Hope Happens Here: Karen LeGrand

Karen LeGrand knew something was wrong as she watched her son fall to the field.

Since the moment Eric discovered football when he was 5 years old, Karen had logged countless hours cheering him on. She’d seen him tumble like a puppy during pint-sized scrimmages, carry the ball into the end zone in hard fought high school games, and rack up tackles playing for Rutgers University. She knew her son – and his movements – better than anyone.

And on that October day in 2010 when Eric fell during a fourth quarter tackle, his legs bouncing stiffly off the ground, Karen saw something that scared her.

“I knew right away everything was different,” she says. “I was like, okay, ‘There is no more you. Now, it's him.’ Everything was Eric.”

Her fears were soon confirmed: Eric had sustained a C3-C4 spinal cord injury. For years, his identity had been singularly rooted in football, his dreams for his future linked to the game. The injury would reshape his life – and Karen’s life, too.                          

Millions of people in the U.S. care for family members living with disabilities, including paralysis. For Karen, becoming a caregiver for her son wasn’t so much a decision made as an inevitability, as basic as breathing. She was his mother. It was as simple as that.

“All I cared about was doing whatever I needed to do so Eric could be healthy and get back to some sort of normalcy in his life,” she says, adding, “I didn't think of myself as a caregiver. It was just automatically something that I had to do. ‘This is what I do. This is my job.’”

It was a mission defined during a moment Karen shared with Eric at the hospital immediately after the accident. About to undergo emergency surgery to stabilize his spine, he was covered in tubes and connected to a ventilator. Her heart ached as she looked at him, but he met her gaze and mouthed, I’ll be back.

“This kid was fighting,” she says. “So, from that moment on, I said, ‘All right, whatever I need to do, I'm going to hold it together. I'm going to hold it together for him.”

Like so many other families, Karen scrambled to process the scope of the injury, using every spare moment to study a stack of materials sent by the Reeve Foundation’s National Paralysis Resource Center.

“You listen to the doctors, and they're telling you this and they're telling you that, but to me, they're not speaking my language,” she says, adding, “When I got that information, I sat in Eric's room and read through everything. The booklets, the sheets, everything. And it helped me understand so much more about his level of injury, about secondary conditions, and about what to expect next."

Guided by Eric’s words before his surgery, Karen realized the most important thing she could give him was positivity. She filled his hospital room with missives of support streaming in from around the country, papering the walls with get-well cards, inspirational posters and football jerseys. She and her daughter, Nicole, danced around his bed to boost his spirits, singing along to Bob Marley’s “Don’t Worry About a Thing.” And, when he moved to Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation, Karen brought him his favorite breakfast from Dunkin’ Donuts each morning to fuel the day ahead.

But even as she projected optimism to Eric, the changes to their lives sometimes overwhelmed her. A tangle of worries left her stomach in knots. Could she take care of him? How would she know if she was doing the right thing? Would he stay healthy? What would his future look like?

"There were times when I would sit in my car, and I would break down because I honestly didn't know how we were going to do this,” she says. “I cried a lot about it, but never in front of Eric. I never let him see that.”

When Eric was discharged, Karen was terrified. She’d learned how to manage the injury and care for Eric alongside the staff at Kessler. Now that safety net was gone.

But the churn of daily life left little time for indulging her fears. As the weeks and months passed, Karen adapted, learning not to panic when health challenges – the sudden spasms, the headaches that signaled autonomic dysreflexia – emerged. She began to trust the new nurse helping with his home care – and also her own instincts.

“It was nerve wracking, but we found a new routine,” she says. “We were okay."