Miracle Comes to Woman Who Cannot Leave Trailer Without Stretcher �Buried in my house� is how 57-year-old Aurora Torres describes the months when she only saw the outside of her trailer from the confines of a stretcher. Torres uses a wheelchair as a result of injuries from several falls compounded by being overweight. Although she was taken to surgeries by ambulance, she missed necessary doctor�s visits for her right leg�reconstructed with 18 screws, two rods, three metal plates, and the bone from a cadaver�because her insurance did not cover ambulance trips, and her trailer had five steps instead of a ramp. "If the house burned down I would have burned down with it, and there were so many accidents," Torres says. Such as when a small fire started while she was cooking and she instinctively jumped out of her wheelchair�forgetting she could not walk. Her son and daughter managed to get her to bed where she suffered for three days before finally calling an ambulance: �I didn�t think an ambulance would come just to take someone to the doctor. I just waited until I couldn�t take the pain anymore.� At the doctor�s office, x-rays revealed that several of the screws in Ms. Torres� leg had been displaced. Or the time when despite her warnings, two staff members from a nursing home took Torres back to her house without a stretcher. When they were unable to lift her and the wheelchair over the steps, they left. Helpless outside of her front door, Ms. Torres was forced to call 911. Yet soon, in what Ms. Torres calls a miracle, she would receive the vital ramp she had somehow learned to accept life without. It began at her last hospital visit when a social worker asked why she was missing her doctor's appointments. The social worker was familiar with the not-for-profit organization, Making Choices for Independent Living, and their program that seeks to provide ramps to disabled persons for free. Torres thought to herself, "No�that can't be�who would do something that nice?" With one phone call MCIL was in the process of rescuing Ms. Torres. Although getting permission from trailer park management to build the ramp took about a month, the ramp itself was constructed in only one day, and cost a total of over $4,000 that she "could never have afforded." �I cannot express my gratitude,� she repeats. �They gave me a decent life rather than being buried in my house.� She is also amazed at the beauty of the two-level, wooden ramp, "I would have been happy with something simple�it is gorgeous, the neighbors come by to stare at it. No one has anything like that around here." For now she can only use the ramp for hospital visits and necessities, but she is dreaming of the time when she can go outside to simply enjoy the weather. |