SEARSPORT, Maine — Myrtilla Laieski knows that life can change forever in a matter of seconds.
That lesson was driven home to her painfully in May, when one moment she was planting rhododendrons and rosebushes and the next she was “wobbling and wheezing.” She staggered into her home, stricken by a dangerous type of pneumonia, though she did not know it yet.
Her worried husband drove her to the hospital, where Myrtilla, now 44, was put on a respirator and went into a coma. She woke up 2½ weeks later, her hands and feet black from the gangrene she had contracted as a complication of the pneumonia.
“I thought, ‘What the heck?’” she said recently from her Searsport home.
Myrtilla punctuated her words with gestures from the metal clamps that have served as her hands since doctors had to amputate her own Aug. 2. She lost one foot in October and is scheduled to have her remaining foot amputated in January at Maine Medical Center in Portland.
She has learned that only one in 143,000 people survive the rare condition that happened as a complication of the pneumonia and precipitated the gangrene — disseminated intravascular coagulation. The condition causes abnormal bleeding and disrupts coagulation.
“Some days, I wish to hell I hadn’t survived,” Myrtilla said. “For some reason, I was left alive with this. God has something planned — I don’t know what it is. Maybe down the road, I’ll be able to help somebody else going through this hell, tell them it’s going to be all right.”
Right now, her friends are asking for a little help for Myrtilla, who already has seen her share of tragedy.
She suffers from multiple sclerosis, one of her sons drowned on Mother’s Day eight years ago, and her 26-year-old daughter is disabled. Myrtilla had cared for her daughter full time until the young woman’s recent move into a midcoast group home.
Myrtilla and her husband of 2½ years, Frank — who himself is disabled after losing the use of an arm in a stroke a few years ago — were looking forward to beginning a new chapter of their life together. After she lost her limbs, it’s all they can do to get around the trailer, where the bathroom doorway is too narrow to allow access to her wheelchair.
“She was a doer,” said Bonnie Berry, a friend who is organizing a fundraising supper for Myrtilla at the Searsport Lions Club on Saturday, Dec. 11. “She’d do everything. She was out there working. She cared for her handicapped daughter for years and years and years. Now, she needs help to do every single thing. She can’t do anything. It’s unreal, just unreal.”
Berry said she hopes to raise enough money to help the family make their home more handicapped-accessible.
“It wouldn’t take a lot just to widen that little trailer,” she said, “just to make it more accessible for her to get around in. It wouldn’t take millions.”
Myrtilla said she would be grateful for any help.
“It would give me more freedom in my own home,” she said.
Right now, she depends on her husband, other family members and people who come in to help.
“I said, ‘For better or worse,’ and I meant every word of it,” Frank Laieski said. “I know there’s better coming.”
Berry also dreams of helping Myrtilla replace her metal clamps with better prosthetic devices.
Now, Myrtilla manipulates straps connected to her shoulders to make the clamps clasp and unclasp. She can use the clamps to smoke cigarettes and scratch her miniature dachshunds.
More-advanced devices such as myoelectric prosthetics are designed to function more like hands and use tiny movements from remaining muscles to rotate the prosthetic wrist and close and open fingers.
That sounds good to Myrtilla, who said she used to enjoy all kinds of activities, including gardening, housework and cooking.
“I did everything,” she said, recollecting her work of Thanksgivings past. “Normally, I make two or three pies … this holiday was pretty hard for me.”
She and Berry said they hope people will be able to help a little.
“It’s hard economics,” Myrtilla said, scratching her little dog with her metal clamp. “I understand.”
The family is still coming to terms with the changes that have taken place since that day in May.
“It really puts your perspective differently,” she said. “It changes what’s important and what’s not important.”
“What matters and what doesn’t,” her husband added. “As humans, we take everything for granted, but nothing’s a given.”
The benefit supper for Myrtilla Laieski will begin at 5 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 11, at the Searsport Lions Club on the Back Searsport Road. The all-you-can-eat meal will feature homemade baked beans, American chop suey, fresh baked rolls, salads and pies. It is $7 for adults, $3 for children 5-12 years old, free for those younger than 5. All are welcome.
For more information about the benefit supper or about how to assist Myrtilla Laieski, contact Bonnie Berry at 322-7974.