Accidents land them in nursing home, love gets them out
As they talk about the life-threatening, debilitating accidents that left them broke, nearly broken and living in a South Elgin nursing home, Mary Ann Bork and Brian Messman break into broad smiles.
Now 50, Bork doesn't remember the hit-and-run driver who knocked her off her bicycle in Naperville in 2007, but she does know her severe head injury led to the tests that found her brain tumor. All Messman knows is that he fell asleep while driving on July 1, 2003, and woke up paralyzed from the middle of his chest down.
"They were blessings in disguise because I met Mary," says Messman, 50, grinning from his wheelchair.
A manager of dozens of restaurants for several fast food chains, Bork lived in a four-bedroom house in Naperville and had started a new Italian restaurant in Westchester when the accident happened. She didn't have health insurance, so medical bills drained her finances, took her home and left her happy to get a spot in the smaller, one-floor South Elgin Rehabilitation & Health Care Center. A carpenter and cabinetmaker who also was without health insurance, Messman had nowhere to go after the brother with whom he lived got married. Messman became a nursing home resident a couple of months later in December of 2007.
Two of the youngest residents in the home, Bork and Messman ended up playing Yahtzee and poker at nights.
"Mary and I were kind of the life of the facility," Messman says. Both have received awards for their activism on behalf of residents.
After cards one night, they were about to retire to their own rooms when Bork made her move.
"She pulled me over and laid one on me," Messman says.
Their relationship blossomed in the nursing home. The couple got engaged on Valentine's Day of 2009 and moved into a room with two beds. But they longed to start a new life on the outside. Armed with a rebuilt laptop and a dogged determination, Messman researched their options.
"If somebody has the potential, we do everything to help them reach their goals," says Mary Karson, administrator of the South Elgin nursing home, which supported the couple's decision to find independent housing. "It's a very uplifting story of Brian and Mary."
Messman also gives lots of credit to the Elgin-based FITE Center for Independent Living, which serves the Fox River Valley of the not-for-profit Illinois Centers for Independent Living.
"I got ahold of the FITE center and Candy Sue Sensor, and, like a bulldozer, she and her co-workers came in and knocked down all the walls preventing us from leaving here and having the necessary tools to live on our own," a grateful Messman e-mails.
Supported mostly by donations and state government funding, the FITE center (www.fitecil.org) used a program called "Money Follows the Person." Sensor, a transitional care manager, helped the couple plan for the future and move into an apartment in Messman's boyhood hometown of Woodstock. Even though the couple hired a personal assistant to help them, "it's much less expensive to have someone living in the community," Sensor says.
FITE, the nursing home and Messman and Bork worked hard to make this happen.
"Normally, I don't see couples move out," Sensor says. "It was very unique to me to see how they help each other. They complete each other."
Bork gives Messman a kiss as they ponder all the boxes that still need unpacking in their new home.
"It works out nice," says Bork, who still suffers from short-term memory loss. "I'm his legs. He's my memory."