Getting 18-year-old Austin him ready for the day — the primary bedroom with room enough for his special bed and equipment — takes a full hour. A handicapped accessible bathroom would he…
I don’t know how you get up every morning and face it. I don’t know how you continue to smile.
In 2016, Austin’s father Christopher died after a long illness that kept him out of work and needing Leonora’s care. Her father passed away two years earlier, leaving her to also care for her mother struggling with signs of dementia, then a diagnosis of cancer. And Leonora’s older daughter left her two young sons in Leonora’s custody to try to straighten out her life, then died unexpectedly in 2019.“A lot of things have happened to this family, but I feel we’re resilient,” she said.
“To feel water on his skin, to have a submerging bath, to have complete wetness to your body,” Leonora said, “he hasn’t experienced that in years.”Leonora is 49 and limps into the living room of her three-bedroom, one-bath home in East Palo Alto that she and her husband purchased six months before he died. Helping move and adjust Austin, even with an electric lift, has taken its toll on her back and shoulder.
EAST PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA – October 20: Leonora Martinez helps Austin Martinez, 18, put on a hoodie at their East Palo Alto home on Oct. 20, 2021. Austin can barely move and has trouble speaking since a bike accident in 2017. After the accident in October 2017 and surgery two days later, an attempt to insert a PICC line for antibiotics triggered Austin’s heart rate to skyrocket and then his temperature soared to 110, his mother said. Doctors put him in a coma for weeks and he remained in the hospital — from Stanford to Oakland Children’s Hospital — until May 2018.Austin’s wheelchair doesn’t fit through the bathroom door.
In between, she visits her ailing mother and, with her mother’s memory problems, takes care of her bills and medications and shuttles her to doctors’ appointments. She dreams of building a granny unit in her backyard for her mother and Austin to share.EAST PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA – October 20: Leonora Martinez talks during an interview at her East Palo Alto home on Oct. 20, 2021.
EHP’s desire to help the Martinez family build a wheelchair accessible bathroom may not be on their short list of services they provide, but its ultimate mission is to try to help in any way it can.
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