When Linda Mills got out of bed on the morning of Monday, Aug. 8, she didn’t know it would be the last day she would ever walk on her own two legs.
Mills — who is 63 years old and lived and worked in Abilene with her husband, Rex — is getting ready to leave Via Christi Hospital next week. She has been there for two weeks of physical rehabilitation to learn how to live without her legs, both of which were amputated above the knee in September of last year.
The story began in 2005, when Mills had both knees surgically replaced. The bones in both of her legs shattered where the replacements were attached, Mills said, and she had dual replacement surgeries again in 2008. Those procedures didn’t last either, and on Aug. 8, 2011, after Mills had returned home from her job as a quality inspector at an ALCO warehouse and was working in her garden, she collapsed, unconscious.
“I should have realized something was wrong,” Mills said, adding that she had unknowingly been walking around on crushed and ruined bone for months. “The doctors said I was OK, and I’m one of those people who, if you tell me I’m OK, then I’m OK.”
Doctors at the tiny hospital in Abilene couldn’t determine the cause of Mills’ illness and collapse, and she was transferred to Salina Regional Hospital on Aug. 18. The replacement knees were heavily infected it turned out, but doctors were unable to successfully treat them. And the medication they were using to treat the infections was wreaking havoc on Mills’ kidneys and other organs, and she had to go on dialysis. On Sept. 22, surgeons amputated Mills’ legs above the knees to save her life. On Oct. 4, Mills was transferred to Landmark Hospital — which is designed specifically for end-of-life and critically ill patient care — in Joplin, so that Rex and their daughter, Frontenac resident Amy Price, could take care of her if and while she recovered.
“That hospital saved her life,” Amy said — she recounted most of the details of the first few months because Mills has little recollection of events.
At Landmark, Mills started on the long road to recovery, one that was fraught with difficulty. Mills’ body did not take well to the morphine she was given for the pain, and she said it was often difficult to distinguish reality from fantasy.
“There were a lot of times I thought ‘It’s not worth it,’” Mills said after therapy Saturday morning. “It was very frustrating, and I was often a horrible patient. But I received wonderful care.”
The experience was tough on her daughter and husband, too. But a little bit of humor went a long way, Amy said.
“There were so many times she’d say ‘Just let me die,’ and I had to keep telling her ‘This is God’s way of teaching them how to handle people when they come into the hospital like this,” Amy said with a grin.
Mills said her system crashed around Thanksgiving and that for a few moments she was, for all intents and purposes, dead. But doctors were able to resuscitate her, and things started to go right.
“I thought, ‘God is giving me a warning to straighten up my act,” she said.
So she cleaned up her act. And shortly thereafter, Mills was well enough to leave Landmark and was transferred to Via Christi Hospital in Pittsburg a week after Christmas. Since then she has been receiving physical therapy to learn how to live life in a wheelchair. In two weeks she learned how to sit up and balance in bed. Now, Mills is learning to transfer from her wheel chair to other surfaces.
“I’m still not sure if I’ve fully grasped the reality of what happened, but my parents raised me to just do what needs to be done,” Mills said. “When they first told me about my legs, I was shocked at first. But I just think ‘Oh, well. Things happen.’ I’m slowly adjusting. It’s the little things.”
Price said the difference is astonishing.
“If you look at her a month back, she’s not the same person,” she said.
Mills said she will have the option to receive prosthetic limbs, but that they will be shorter than normal legs.
“And they say it depends on how much energy I have to learn how to walk with them,” Mills said. “But I just don’t think about that. It’s just my nature.”
Now, Mills and Rex will move into a house next door to Amy in Frontenac, and she will continue to visit Via Christi for therapy. Coincidentally, that was always the plan. In 2008, Amy and her husband, David, purchased the house so that her parents could be near family.
“We bought it because with her knees already bad, the idea was that they would eventually come live here. It’s just sped that up more,” Amy said. My husband and I are similar in the fact that you take care of family. It’s just what you do, and he was totally on board with that.”
The role reversal isn’t lost on either.
“She’s my mother now and I’m her daughter,” Mills said. “I always say you never know what’s going to happen, and you really don’t.”
Now that she can’t return to her previous job, Mills said she plans to crochet and take up gourmet cooking. One of the worst developments during the whole ordeal, she said, was that she lost her taste for food.
“I’m a closet eater,” she said with a chuckle. “I hope my taste will come back. I like the look of food, the taste of food, the texture of it. Gourmet cooking is going to be a new thing.”
Mills said she also plans to watch her grandchildren, Paige and Forrest, play sports.
“I’m not a sports person but when they’re playing, that’s a story,” Mills said.
Amy said she knew that once the worst was over, her mother would be able to get back to living the life she loves.
“I wouldn’t have done all this unless I thought you’d have a life afterward,” she said.
Mills smiled in agreement.
“I know I’ll have a life,” she said.
