories/2023/05/collaboration-medical-braces.html?utm_source=FBPAGE&utm_medium=social&utm_term=20230610&utm_content=100004223382932&utm_campaign=General+Content&linkId=100000204985221&fbclid=IwAR1rJD4GfZ5E7GfnHptd9gLVJ1Q8feqmF_vrNProAmYFyGk5tyUy_Z39Pok

Cheers!

Donna