Burn victim recovering at home after four months in hospital

By Karena Walter QMI Agency

ST. CATHARINES — Cindy Purdy Campbell takes great pleasure in making her kids their favourite chicken dish.

Even if she can’t bend her elbows.
And needs to take a break during cooking.
And spends 30 extra minutes at it than she used to.
Campbell is back at home after being burned to more than 60% of her body, and she’s making dinner for her family, no matter what.
Even if it takes forever to cut up the chicken. And fry the apples. And the onions, too.
“I always make a supper,” Campbell said Monday from her St. Catharines home. “It’s hard work, but it gets done.”
Campbell, 35, spent 41/2 months in hospitals battling injuries she suffered on July 23, the day she was rushed to hospital from the Rockway Community Centre on Pelham Rd.
A 48-year-old man was charged with attempted murder. Details of the case are under a publication ban.
Campbell didn’t know when she’d be allowed to come home from hospital, but doctors released her in early December, in time for the Christmas holidays.
She is anything but recovered. She still has five surgeries ahead of her. But she said she is getting stronger.

“I’m doing alright,” she said. “I have to rely on everybody for rides. I’m feeling pretty good.”

Each morning, a personal support worker gets Campbell out of bed, bathes and dresses her.
Her knees and elbows do not bend because of heterotopic ossification — extra bone tissue that can develop in elbows, knees and shoulders from burn trauma.
The immobility makes doing anything a challenge. Even blowing her nose takes some creative thinking (She puts a tissue on the bed and rubs her nose against it.)
Campbell can sit in a wheelchair with elevating leg lifts or in a medical lift chair. Occasionally, she said she will try to stand but is wobbly.
And so, she relies on the help of support workers, family and friends.
“It’s frustrating because I can’t do what I want. If I have to go out it has to be planned,” she said.
Three times a week, a friend or family member drivers her for physiotherapy at Hotel Dieu Shaver Health and Rehabilitation Centre, which is now “so close and so far away.”
She can’t call Paratransit because the drivers don’t come into the house and she needs someone to put on her shoes and coat.
Campbell said she’s thankful to the strangers who donated to a fund her family opened up for her. She said she’d like to thank everyone who helped, but many didn’t leave their names and made anonymous donations.
She said the money went towards buying a used wheelchair, a mattress for a hospital bed and a wig, because she lost a lot of hair from the trauma and some burned off.
“It’s so nice having such nice people,” she said. “And I have good friends and family.