Living Example Debbie Walsh Wasn’t Expected To Recover From Her Life-Threatening Illness, But Things Didn’t Go As Expected

Debbie Walsh really doesn’t want anybody to read this.

She sits in her wheelchair, dressed in a denim dress, white tights and black Nike tennis shoes, and shrugs off compliments. She wears modesty like a shawl. Her blue eyes toss out light. Her smile rarely leaves her face.

Last year, doctors said 35-year-old Debbie Walsh had a less than 10 percent chance of living. Her lungs were severely damaged around the time she had surgery for a perforated ulcer the size of a little finger. Doctors put her in a drug-induced coma for more than a month.

Walsh was sent to a nursing home, so she could be comfortable until she died. “Basically they were just going to go warehouse her somewhere,” said husband Tim Walsh.

Debbie Walsh wasn’t supposed to be able to breathe without a ventilator. She definitely wasn’t supposed to be able to breathe without an oxygen tube in her nose.

No one held out much hope. They prepared for the worst.

“I knew she was a fighter,” said nurse Ruth Erb, a close friend since the seventh grade. “But I also knew how frail her body was. I kept saying, ‘No, I’m being realistic. I’ve seen those people. They don’t get better.”’

But nobody told Debbie Walsh. She lived. She learned to breathe without a ventilator. She rejected the oxygen tube. And now she’s living again in her Colbert home, talking, cooking one meal a day for her family and learning to walk again.

Her illness pulled a community together, from the Half Moon Grange, the Northview Bible Church and friends.

Neighbors cooked meals for Tim Walsh and the couple’s 10-year-old son. They helped clean house. A benefit raised more than $17,000. T-shirts supporting Walsh were coveted by children at a vacation Bible camp. Her nursing home room was wallpapered in banners and get-well cards and was home to a tiny zoo of stuffed animals, from rabbits to teddy bears to a duck.

Friends and family members were like faithful suitors, coming by her room every day and helping her learn to comb her hair and brush her teeth. They read her lips, adjusted her pillows and waited for the day when Walsh could softly say, “Hi.”

“There were people praying all over the world for her,” Tim Walsh said.

“The support was so consistent,” Debbie Walsh added. “That was what surprised me. They didn’t let up.”

That’s because of Debbie Walsh’s consistent support, her friends say. For years, cloistered in her home because of rheumatoid arthritis, Walsh has been a community backbone. She doesn’t talk much about it, but her friends do.

Walsh is probably the post office’s best friend - or worst nightmare. She sends out scores of notes and letters every month to friends, neighbors and church members. She started writing to high school students in tough spots - whether they had important tests, tough days or struggles. She signed her notes, “The Church Mouse,” and drew a tiny smiley face.

“She is a person who’s not very vocal, very shy, easily intimidated,” Erb said. “She doesn’t like to be in crowds, any recognition of any type. It kills her. She started feeling like her calling, her gift, was to write people encouraging notes, hundreds of people. I’m not kidding, she’d send hundreds every month.”

Now Walsh has been picked as one of the five most inspirational nursing home patients in the Southcrest Nursing and Rehabilitation Center national chain. She’s won a trip in June to an awards banquet, in Lincolnshire, Ill.

“We just saw miracle after miracle,” said friend Kathy Henkle, who helped organize the benefit and visited Walsh weekly in the nursing home. “Everybody just kept praying. God was so good. I feel so privileged to have been a part and be a part of her life. Even her doctors were so negative. They just held out no hope for her.”

Granted, Walsh’s fight was against severe odds. Her body had already taken a beating, for 14 years.

Walsh ran long distance in high school and at Spokane Community College. She was almost finished earning a degree at Eastern Washington University to teach physical education and coach track when a niggling pain started in her right knee.

Three months later, as Walsh readied herself to walk down the aisle, her other knee started hurting. Three months later, Debbie Walsh was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. Running and coaching weren’t possible. Neither was helping her new husband farm 2,400 acres on Half Moon Road.

The Walshes believe the stress from the arthritis, the arthritis drugs and anorexia led to Debbie Walsh’s ulcer. She just remembers her stomach always giving her problems.

She figured she had a cold in late December 1994, but she doesn’t remember anything from Christmas onward. Walsh looked ashen when she attended a Bible study group with friends on Jan. 7. That Saturday, she doubled over in pain three times. She described the pain as the worst she’d ever had, worse than kidney stones, worse than giving birth.

Tim Walsh drove his wife to the emergency room, and late-night surgery was performed on the perforated ulcer. Debbie Walsh didn’t really wake up. At some point, Walsh inhaled a large amount of gastric material that scalded and scarred her lungs, leading to adult respiratory distress syndrome. The condition is fatal more than half the time.

Walsh was in a drug-induced coma for a little more than a month. The first thing she remembers is Valentine’s Day 1995, when her husband brought her a dozen red roses in a vase. The vase was placed behind her.

“I couldn’t see them, and everybody kept saying, ‘What beautiful roses,”’ Debbie Walsh said. “I was so frustrated, because I couldn’t tell anyone I wanted to see them.”

Almost a month later, she was sent to Southcrest, where rehabilitation workers worked to help her wean first off the ventilator and then off her tracheostomy tube.

She made baby steps. Walsh was able to attend her benefit, at Midway Elementary, in early June. Almost 300 people were there, buying T-shirts emblazoned with a tiny mouse holding a pen and bidding on donated goods in a silent auction.

Then Walsh started eating solid food. She made her husband bring her the same meal every evening: two pieces of regular recipe Kentucky Fried Chicken, a biscuit and a Baskin-Robbins vanilla milkshake.

Walsh was finally sent home Aug. 15. Since then, she’s had foot surgery and has been learning to walk again. She’s set goals that she’s achieved, like driving her son to school in the spring. Now she wants to be able to throw her crutches away.

“She’s incredible,” said Laura Dover, the respiratory therapist at Southcrest who nominated Walsh for the nursing home award. “She tends to be real modest and not think it’s a big deal, but what she’s done is absolutely amazing. She touched everybody at Southcrest. She made a huge difference in all our lives.”

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