Support Tom's Journey to Mobility

Hello! My name is Linda Traurig. I am here to help my husband, Tom Traurig, raise money for the purchase of a wheelchair-accessible van. Here is a little background on this amazing, kind, and wonderful man. Tom served in our United States Navy and then became a police officer for our hometown, Manitowoc. After he retired from the city, he was also a reserve deputy for Manitowoc County. He obviously has a serving mentality!

April 17, 2023, was the worst day of our lives! Tom has been healthy the majority of his life as he was a powerlifter in high school and a bodybuilder while being on the Police Department. He needed to stay in shape as he would say, "If I go down in the dirt with someone, I want to make sure I win!" After retirement, he still maintained a part-time job at our local hospital as a courier. He was always busy taking care of our furbabies, our house, yard, grocery shopping, making meals, and me. He would average 14,000 steps a day! Tragically, he suffered a drop in his heart rate and blood pressure that night while he was sleeping. His moaning and pounding of his fist woke me up. I was shaking him, trying to wake him. His eyes were rolled back in his head! He came to after a minute or so! I thought he was having a bad dream as he had never experienced this before. I asked him what was going on, and he said he must have been having trouble falling asleep! We were asleep for an hour and didn't know that had happened to him! He got up to go to the bathroom. It was 12:02 a.m. All of a sudden, I heard BAMMMM! It felt like the whole house had shook. I flew out of bed to the bathroom, and he was laying on the bathroom floor having another episode! He fell backward when he got into the bathroom and landed against the wall that supports our clothes chute. He came to and said, "I can't feel anything, honey, help me up!" He was dead weight! I couldn't move him! I immediately called an ambulance. He was taken to our local hospital where they found he had broken his neck and is now a quadriplegic!

He has been at 8 different facilities since that tragic day due to many health issues from his spinal cord injury. He had a coccyx wound that started at the first facility from lack of turning him. The second facility was even worse as it grew to a stage 4. It was so large I could put my fist in it! It was also infected to the bone! Had the Wound Nurse at the 3rd facility not sent him to the hospital next door, he would have gone septic and died. He has coded 7 times, had a heart attack after a pacemaker was placed, was on a ventilator twice, was given a tracheostomy, and just recently, he had a pulmonary embolism and is now back on blood thinners to prevent that from happening again. He is currently at the VA Spinal Cord Injury Center in Milwaukee and is due to be discharged in a few days. The VA SCI Center is in the top 10 VA facilities in the country! They are THE BEST! The VA is helping us purchase a wheelchair accessible van so that I can get him to physical and occupational therapy at the VA SCI Center. They will fund the conversion part of the van. Since this accident, we have great financial difficulties since both of us can no longer work as we did before! Your help in funding the remaining portion of the van is greatly appreciated. The wheelchair van will not only help us get him to the therapy he needs, but it will also give him some normalcy of being able to get out in the community, see friends and family, go to church, go out to dinner and allowing us to just take a ride in our beautiful community.