TOWER- It was a fraction of a second that changed her life, and Dena Suihkonen said she honestly can’t even remember it. What she does remember is trying to grab onto something as she fell backwards off a dunk tank whose seat had malfunctioned, throwing her backwards onto the ground.
“I knew right away that my legs didn’t work,” she said.
Suihkonen, the Tower Ambulance Supervisor, was volunteering at the Breitung Community Picnic on July 6. She was there with the ambulance and several other ambulance department members, in case of a medical emergency, as well as to generally help out, something that is literally part of her DNA.
She was taking her turn on a dunk tank, borrowed from a nearby community. Breitung Police Chief Dan Reing had been in the seat of honor on the tank for quite a while when Suihkonen took her turn.
“They had used that dunk tank for years and years,” said Dena’s husband Tom. “The mechanism that should have prevented the seat from moving backwards simply wasn’t there. They had been using it that way for years and years.”
Her family’s life changed in that instant.
Dena spent over a month in hospitals in Duluth, first at St. Mary’s, and then for intensive rehabilitation at Miller Dwan. She had broken her T11 and T12 vertebrae, which required surgery, plates, and screws. She was now a paraplegic. The rehab work began within days of her injury and was intensive.
“I had to learn to sit up,” she said. “You lose muscle so quickly.”
Even though her legs don’t move, she said, to learn to sit up she had to look at her legs.
“It made me believe they still worked,” she said.
After mastering sitting up, she had to learn to lift herself, and then learn how to transfer back and forth from her wheelchair. She now can manage the basics of what she needs to be at home, but still needs plenty of help. She is weight-training to build strength in her arms and shoulders and learning to navigate household chores from her wheelchair.
She learned how to do “wheelies” to get her wheelchair over things like doorway thresholds. And learned how to talk someone else through helping her and her chair up and over curbs. Some things she had to learn were a little more personal.
“I never in my wildest thoughts thought if you were a parapeligic, you couldn’t pee,” she said. “I had to learn how to catheterize myself.”
Taking showers took some getting used to, she said, but now she has the seated shower routine down.
She is wearing a back brace, something that will remain on until the spinal fractures are healed, hopefully by the end of September, she said.
Dena related all this with a smile, with her six-year old Sphinx hairless cat, Glacia, seated squarely on her lap.
Her attitude, unlike her legs, is something she can control.
“I had two choices,” she said. “I could stay home and cry, or I can be out in the world.”
Things are going to get a lot better, she said.
She is using a loaner wheelchair now, but her new one is on the way. The lightweight model will be easy to get in and out of a regular car.
“Once the wheels get taken off,” she said. “It only weighs 10 pounds.”
While she has only been home a few days, she has been busy. Her husband Tom built a ramp between their garage and back door that is easy to navigate. Their bedroom has been moved into the living room for now, but they will need to remodel the main floor of their house to create a new bedroom. And the house will need some other accessibility upgrades as well.
Family friends are working on planning a benefit, date and details still coming, to help fund these projects.
Her 40-year relationship with Tom is built on trust, she said, and that has meant getting help from him at home has been easier than she expected. The two will celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary in September.
“I am feeling more and more like myself,” she said.
During her interview with the Timberjay on Tuesday, her mother Nancy, who lives in Soudan, was visiting, and another family friend also stopped by with a ready-to-heat meal. Tom was busy, trying to troubleshoot a broken water softener. Home repairs in their vintage Tower home, perched up on the north edge of town, didn’t stop when she had her accident, and they’ve had issues with several kitchen appliances recently. Luckily, Dena’s siblings, as well as Tom, have experience with home repairs, because as she noted with a smile, I can’t do them now. Tom is heading back to work next week and Dena is planning to resume some of her ambulance duties, basically paperwork-related tasks like payroll and billing that she can do from home. The ambulance office is tiny and crowded, and not anywhere near handicap-accessible, she said. And ambulances are packed into the ambulance garage so tightly that a wheelchair couldn’t move around at all.
Dena said she will retain her ambulance licensure, and said she is proud to see how the service has been working in her absence.
“While I was in the hospital, the ambulance service had its EMSRB inspection review,” she said. “We passed with flying colors.”
The remaining ambulance staff has been able to pick up the workload so far, she said, and it has been a very busy summer. One 24-hour period had five ambulance runs.”
The Eveleth Ambulance Service offered to lend some staff to Tower, she said, but so far that hasn’t been needed.
“I am getting so much support from the EMS community,” she said. While in the hospital, she received visits and flowers from almost all the area emergency department and is still in touch with many of her fellow responders on a regular basis.
“We have a community like no other,” she said.
One of her most thoughtful gifts came from Tower Café owner Jen McDonough, who brought a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, which meant Dena was able to get some sleep in the noisy hospital room.
In the future, she could have the option of teaching and possibly consulting with other small, rural ambulance services. But the work on the ambulance rig, responding to emergencies and working with patients, is something she will miss, and something at which she was truly gifted.
She said her father Chuck Tekautz, who recently passed away, taught her and her brothers by example, of the importance of public service, a legacy that is apparent today in both Tower and Soudan, where siblings have seats on the Breitung Town Board and Tower City Council.
“My dad belonged in public service,” she said. “It was his forte.”
Nancy said their children are continuing that legacy. “They are all giving back to their community.”
“I think there is a reason for everything,” she said. “Maybe the reason was that I am going to make Tower more handicap-accessible,” said Dena.
She and Tom have taken some walks downtown, and options for wheelchair access are limited, which is common in communities that date back over 100 years. Even some places, like the post office, which doesn’t have a step, has a door that is too heavy to easily open from a wheelchair, she noted. A trip to Virginia the day before with Tom went better, with easier access to the larger stores. She will be able to drive, she said, once their car gets adapted.
Right now, she is happy with all the time she gets to spend with her four daughters and all her grandchildren. One thing she did make sure to learn was how to get safely up and down from the floor, so she could play with her grandkids.
Dena does have more medical issues to deal with. While they don’t currently expect she will need any more surgery on her back, testing done after the surgery found two aneurisms in her brain. Surgeons have mapped them out, and they will be treating them. One needs a stent and one a coil, she said.
“I am lucky they found them,” she said, “one of them was large.”
She is expecting future trips to the Mayo Clinic to meet with doctors who specialize in care for paraplegics, but most of her routine medical care will be done by staff at Scenic Rivers in Tower, where she feels she will get great care from medical professionals she knows and respects. She will do physical and occupational therapy at Essentia in Virginia, which has a larger gym space and more specialized equipment to meet her needs.