This is a story about two women and a wheelchair. Ah, if it were about only that.
It is also, in equal parts, a story of caring and love — which, if you had not noticed, at times seem in short supply.
The women met 12 years ago at the Colorado State Patrol’s training academy. Lora Thomas was a captain then, the first woman to reach that rank. She decided that January to invite the female cadets at the academy to dinner.
Something about Molly Tyler struck her. She still cannot explain it, but she just knew somehow the cadet would become part of her life.
They assigned Molly Tyler to Del Norte after graduation. Lora Thomas had been promoted to major and assigned to Durango, meaning Tyler would be one of the 75 troopers under her command.
Their friendship took firm hold in late 1998 when Molly’s husband, Hal, was diagnosed with cancer. Thomas would visit often with the couple.
“You are Molly’s guardian angel, I know that,” Hal Tyler told Thomas in early 1999. “I know you will look after her, and I can die in peace knowing that.” He died that February.
By January 2008, Molly Tyler had remarried and was in the second year at her new duty station in Gunnison. On Jan. 15, she was walking with another trooper in the courthouse parking lot. Their patrol vehicle’s battery was dead.
Tyler turned and was about to get jumper cables when her feet came out from under her on the icy, snow-covered lot.
“The next thing I knew, I was looking up at the sky. I thought I would be OK,” she said in an interview.
Two surgeries later, Tyler, 39, is wheelchair-bound and medically retired from the State Patrol. Her days are filled with constant pain, the result of what doctors call complex regional pain syndrome. Anything that touches her skin is basically the equivalent of someone firing needles and knives at her.
“It is an insufferable, unrelenting pain,” she explained.
Thomas, 58, and retired since 2003, calls virtually every day and visits at least twice a week, to help Molly with her two kids, Trinity Jo, 5, and Jacob, 4.
“She caught a bad break, but I have never once heard Molly complain,” Thomas says. “The worst was when I heard her say how she would love to just once be able to go to the backyard to play catch with her little boy.”
The pain has reached Molly’s arms, making it nearly impossible for her to wheel herself in the chair she has been confined to for over a year.
Here is where the love and caring thing comes in.
Thomas has begun a drive to raise $2,000 to buy her friend an electric wheelchair. It is a $6,000 chair once used by the deceased husband of a woman she knew from her State Patrol days.
“It is perfect for Molly and would make her life so much easier,” Thomas said.
Contributions can be made to the Colorado State Patrol Family Foundation, the Molly Tyler Fund, P.O. Box 150307, Lakewood, CO 80215.
Jacob paws at his mother as she collects her thoughts. “God bless her heart,” Molly Tyler finally says of her friend.
“She has been there for me every step since that day, the best friend a person could have. Every day I tell her that she is my guardian angel.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
