By Dean Poling
VALDOSTA — Shelby Rinkle needed a drink of water.
The morning of April 24, she had taken a blood-pressure pill. She unscrewed the top of a water bottle while driving her Trailblazer.
Less than 100 yards from her house, she had driven this path thousands of times since she and husband John had moved here 10 years earlier. She was driving to her job as a bookkeeper with the Salvation Army.
While opening the bottle, the SUV hit a group of mailboxes. The collision caused the Trailblazer to flip. The vehicle rolled five times and Shelby Rinkle rolled with it.
John would later realize that the incident happened so close to home that you could see the wreck site from the Rinkles’ back porch.
A twist of a cap. A twist of metal. A twist of the spine. A twist of fate.
Shelby Rinkle’s life and the lives of her family were changed in an instant.
Opening a water bottle now, as she does during this interview, she no longer gets the job done with only her hands. She bites the cap with her teeth and uses her hands to twist the bottle.
She’s lost the strength in her hands. She has only 20 percent mobility in moving her head from side to side. Shelby Rinkle is paralyzed from the chest down.
She crushed her fifth and sixth vertebrae. She had to be cut from the wreckage of the Trailblazer. A helicopter life-flighted Shelby to Shands Hospital in Gainesville. Surgeons performed what had been estimated as an 18-hour surgery in four-and-a-half hours to return her spinal cord to its proper position.
She spent four weeks in intensive care. She coded twice. Shelby’s neck is filled with so many titanium rods, plates and pins that John says an X-ray of his wife’s neck looks like an erector set.
Shelby stayed at Shands from April 22 to May 22 before being transferred to Select Specialty then helicoptered to the Shepherd Center for spinal-cord injury rehabilitation.
Shelby has been home for the past few months, but almost everything has changed.
She has a special diet: high fiber, low calorie, low fat, no spices. She’s lost 50-60 pounds since the accident. She needs help bathing. John shaves her legs. Their daughter, Katherine, a 17-year-old Lake Park Christian Academy student, and John both received training to care for Shelby at home.
Brain trauma has made it impossible for Shelby to keep her bookkeeping job, so the family’s monthly income is drastically reduced. Insurance covered her surgery and medical treatment, but it doesn’t cover the medical supplies and necessary renovations.
John runs down a list of costs: $23,000 for Shelby’s wheelchair; $1,500 for a hoyer lift to move her from the bed to the chair; $1,800 for a special bed; $5,000 for a concrete pad outside the Rinkles’ house because the wheelchair cannot run on grass or dirt without being exposed to damage; $250 for a case of 200 pads for the bed; $2,000 for a wheelchair ramp, etc.
John works nights at the Salvation Army transit lodge and days at Steve’s Chem-Dry. He had been on his way from one job to the other when he learned of Shelby’s wreck. He’s also the son of a master carpenter. He knows how to make the renovations needed in his house to accommodate Shelby’s needs, but he must still find the resources for the materials.
The Rinkles have also seen their family become closer during this time. John and Shelby praise their daughter Katherine’s abilities and willingness to care for her mother. John’s mother, Jody McCants, has spent weeks away from her Florida home, traveling back and forth, to help the Rinkles.
Friends, like Teresa Parker and Tonda Connell, have organized fund-raisers to defray the Rinkles’ costs. A March 20 event is already being planned for Drexel Park to benefit the Rinkles.
While many things in their lives have changed, one thing hasn’t. John and Shelby’s devotion to one another. They met in college and will celebrate 24 years of marriage in December.
Faith sustains them.
Doctors have told the couple there is an outside chance that some movement may return to Shelby. Within a year after such an accident, John says, there is a window of opportunity for the nerves to possibly readjust. Still, they remain realistic about such odds.
“It would be like winning the spinal-cord lottery,” John says. “Other than that it would take a miracle from God.”
A special bank account has been established for donations at Park Avenue Bank under the Shelby Rinkle Benefit Fund. More information on fund-raisers, call Tonda Connell at (229) 560-8308.
