Bio: Victoria Lopez, 48, is a Colorado native who grew up in Commerce City and spent 25 years as a hairdresser. She lives in Thornton with her husband, Larry. They have two daughters, now in their early 20s, and one granddaughter.
The Challenge: Not long after her 40th birthday, Lopez awoke one morning to find the whole left side of her body had gone numb. “I thought I really must have slept crooked,” she recalls. But when the sensation didn’t go away and she had trouble getting into the shower, she suspected something more serious. Doctors diagnosed a mild stroke – the first of three that changed her life dramatically over the next few months.
“What happens with strokes is, it doesn’t all happen initially,” she says. “As time goes on, the weakness comes.” At first she could stand but couldn’t move from side to side. Later, at work, she found her left hand could no longer hold a comb. Eventually, even though she was put on blood thinners to prevent a recurrence, she lost the ability to drive a car, to write her name, to speak clearly. Her bubbling personality went flat. “I was a limp rag,” she says. “Not only didn’t I have any muscles, but I didn’t have any energy.” Fighting severe anemia, she spent three months in the hospital, family members taking turns sleeping in a chair beside the bed, before she was strong enough to go home. A doctor wrote on her chart that her ability to walk “might never return.”
How She Handled It: Always an active person, Lopez refused to give up. “When I saw all that love in the emergency room, I thought I had to do my part. That’s only fair,” she says. “I never asked, ‘Why me?’ I just decided I have to be in this body, and I just have to get better.”
With the help of physical therapist Deb McCoy and masseur Raymond King, she slowly relearned the patterns of everyday life – climbing stairs, cooking, gardening, writing, driving, even speaking with inflection. It was a long, hard process, punctuated midway by a hysterectomy and surgery to close a hole in her heart. But gradually, with a determination that her five siblings and the rest of her family and friends find inspiring, she moved from using a wheelchair to using a walker, to arm crutches, to a cane, and finally to the leg braces she wears today.
Still Working On: Lopez credits much of her recovery to working out, mostly swimming, water aerobics, weightlifting and walking. She now can cover a mile or more without having to hold on to someone, as long as she stays on level ground, and has just recently found she can ride a bike. “It would be nice to wear high heels again, and to be able to go jogging outdoors,” she says, but that presumably would require a new set of $9,000 WalkAide braces, which the family can’t afford.
Best Advice: “I think when you become most spiritual is when your body’s taken away. We all think we have control, but we don’t,” Lopez says. “So we just have to trust our own bodies, and when something’s really not right, call the doctor immediately.”
– Jack Cox
