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Staff writer

One year after her car collided with a deer, causing paralysis from her armpits down, Lynne Dorr struggles with the question of why this happened to her as she rehabilitates to hopefully be able to walk and play with her daughters again.

“I have two little girls that I want to be a good mom for and do things with them that I used to do and I can’t do those things any more,” she said.

For approximately eight months after the accident, Dorr was in the hospital and undergoing rehabilitation and was away from her Ham Lake home where her husband Karl and daughters live.

She is now being taken care of by her parents Barb and Chuck at their Coon Rapids home.

They are planning to put in a chair lift on the stairs from the basement where she stays to the first floor. She now has to go out the basement’s walk-out door and around the front to get outside, so getting the lift in before the heavy winter snowfall comes is crucial.

Every night before they go to bed, Dorr talks to Kalissa, 7, and Kaelyn, 5, and she sees them every weekend. She sees their bright shining faces every day though. Their school photos hang on the side of her wheelchair.

“Those little girls are what keeps me going,” Dorr said.

“They’re my motivation to get out of this chair.”

The accident

On a Saturday morning, shortly before 7 a.m. on Nov. 8, 2008, Dorr was driving south on Radisson Road near Arnold Palmer Drive in Blaine  when a deer suddenly crashed into the driver’s side of her Honda Pilot. Its antlers flew into the windshield and her air bag went off.

The impact pushed her Honda off the side of the road, over the curb and through a fence. Time seemed to slow down as she saw a group of trees rushing up.

She tried to move her arms to steer her car back onto the road, but she was unable to move. She hoped the car would brush with something to slow her down, but she sensed she was already severely hurt before crashing into the trees.

Dorr was able to get to the Hennepin County Medical Center (HCMC) after the crash thanks to the Blaine neighborhood residents responding and calling 911 and her husband. She is extremely thankful for their help because without it, she may have been sitting in that car for a long time.

Rehabilitation

Dorr was in the HCMC’s emergency and neurological units for approximately three weeks following the accident where it was discovered that she had a spinal cord bruise from vertebrae five to vertebrae seven.

Dorr remembers friends and nurses stopping by to talk to her and being on the breathing tube, but her memory of the three weeks she spent at HCMC is blurry and she did not know the extent of her injuries.

“I guess I was still thinking in my head that I’d be walking out of there,” Dorr said. “I just thought I’d be in the hospital for a couple of weeks and go home and recover and be fine.”

When she was checked into the Sister Kenny Rehabilitation Institute at Abbott Northwestern Hospital, it started sinking in that she would not walking anytime soon. She found out that she was paralyzed from the armpits down and she had limited movement in her arms.

“I started thinking about how was I going to live life after getting out of the hospital like this,” Dorr said. “How was it going to affect my family and my work and things that I enjoyed doing?”

At the Sister Kenny treatment center, she was able to get some movement back in her arms through range of motion exercises.

After six weeks at Sister Kenny, she went to the Courage Center in Golden Valley, where she underwent five-and-a-half months of intensive physical and occupational therapy.

Dorr left the Courage Center because her insurance would no longer cover her stay.

She also did not get any help from her insurance company when she chose to buy a specialized stationary exercise bike that uses electric currents to stimulate the muscles in the legs so she can pedal on her own. This cost $15,000.

“I’m never letting go of that dream to walk again,” Dorr said. “And in order to keep my legs active and my muscles strong, I needed something, so I bought one of those bikes myself.”

Dorr continues to undergo therapeutic treatment every weekday at Mercy Hospital. Twice a week is occupational and physical therapy and every weekday is hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

Doctors have told her that the hyperbaric oxygen therapy is experimental. She spends about an hour in a hyperbaric chamber each weekday.

“I have hope,” Dorr said. “I feel like I’ve had some progress since I’ve been going.

The progress Dorr has seen is the muscles she can use are stronger, she has better balance in her wheelchair and the low blood pressure she has had since the accident is starting to improve.

She hopes to wean off on the blood pressure medicine she takes. Every day, Dorr takes 15 different medications, of which several are vitamin supplements.

In this difficult period of her life, Dorr has been humbled by the help her family and friends have given her from her parents opening up their home to her and friends dropping off meals and cards to her husband and children.

“I guess I didn’t realize how much people cared and how good people were until I was faced with something like this,” Dorr said.

She has had to find new ways to do daily tasks that were once simple like eating or turning the pages of a book, according to Dorr.

Dorr has a splint that gives her arm more strength and allows her to eat by herself if the handle of the eating utensil is encased in foam to make it easier to hold. Turning the pages of a book is a struggle, but she can do it.

Before the accident, Dorr started taking up photography as a hobby. Her camera has a remote control, but she is not able to use this yet.

There are a lot of thoughts on Dorr’s mind that she has trouble conveying because she does not know anybody who truly understands what she is going through.

Her Facebook page helps her stay connected with family and friends, but Dorr hopes to connect with more people she can share personal experiences with.

“I suppose nobody ever envisions anything like this happening to someone they care about, much less themselves,” Dorr said. “It’s such a major, major life change that it’s hard to know how to cope with it.”

Eric Hagen is at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it