05/19/2007: Riding again -- A year after losing part of a leg in an accident, Burlington woman is back on her bike

Category: General Posted by: Editors
By Janine Anderson
Journal Times
BURLINGTON — One year ago today, Cathryn “Cat” Hammes took a motorcycle ride that changed her life. Next Sunday, she plans to take another one.

When she climbs on her bike that day, she plans to have her left pant leg rolled up high. That way, no one will crash trying to steal a glance at something she normally keeps hidden beneath crazy socks and wide-leg jeans.

That day will be different. Hammes will show off the limb she lost when she crashed last year. She will ride the breadth of the county with her prosthetic displayed for everyone to see. She wants people to know that it’s possible to come back, even when you don’t think you can, and that tragedy doesn’t mean you stop living.

A year ago today
On May 20, 2006, Hammes, a registered nurse, worked third shift at her job in the bone marrow transplant unit at Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital in Wauwatosa. A patient had recently died, and Hammes just couldn’t get to sleep.

Her husband told her to go for a ride, to take her motorcycle out and see if that helped clear her mind so she could rest.

Hammes rode down Milwaukee Avenue, but that’s all she remembers until later.

Police records state that the minivan in front of her stopped to turn left on Grove Street. Witnesses told officers Hammes tried to go around the van, but didn’t quite make it.

Even at low speeds, a motorcycle crash is devastating to the human body. Hammes was thrown from the bike and into the oncoming lane of traffic. Flight For Life brought her back to Froedtert that afternoon, shortly after the crash.

Surgeons tried to save her left leg, to reconnect bones and muscles, nerves and blood vessels. But in the end, the injuries to her leg were too great.

After the amputation, when Hammes returned home, she found she no longer knew how to fit into her once-familiar world.

“I had a wheelchair and a walker,” she said. “There was a hospital bed in my husband’s cigar room.”
In all the years she rode a motorcycle, this was one thing she never expected.

“When you ride a motorcycle, you always know you could die or be paralyzed,” she said. “You never think that you could lose a limb. I was frustrated and angry ... this is the most solitary thing I’ve gone through in my life.”

It’s hard to see Hammes alone. Hammes talks with a hopeful urgency, and she doesn’t wallow in self-pity.

“I’m not a super-emotional person,” she said. “I’m strong-willed, git-er-done. I work through hard times and difficulties.”

For years, she was the one who helped others through their own tough times, but after she lost her leg, she didn’t know where to turn.

The Amputee Coalition of America became her lifeline, she said, always available with information, a sympathetic ear and guidance. Her older brother, who is paralyzed from the waist down, helped, too, giving her another perspective on what recovery means.

“He rolls in the door and says ‘If you think I’m going to feel sorry for you, you’re wrong. Do not, do not ask why. You will never know the answer to that. Just do what needs to be done and get on with your life.’ ”

She took his advice, and as Hammes has healed inside and out she has had to make changes.

She now drives a burgundy GMC Envoy with a custom Harley-Davidson grill and ghost flames on the hood. A huge sticker on her SUV’s back window says “Motorcycle Crashing Sucks,” flanked by the broken Harley-Davidson wings. She keeps a lint brush in the car so she can clean up easily when she takes her dogs for a ride.

She’s got tattoos, and one of the most recent ones is about her crash and its aftermath. It’s on the small of her back, a delicate set of fairy footprints. First, there’s one print with crutch marks on either side, then the crutches disappear, and there are two footprints. Eventually, Hammes said, when she has reached more of her goals, the fairy she designed will be added on.

She wears loud and crazy socks, because she believes they help speed things along at the airport, when security personnel have to check her prosthetic.

Hammes now has to shop at skater and goth stores because they’re the only places that stock the wide-leg jeans she needs to wear now. The teenagers who work there are always polite and helpful, she said. Somehow, they’re not fazed when she tells them why she needs the wide legs. They do whatever they can to help her find something that will work.

On top, she’s often wearing Harley-Davidson shirts. She lost one of her favorites, from Daytona, in the crash. Staff at Racine Harley-Davidson managed to find an identical one somewhere, she said. They, too, don’t mind when she comes in trying to find boots that will fit her new foot and leg.

Once, she just took the prosthetic off and gave it to one of the women working there to make it easier to put the boot on the foot. It took months before she found a pair that would fit.

Unexpected help
A phone call really started Hammes’ road to recovery, she said. “Out of the blue one day, I get a call from this wonderful lady, and she said ‘What happened to you?’ Hammes said. “This woman said her father lost his leg. Nobody wanted to deal with him.”

The woman told her to call McKinney Prosthetics, in Gurnee, Ill.

By this time Hammes had been to two different prosthetists, she said, and still couldn’t get off crutches.

“I was told either it was going to get better or the outcome isn’t going to be that good,” she said.
On her first visit to Donald Ray McKinney’s office, he told her things would be different.

“He said he’d get me off crutches,” she said. “He said, ‘I can’t let you walk around like this.’ ”
McKinney, who makes prosthetic limbs and orthotic braces, said Hammes’ experience matched what his other patients report.

The conventional limb she had been given did not work for her, McKinney said. She had friction sores, exacerbated by moisture that built up while she wore the leg. What remained of her left leg shrank dramatically over the course of the day — Hammes said you could almost watch it shrink before your eyes — and as the volume changed, the problems got worse.

“She was in tears when I walked into the room,” McKinney said, remembering the first time he saw Hammes at her office. “She was unable to walk on the prosthesis and was on crutches. She was in tears and visibly shaken.”

Hammes said her initial prosthesis squeezed what remained of her lower leg “like milking a cow.”

The first time McKinney put her in a Harmony prosthetic, which uses vacuum pressure to keep the limb in place instead of the conventional pin system, Hammes didn’t believe she was even in the leg properly.

“I kept waiting for the bite,” she said. “I started walking down the parallel bars. I tried to pick my hands up, and then I scooted right around the parallel bars and went down the hallway.”

‘You can, you really can’
Hammes’ recent improvement has her thinking about the future again, instead of just how to get through the day.

She wants to go back to nursing, something she couldn’t even consider before. But more immediately, she wants to ride her motorcycle again. She wants, desperately, to climb back on her Harley-Davidson Fat Boy next Sunday, to lead the ride she organized to raise money for the Amputee Coalition of America. She wants to walk, without assistance of any kind, at her daughter’s wedding next month.

When she first went to McKinney’s office, her hopes were much lower. “I really came in and I did not have the expectations I do now,” she said. “It was just: Let me walk, do some day-to-day things. I couldn’t get off crutches. There was no way I was going to get on the motorcycle. ... How can I help to save lives if I can’t get off crutches? What if I have to run to a code?”

Even with her optimism, Hammes knows there are some things she just won’t be able to do. She can’t get into a sports car anymore and had to give up her dream of tooling around in a 2-seater BMW convertible. She always wanted to go to Hawaii, but can’t see herself walking on a beach with her fake leg on display. She doesn’t want her family to deal with the stares from strangers, she said.
Of all the things Hammes has had to face losing along with her leg, the two she could not let go of were her career and her passion for motorcycles.

“To me, it was like, when the wind hits your face it’s like God giving you a kiss,” she said. “To me, that’s where I felt absolutely the closest to God.”

Hammes is now a champion for the technology that she credits with getting her back on her feet, and back on her motorcycle. She wants other amputees — especially women — to know they have other options, something she did not learn until after her initial prosthesis failed her.

The outside of her final leg will be laminated with a brightly-colored fantasy scene featuring a fairy Hammes drew — the same one she plans to have tattooed on her back some day — and the name and number for McKinney Prosthetics.

To Hammes, her progress since first being fitted with a Harmony leg is a miracle. McKinney sees helping her make those steps as part of his job. “It didn’t surprise me at all (that she is ready to drive the motorcycle again),” he said. “Her attitude is just ‘Give it to me and get out of my way.’ She’s going to get up and go. It’s a wonderful attitude. I’m glad to see it.”

Having her prostethist’s support and assurance that she could achieve her goals gave her the courage to reach further than she initially thought possible. It’s why she had a different foot shipped to their office. That foot gives her some tilt in the ankle, something she needs if she wants to get on and off the motorcycle.

The first thing she did when she tried the new leg and foot on last week was to test out the ankle, pushing her leg out to the side and tilting it the way she does on the motorcycle. Without those things — McKinney’s help, the new leg system, the new foot — she does not believe she would be where she is, closing in on her goals and living the life she thought she would live.

“I want to go to the grave in worn leather and a twisted, used-up body,” she said. “There were a lot of things I had to get OK with.

“This is my way of saying ‘You can, you really can.’ ... He gave me my life back.”

Thumbs Up CAT..my friend!!!
Go Girl!!! SMILES :>)

Garry Van Kirk
Bikers Accident Survivor Forum
http://www.bacsuv.com
05/20/2007

The Article can be read also at: http://www.journaltimes.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=13067

Go to the link above and give our " Cat " the support she deserves..:>)

With greatest Respect Cat,

Garry