Kathleen Bokrossy is giving back by raising funds for the Huntsville Hospital Foundation and hopes you’ll find it in you to support the cause.
We don’t always know how important good health care can be until the unexpected happens. For Bokrossy, the unexpected happened one early Sunday morning in October of 2019.
Bokrossy and her husband Paul had just put in a new dock at their water access cottage on Kawagama Lake. She took her coffee with her down to the dock. The view was breathtaking, and she wanted to take some photos to send to her daughter who was away at university.
In the fall, she said the lake lowers significantly which makes the dock ramp steeper. The dock they put in is also much longer than the old one and Bokrossy said she didn’t notice the icy morning dew.
“Within seconds of walking down the ramp, I slid down! My foot lodged in the space between the ramp and dock, and my body kept going, dislocating my foot, breaking my leg, and shattering my ankle!”
Her husband tried to help her and get her into their boat, but she was in too much pain. They called 9-1-1. What she presumes were volunteer firefighters arrived and strapped her to a stretcher and carefully lowered her to a boat and took her to a nearby marina where an ambulance was waiting.
Both the volunteers that got her ashore and the paramedics that got her to Huntsville Hospital were amazing, recalled Bokrossy.
She also gave kudos to the staff at the hospital for their personalized care during her time of crisis. “It was horrible. I was in bed for basically five months,” she recalled. “But the way that they treated me, it was amazing. They make you feel like you’re the only person that’s going through something.”
Her leg was ‘reset’ twice at the hospital because the doctor wasn’t quite satisfied with the results the first time, she recalled.
The second reset was done and Bokrossy was sent with a cast back to her home in Burlington where she would have to undergo an operation.
“I had surgery I think it was three or four days later but my bones just healed very quickly,” despite predictions from other professionals to the contrary. She attributes that to the thorough work done by ER Dr. John Simpson in Huntsville.
She was grateful for the treatment, “because you know we’ve been to some other places where you’re just another number,” she said, adding that even at the Burlington hospital they had heard about how wonderful care in Huntsville was, and quipped that they’d do better, said Bokrossy.
“Obviously they have a good reputation,” she said. “It was like they had heard that Huntsville is amazing for their care,” she added.
The Bokrossys have since sold their home in Burlington and purchased a year-round home on the lake across from their cottage.
“We love it,” she said. Huntsville is 45 minutes away and it’s the place where they do their shopping, so they plan for it. “You just come to accept that that’s the way it is,” she said, adding that they’re also able to get supplies in Dorset.
She has organized an online fundraiser for the Huntsville Hospital Foundation in support of the hospital and those interested and able are also invited to a concert on a barge at Kawagama Lake that she’s organizing on July 23. A donation will also be made to the Send a Kid to Camp initiative at Moorelands Camp.
For more information or to donate, please click here.
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