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Pat Oates

“I never dreamed I was going to have to depend on anyone else.”

                        --Pat Oates
 
Pat Oates always saw herself as a successful, independent person. She raised two children as a single mother, graduated from college, and had a good job with a major retailer.
 
Along the way, she got some help: A United Way-supported service helped her with child care when the children were younger. She also gave back: She helped run United Way of Allen County campaigns at two workplaces and she served on the organization’s allocations panel.
 
Then, beginning in 1998, the unthinkable happened. While representing her employer at a funeral, a shooting occurred and she suffered muscle and spinal injuries when frightened funeral-goers stampeded, trampling her. Three weeks later, those injuries were exacerbated when she was in a car accident. After enduring pain for four years, a morphine pump was inserted near her spine, and she says the pump created a tumor that significantly damaged the spine and left her in a wheelchair. Doctors said she might never walk again.
 
“People don’t understand that life can change in a moment,” she says. “I never dreamed I was going to have to depend on anyone else.”
 
She didn’t want to interfere with her grown children’s lives and careers, so she struggled on her own to seek the therapy and medical help that got rid of the wheelchair and may one day allow her to throw away her cane. United Way-supported Community Transportation Network (CTN) provides the vital service that gets her to her appointments.
 
“I don’t know that I would have come this far without CTN,” she says. “They’re just like family. United Way is people’s best investment. Helping someone else help themselves.”
 

Not surprisingly, she still supports United Way and serves on the CTN board: “Somebody had to give for me to be able to receive. You have to pass it on.”

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