THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, July 12, 1994 TAG: 9407120315
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By DEBRA GORDON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 92 lines
Martha Davis pulls the fingers of her lifeless left hand and holds them out, as if admiring the neatly filed nails.
This is the only way she can straighten her hand, a reminder of a mugging, robbery and the resulting stroke that crippled her six months ago.
But Davis, 72, doesn't sit in her wheelchair at Sentara Nursing Home in Portsmouth angry at the attacker who stole $10 and left her homeless and without the upholstery business she'd owned for 10 years. To be angry would waste too much energy she could put into therapy and exercises.
Instead she is getting ready to leave the nursing home, rent herself a ground-floor apartment somewhere and start her business all over again - even with that crippled left hand.
On Monday, the nursing-home staff rewarded that positive outlook, presenting Davis with a dozen red roses and a 2-foot-high trophy during its fourth annual ``Handicapable Awareness Day.'' The award is designed to honor a physically challenged person who has exceeded limitations and handicaps.
The award took Davis completely by surprise. ``I'm used to being on the giving end, never the receiving end,'' she sobbed, as senior activity director Deborah Freeman wheeled her to the center of the dining room to give a speech.
In November 1993, Davis hired a strong young man to help her move furniture in and out of her High Street shop in Portsmouth. Even when he reached up and put his arm around her neck on that mid
January afternoon, she didn't think anything of it.
Then his grip tightened.
``Where is the money?'' he asked.
She'd just deposited $200 that afternoon. All that was left was the $14 in her purse.
``It's in my wallet,'' she said coldly. ``You'll get it when you get paid.''
``I mean all the money,'' he said, his grip tightening. Then he twisted her right arm behind her back, the same arm she'd injured in a car accident 10 years earlier, and the pain hit. It was so excruciating that her blood pressure peaked, sending a blood clot to her brain and causing a stroke.
She knew what it was when it happened, yet she remained calm, telling him to take the wallet and go.
He took $10 - the same amount she would have paid him - ripped the phone out of the wall and left her lying on the ground. Police never found him.
Davis lay there all night, taking strength from the spiritual posters she had tacked to the walls, alternately reading them and praying.
The next morning, a passing ambulance attendant noticed the open door and the lights on and called 911. The police arrived and knocked on the door.
``Who is it?'' she called from the floor. When she heard it was rescue, she said, ``Good. Come on back here. I can't get up.''
She knew it was bad when the police officer asked her to squeeze his hand and she couldn't. Her hands were her livelihood. She could cut, sew and design any slipcover, upholstery, drapery - you name it, she could do it.
``I had earned $100 with these hands the day this happened; and if you don't believe that's a slap to you and your self-respect, to earn $100 one day and then have everything snatched away at the end of the day. It takes it out of you; it's not easy to stand up and fight.''
But fight she did.
She spent three weeks in a hospital, then another two months in a rehabilitation center, coming to Sentara in March.
When she arrived at the nursing home, she couldn't walk, bathe herself or go to the bathroom alone.
She was depressed, although she didn't realize it at the time. ``To be so capable one day, and then to have someone clean my behind the next; that is so demeaning,'' she said.
Her daughter came up from North Carolina and closed the shop. Her doctor told her not to worry about it, to focus on her therapy and getting well.
And so she did, with two goals in mind - to live independently and to own her own business.
That day is coming. She's ready to leave the nursing home as soon as she finds a place to live. She can dress herself, bathe herself, and she has even learned to tie her shoelaces with one hand.
Her daughter and son want her to live with either of them, she said. But she won't.
``I'm going back in business,'' she says in her booming voice. ``No matter what. I'm going to do more than move from home to home. The mind has a way of healing the body through vision.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
MOTOYA NAKAMURA/Staff
Martha Davis is recovering at Sentara Nursing Home after a man she
hired to help move furniture in her upholstery shop caused her to
have a stroke while he robbed her in January.
by CNB