By John Riedel
National Life employees often live our Do Good culture well beyond the office, helping to spread the good far and wide. Kaitlyn Cota of the New Business area has certainly taken the idea to heart – and even to South America.
Kaitlyn’s story is a particularly poignant one, given her own personal experience of the past couple of years.
Kaitlyn makes her way up a steep street in Peru.
She went all the way to Lima, Peru, in late March to volunteer with a day center for the elderly. However, the director of the facility had a different plan for her. “There’s one kid that he knew who’s 26 and he was injured while he was working when he was 18,” Kaitlyn said. “He’s been paralyzed from the waist down for eight years and in a bed because he didn’t have any support.” Kaitlyn immediately knew this was what she was there for.
In January of 2015, Kaitlyn was in a multi-vehicle car accident, leaving her with a spinal cord injury that doctors thought would leave her in a wheelchair. But after a week in the intensive care unit at the University of Vermont Medical Center, she moved to an inpatient rehabilitation facility. Over the course of two months, with a determination that her team of doctors perhaps didn’t expect, Kaitlyn learned how to walk again.
Two years later she is using her experience to help others overcome the same challenges she faced. She occasionally returns to the inpatient facility to help others relearning how to walk. But this was the first time she could help someone who didn’t have access to the resources that helped guide her recovery.
The man she helped in Peru is named Pablo Pedro and he lives on a hill without stairs or a ramp. “It was a feat to get to his house, and to get into it you had to climb a rock pile,” Kaitlyn said. “I’m bear crawling on my hands and knees and I made it up there to tell him it’s possible to still do things.”
Not only is Pablo’s house hard for him to leave because of the terrain, but the design is also challenging. “He’s confined to one room and he can’t get into any other part of the house,” Kaitlyn said. The house is a small cement building with dirt floors. Because of the limited access, Pablo was rarely motivated to even get out of bed.
Kaitlyn only had one day with Pablo, but it was a day that had a lasting impact. To help, Kaitlyn began by teaching Pablo how to start moving again, using the same exercises she learned during her own recovery. The first step was getting him motivated and out of bed.
“I was standing behind him and he did it and I instantly started to swell with tears,” Kaitlyn said. This simple action may not have been a big deal to Pablo, but it was a huge accomplishment to Kaitlyn. “You
Kaitlyn continued with basic exercises for Pablo’s arms so he could get himself around more easily. “For him to hear it from someone who’s been in his position gave him a lot of hope,” Kaitlyn said. “We worked on core and upper-body exercises so he could move more by himself.” These exercises will help him do things many people take for granted, such as taking a shower without help and participating in sports.
To this day she has stayed in contact with Pablo through the program, sending him online resources and exercises to continue his progress. Since her trip, others in the community have worked to build Pablo a patio so he can go outside, and a project is in place for a ramp so he can leave his home.
“Now I feel like a part of his community and I want to go back,” Kaitlyn said. Her goal is to one-day return and check in with Pablo to make sure he’s continued his training.