The orthopedic surgeon who performed so many operations on Karen O’Brien and finally fused her knee so she could walk without crutches was one of many people over the years who made the mistake of underestimating her.
When she told him she wanted to go to nursing school, he was stunned. “Why do you want to do that?” he said.
Then the faculty at Wichita State University took one look at her teetering steps and denied her admission to the nursing school. It was the late 1960s – long before the Americans with Disabilities Act was enacted – and she was considered too handicapped to do such a physically demanding job.
She asked them to reconsider.
Finally, a lone faculty member took up her cause. She argued that even if O’Brien couldn’t be a nurse, she might be able to teach nursing.
“She believed in me,” O’Brien said.
So she enrolled in the nursing school, graduated, practiced nursing and went on to graduate school.
And not just out of spite.
“Nurses were always there for me,” O’Brien explained. “They made such a difference in my life.”
The little girl crippled by polio at 18 months was empowered by women who helped her overcome fears and frustrations.
“They were my heroes,” she said.
So, wanting to be like them was only natural.
But as moments go, even for an altruist like O’Brien, being elected president of the national Association of State and Territorial Directors of Nursing last month had to be especially sweet.
She proved all the doubters and naysayers wrong.
“I did just fine,” she said.
I’d say that’s an understatement.
When she was a young nurse, O’Brien founded a rural health clinic in El Rito, N.M. She became director of a children’s home in Illinois, ran the Teller County Public Health Department in Colorado and was named Colorado’s director of public-health nursing in 1998.
She is a senior instructor at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, a wife and a mother of two grown children, and is working on her Ph.D.
She’s also an avid skier through the National Sports Center for the Disabled at Winter Park and competes in running events in her wheelchair.
“This summer, my husband and I did a river kayaking trip with children with disabilities,” she said. “It was incredibly fun.”
She’s a living, working, speed-wheeling challenge to able-bodied couch potatoes everywhere and anybody left who might make the mistake of underestimating the abilities of the disabled.
And if that’s not enough, she also is on a mission.
The job of a public-health nurse is to focus on health, not illness, she said. That means managing programs to prevent unintended pregnancies, reduce obesity and unhealthy lifestyle choices such as smoking and drug abuse, and reach out to the uninsured and people with special needs.
“We work with a lot of partners, private foundations and coalitions within the community to get things done,” she said. “Our work is to prevent illnesses and disabilities.”
As part of that, one of the key roles of the public-health nurse is to make sure children are fully immunized.
And for this, the nurse who often uses a wheelchair definitely has an advantage.
O’Brien can look skeptical parents in the eye and speak with authority on what it’s like to live with the consequences of a preventable disease.
She can describe a childhood spent in and out of hospitals, undergoing two operations a year, and days and months of physical therapy. She can speak from experience of post-polio complications and the considerable obstacles she has faced throughout her life.
O’Brien is proud of all the adversity she has overcome. She’s even prouder of all the work she has done to make sure other children won’t have to.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-820-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
