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  Home Page » Features » Columnists » John Peel » Near Tragedy Becomes A Healing Experience For Durango Woman

Near tragedy becomes a healing experience for Durango woman

Health overhaul bill expected to hit Senate floor within 2 weeks

by John Peel

A wool ski cap covers Carla Marie Toth’s scarred, partly shaved head. A patch veils her left eye; titanium is embedded in her skull.

But all that’s tolerable for this basic reason: Life flows in her blood.

This is a tale of survival. Survival in a small town that provides minimal earning opportunities. Life-and-death survival. And survival in a medical insurance system that leads some to ponder dangerous choices.

♦♦♦

On a Tuesday afternoon five weeks ago, Toth attended a meeting of the Durango chapter of Business Network International. As at each meeting, Toth stood to give a one-minute presentation on the status of her business. That was when the acupuncturist began feeling dizzy and faint. She sat down.

Cindy Coleman stood to give her short talk and noticed Toth lying on the floor.

“I figured it was low blood sugar. No big deal,” Coleman says.

Things quickly turned serious when Toth went into convulsions. Another attendee, Brandon Montag, called 911, and a few minutes later, emergency medical technicians arrived at the Prudential building.

“She was adamant that she was not going to the hospital,” Coleman says. Toth wanted to go home. “She knew she couldn’t afford it. … (But) none of us were going to take her home.”

Meeting participants cleared the room, and were surprised when at least 15 minutes passed with no sign of Toth being carted out.

Montag, a local insurance agent, went downstairs to talk with her.

“Let the EMTs do their thing,” he insisted. You’re not the first person without insurance to go to the hospital, he told her, figuring it’d be a $1,000 ambulance ride, and they’d all chip in, if necessary, to pay the bill.

Toth relented. Had she been alone when her dizziness occurred, she very likely would not have sought medical help.

“She’s really lucky she was where she was at that point,” Montag says. “If she was by herself, she wouldn’t be with us.”

Montag followed the ambulance to Mercy Regional Medical Center. When he was allowed into Toth’s emergency room, he saw the concern on Toth’s and doctors’ faces.

She didn’t have low blood sugar. A scan had revealed bleeding in the brain, and she was quickly on an emergency flight to Denver.

♦♦♦

Toth, now 43, moved to Durango seven years ago, just after finishing acupuncture school in Santa Barbara, Calif. She set up a practice, and supplemented her income by working at Steamworks Brewing Co. But she quit Steamworks after several
years to focus on healing her patients.

While working two jobs she felt she could afford the $200 per month for catastrophic health insurance, with a $10,000 deductible. After leaving Steamworks, she dropped the insurance to make it easier to pay other, more-pressing monthly bills.

“It’s a big problem in this town,” Toth says. “Most of the people I know don’t have insurance, or don’t have good insurance.”

Her medical bills will amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Right now, she’s dwelling on getting healthy, not the looming bills and potential bankruptcy.

♦♦♦

Toth sinks her hands into a mixing bowl filled with dry rice and beans. She massages the mixture, letting it slide through her fingers to improve her dexterity. It’s four weeks since the incident, and there’s numbness in her hands. Her balance is shaky, her left eye is blurry.

She’s doing amazingly well, say her parents, Jaine and Don Toth, who left Santa Barbara for Denver two hours after getting the news. You should have seen her just a week, or even a couple of days ago, they say. Toth picks out a single bean and holds it up. It’s the first time she’s been able to do this.

“It’s a type of stroke, so it can paralyze part of the body,” Jaine Toth explains in the living room of their daughter’s Durango home. It’s the same room where she and Don have been sleeping on a blow-up mattress.

At Swedish Medical Center in Denver, surgeons repaired a ruptured aneurysm on an artery that was bleeding into Toth’s brain. They clamped that aneurysm, as well as another aneurysm (not yet ruptured) found on Toth’s carotid artery.

Toth spent two weeks at Swedish, and was discharged a day ahead of schedule because of her excellent progress. After three days in Denver, she arrived back in Durango on Oct. 9 to a home filled with flowers, balloons and a “WELCOME HOME” banner artfully decorated by a 2-year-old neighbor boy.

Toth, along with her parents and her patient dog, Lucky, take 45-minute walks twice a day. Although Toth cannot pay, a friend provides physical therapy. She can turn doorknobs now, and last week she started tying her own shoes.

“My energy is getting better,” she says. “My brain’s back to about 98 percent normal. There’s still some words I can’t remember. But mostly I can carry on a decent conversation.”

Other friends are doing acupuncture and massage, and bringing over food.

“They keep asking, ‘What can I do for you?’ I’m just like, ‘Ask my parents because they’re taking care of me.’”

Doctors have said she should be able to return to 100 percent of normal, or close; she hopes to return to her vocation in one to three months. A lot depends on her hands losing their numbness. She needs to “feel the chi.”

Her parents at first wanted to take her to California to heal. But after a week in Durango, they realized she was better off here.

“The support system is amazing,” Jaine Toth marvels.

Just after surgery, her head swelled to twice its normal size; she was so drugged that she missed several days of her life. She’s come a long way. And Carla Marie Toth sees progress each day.

“I am feeling really positive,” Toth says with a persuasive smile. “I’m going to get better and resume my great life in this great little town.”

johnp@durangoherald.com
John Peel writes a weekly human-interest column.