For better or for worse: Life-changing accident doesn’t dim couple’s commitment

WASILLA — Dan Ducey, 60, asked God for a challenge, a real challenge. And in some ways, he’s haunted by those words.

“I think I’d take that prayer back,” he said.

He was 43 when he took time off from Arco to take his wife Linda and their two young children, Kellen, 11, and Kena, 7, on a family vacation to Hawaii.

It was July 28, 1993. Linda and Kena were collecting seashells on the beach while Dan and Kellen tried body surfing in the waves. Father and son were caught in the same very large wave, which drove Dan head first into the sand.

“I felt a jolt of electricity pass through my whole body and then I felt myself sinking.”

A surfer saw Dan was in trouble and dragged him out of the ocean.

He spent the next month in intensive care in Queens Hospital in Hawaii. The resulting compression injury to his spine at C 4-5 paralyzed him from the neck down. He can move his head and has sensation from his chest up, he said.

“The good news is I’ve got sensation. The bad news is it hurts.”

Empathy asks others to imagine how they would handle it if this had been their life the past 17 years. It’s natural. It’s human nature. But he thinks it’s hardest for other men, Dan says.

He remembers a conversation with a friend about what the worst thing to happen would be. His friend said cancer. Dan said being a quadriplegic.

“I always thought that’d be the worst fate possible. But you get through,” he said. “My body doesn’t work, but my mind is fine.”

For richer, for poorer

The two grew up in California but met working at the cannery in Seward in 1971 when Linda was 20 and Dan was 21. They came to Alaska separately to seek their fortunes, Dan hitchhiked here and Linda flew.

“It was the 1960s and everybody was on the move,” Dan said.

More than that, he said the drug situation was getting increasingly bad in California and he just wanted out. “Too much bad stuff was happening to my friends.”

Linda knew she wanted a family and since Alaska had a 10 to 1 ratio of men to women in the 1970s, she thought this would be a good place to meet someone.

“I came up here to find my fortune and a boyfriend and the next day I met Dan,” Linda said.

“Be careful what you wish for,” Dan said.

Like many weddings, their Oct. 27, 1977, ceremony included the familiar vow “for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; from this day forward until death do us part.

“I never really thought my life would be like this,” Linda said during a rare uninterrupted interview at a local coffee shop. “I just knew I wanted to get married and have kids and what happens, happens.”

It might seem like a natural response to be angry with God, but Dan and Linda say they are not. Frustration describes their experience better than anger, they say.

“People say ‘why me?’ But my son was with me. It could have been him,” Dan said.

Linda said she doesn’t have time to focus on what was and what is, or how different the two versions of their lives are.

“I still don’t really think about it. I’m task-oriented. I’m a planner,” she said. “That’s how I get through the day.”

Dan said there isn’t time for self-pity or what-ifs. “You’re too busy trying just to survive. You are just trying to keep from dying.”

In sickness and in health

Sooner or later, most people will experience some form of disability, Dan said. Whether a person needs glasses, a cane, an American Sign Language interpreter or a powered wheelchair to move around, people who experience disabilities are just people, he said.

But too often able-bodied people look past their disabled brethren, Dan said. “I’m like everybody else. Before I was injured, I didn’t really recognize people with disabilities.

“Afterward, I started seeing what was around me.”

Sometimes even his doctors see only Dan’s disability and talk to Linda about his medical needs, even though he’s sitting right there, he said.

Linda said these experiences are learning opportunities for the doctors, too. “Call him on it, Dan,” she prods. It’s a mistake most people only make once, she said.

In general, Dan said, men tend to ignore disabled people and women say things like, “Oh, you poor thing.”

They’d prefer adults adopt the tack taken by kids, who just ask questions, Linda said.

Whether you know Dan by name, you’ve probably seen him in the grocery store, out to eat or remember him visiting your school: He’s the guy who steers his wheelchair with his chin.

“I feel like I’m where God wants me to be and doing what God wants me to do,” he said.

He is adamant about a couple of points though, he is more than his disability and he’s not an inspiration.

“I’m just a person. I’m not an inspiration,” Dan said. “I’m just a person who experiences disabilities and we cope the best we can.”

He does admit that there are times when he feels sorry for himself. He recounted a story about an experience in the Arco building after he was injured.

“I was feeling pretty sorry for myself,” Dan said, until he saw a line of people with Down syndrome, each with their fingers in the belt loop of the person in front of them.

“I had 43 years of being able-bodied,” he said. “I have kids. I have a wife. I have a family. It made me feel like, ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself.’ It was kind of a moment when I started looking ahead and stopped looking behind.”

To love and to cherish

Years ago, after Dan’s arm was caught in a machine at the Seward lumber mill and he had to have a skin graft, Linda encouraged him to go to AVTEC and get more training. Dan completed the oil tech program and got a job with Arco.

He was a production operator for the company for years and he still has long-term disability benefits through that job, although BP purchased Arco years ago. Back then, Dan worked outside monitoring the wells and production and making sure things were safe, he said.

Linda said their family is fortunate to still have excellent health insurance and disability coverage through that job.

After he was injured, Dan said the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation also helped him go to the UAA at Mat-Su campus and complete his degree in Human Services.

Now he volunteers as an independent living advocate with Access Alaska three days a week.

“We try to help them live as independently as possible in the community of their choice,” Dan said.

He said Access also works on access issues at the community level, such as an accessibility project they helped the Alaska State Fair with last year.

Working for Access, Dan said, has also given him insight regarding his blessings.

“I often think if the roles were reversed, would I be able to do the things Linda does. She really never wavers,” Dan said. “Linda has really literally saved my life a couple of times.”

Of all the things he misses from his old life, he said physical labor, like working in his yard, is what he misses most.

From this day forward

Perhaps it was fate that Dan and Linda had met Wasilla residents Desi and Cathy Mayo at their hotel during their July 1993 vacation to Hawaii. The Mayos saw Dan and Kellen get wiped out by that big wave, saw the surfer pull Dan out and ran down the beach to get Linda and Kena, who were still collecting seashells.

The Mayo family took Kellen and Kena and met her at the hospital that day, Linda said.

Dan would spend the next month in the intensive care unit hooked up to a ventilator and a trach tube.

Their children spent that month with friends and family in California.

“Every day I had a new plan — things I had to do,” Linda said.

Doctors kept him on a ventilator until he got back to the University of Washington where he completed a months-long rehab program.

To save the insurance company money, Dan and Linda flew on a commercial flight with a nurse and a respiratory therapist from Hawaii to Seattle. “We had to book, like, six seats,” Dan recalls.

They’d been in the air awhile when another passenger slipped Linda a note.

“If you need anything and you are coming through Seattle, consider me a resource. I’m a survivor,” the note said.

When Linda went to thank the woman who’d passed the note she learned that her husband worked for the Seattle school district and that she was an event planner in the Seattle area. She said her name was Linda, too, and gave Linda Ducey her home phone number, saying to call if she needed anything.

After getting Dan situated, Linda said she had two weeks to get an apartment, enroll the kids in school and bring them to Washington. On her first day of looking, she found a wheelchair-accessible apartment that was perfect, but the owners wanted a long-term lease. Days later and getting frustrated with the search, Linda stopped back by that first apartment.

The leasing agents told her they had good news. They said they’d told the owners about her situation and they’d decided to make an exception.

When Linda Ducey called Linda Pressey with the news, her new friend was excited. “Oh, my God, that’s right down the street,” she said.

The two Lindas met down the street at the school where Linda Ducey was enrolling their children. When she told Pressey she was flying out the next day to get Kellen and Kena, the woman asked if Linda would mind leaving the apartment key with her. She said she had a table and chairs in storage she would bring over for the apartment.

“When we drove up to that building there was a huge bow on the door,” Linda Ducey remembered. Inside their new friends stocked the place with everything from Q-Tips and cotton balls to backpacks for the kids, school supplies and a huge bulletin board of all the people who’d put it together.

“It was just unbelievable,” Linda said.

Until death do us part

Ideally, Dan would have personal care assistants whose job is to help him around-the-clock. But the Duceys can’t afford the expense.

“From the very beginning doctors said don’t be the caregiver,” Linda said. “But that didn’t really work for us.”

Dan says he’s lucky, though. Not everyone has a caregiver who loves them and is genuinely concerned for their well-being.

“By far my greatest resource, support, tool, companion and everything else is my wife Linda,” he said. “She can do it all.”

Dan can only move his head, though he does have assistive technology that enables him to perform tasks like opening and closing the door, operating appliances, using the phone, turning on and off lights and using the computer.

Dan credits Elks Help with connecting him with most of the assistive technology he uses to access the world.

When they travel, Linda said it’s especially hard on Dan because he is without all these specialized tools, his motorized chair or his accessible house.

“When we travel we don’t have these conveniences,” she said. “When Dan’s in his own home he can do whatever he wants.”

And having an accessible home is huge, Dan said.

They tried to modify their old house so Dan could access it, but while they had added ramps so he could get in the house, he could not get in the bathroom and his chair barely fit through the bedroom doorway.

Then a friend from the gym made them an offer they couldn’t refuse, he said. “A lot of things just seemed to come together,” Dan said.

Bob Pevan had just started a residential construction company and offered to design and build a house for their family that Dan could fully access.

“There is no other way we could have done it if it hadn’t been for Bob,” Linda said of the sunny new home with views of Cook Inlet they moved into in 1999.

Perhaps nothing has done more than the Internet to help Dan access the world.

“It’s the way I communicate. The way I receive communication and the way I find out information,” he said. “I can work in that world.”

Linda said the hardest days are when something goes wrong with either Dan’s chair or his computer and then their plans for the whole day change. It’s these day-to-day frustrations she said are the most challenging.

“Things aren’t simple anymore,” she said. “I can’t just go climb Lazy Mountain.”

Although it’s been nearly 20 years since his injury, Linda said people still ask her if Dan has gotten any movement back. For them, she said movement is secondary to his pain level and sleeplessness. “Unless he is completely out, the pain is always there,” Linda said.

On bad days, Dan said his pain is 8 on a scale of 10 and on good days, it drops to 5.

“I have so much more than a lot of people in my situation have,” Dan said. “I have a lot of things to be grateful for.”

Other families struggling with similar issues who would like to talk to them about assistive technology, living with a long-term disability or anything else may e-mail Dan at dducey@gci.net or Linda at lducey@gci.net.

Contact Heather A. Resz at 352-2268 or heather.resz@frontiersman.com.