Rothrock's recovery: from patient to director of rehab center

FISHERSVILLE - At 16 years old, Jim Rothrock was having a hard time making sense of it all.

He was lying in a hospital bed at the Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center near Staunton, paralyzed from the chest down following a snow-sledding accident, contemplating a future that couldn't have seemed more hopeless. To say he was feeling sorry for himself would be putting a positive spin on things.

Then, into his room burst a tiny bundle of energy: another patient, a young woman probably not more than 3 feet tall. She had one leg, prosthetics for arms and hooks for hands. She scooted around in a wheeled contraption that resembled something a baby might have used for learning to walk.

"She pushed it around with her leg, and she flew," Rothrock said. "She was really good at it. She came sliding around the corner and started talking to me."

She asked if he would like a cup of coffee. Thunderstruck, Rothrock said sure, and then proceeded to watch in what he recalls as "shock and awe" as she poured coffee, added sugar and milk, stirred it and presented it to him - all accomplished with her hooks manipulated by subtle shoulder movements and all accompanied by her happy banter.

It was, Rothrock says today, "a life-changing event."

"I was like, 'Wow!' " he said. "I'd never seen anything like that. I was just a sheltered boy from Martinsville.

"I thought I had it bad, and she's happy and bopping around. I figured if she can do that and do it with a smile ... maybe I'm going to be able to get through this."

The episode has served Rothrock well in the 46 years since it happened. He told the story recently as he drove from his Henrico office west toward Fishersville for one of his regular visits to the same Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center, something else that has served him well over the years.

Few individuals are connected to an institution the way Rothrock's life and fortunes have been linked with the center. He was, of course, a patient. Then, when he had trouble finding work after college - in the early 1970s he was limited to applying for jobs in buildings his wheelchair could get into - he was hired as a counselor at the center. His work there served as a springboard to his degree in rehabilitation counseling; now, as commissioner of the Virginia Department of Rehabilitative Services, the center falls under his purview.

On top of everything, he met Jane, his wife of almost 33 years, at the center when she was a young rehabilitation counselor and, in 2009, a new medical building on the center's campus was named in his honor. Attending the dedication of James A. Rothrock Hall and hearing all of the nice things people said about him, Rothrock said with a laugh, was a bit like showing up at his own funeral.

When he's on campus, he can't help but smile when a student eyes him curiously and says: "I've seen your picture. I thought you were dead."

Rothrock, 62, is very much alive, serving in his 10^th year as commissioner of DRS, overseeing an agency that provides services to help Virginians with disabilities become more independent and self-sufficient.

In 2010, DRS assisted more than 32,000 people with disabilities. Rothrock has worked for three governors and was reappointed last year by Gov. Bob McDonnell, who also tapped him as interim commissioner of the Virginia Department for the Aging.

Like other agency chiefs in a tough economy, Rothrock has had to make difficult budgetary decisions, said Anne McDonnell, executive director of the Brain Injury Association of Virginia, who is not related to the governor. But it's hard to argue with the decisions he makes, she said, because he's knowledgeable, thoughtful and approaches his job with an ability to cut quickly to the heart of any matter. His experiences allow him to bring unquestioned empathy to his position.

"He's always been very interested in helping people become more empowered," said Anne McDonnell, who knew Rothrock long before he became commissioner.

Although he is not an elected official, Rothrock is a political animal in the sense that he is friendly, gregarious and knows how to work a room. He learned all about being a conspicuous part of the community from his father and mother, who were funeral directors in his hometown of Martinsville.

"Everybody knew us," Rothrock said, "because everybody dies."

In school, Rothrock was a B student, an athlete and a pretty popular kid. In January 1965, he was sledding down an icy hill when he plowed into a car that he had not seen as it backed out of a driveway. His left shoulder hit first, and the impact severed his spinal cord. He was less than two blocks from his home.

He spent 85 days in a hospital, most of them in Roanoke Memorial, before he was loaded into an ambulance and transported to the rehabilitation center, which in those days was a primary destination for anyone with such traumatic, life-altering injuries. The ambulance ride was his first trip outside in months, and he has never forgotten the driver stopping on the way to Fishersville along U.S. 11 and bringing him an ice cream cone. Pistachio.

He also has never forgotten how naïve he had been before he left the hospital.

"I really was not fully aware, not willing to accept the permanence of the disability," he said. "I knew I was in trouble, though, when one of the nurses, right as I was getting ready to go to Fishersville, said, 'I still believe in miracles.' I went, 'Doggone, do I need a miracle?' "

The miracle he got was not the ability to walk again but the capacity to view his situation, to see possibilities, in a less-gloomy light.

The beauty of a place like the center was not only the physical rehabilitation and the training, but the opportunity to spend weeks and months with other people learning to cope with similar circumstances. The camaraderie was thick; the life lessons sometimes subtle, but lasting.

Rothrock spent five months at the center on his first visit, during which he figured out that his focus needed to be not on what he couldn't do but what he could. Friends and family visited from Martinsville, learning how to care for him when he returned home. Beyond the love and support they provided, the biggest thing they did for him, Rothrock said, was "They gave me no quarter."

It started with his mother, a strong woman who had weathered the sudden loss of her husband a few years earlier, had added the role of breadwinner and was now bravely dealing with a devastating turn of events for her eldest son.

As far as his friends: "Anything they were going to do, they fully expected me to do," Rothrock said, "even if that meant throwing the wheelchair in the back of the car and my going off with them."

Classmates carried Rothrock and his wheelchair up and down the stairs to class at Martinsville High. On occasion, they would stretch the rules and carry him to the nearby Esso station - under the ruse of needing to fill the tires on his wheelchair with air - where they would spend a nice afternoon drinking Cokes and eating peanuts. He went to movies, he attended school dances.

For college, he enrolled at St. Andrew's Presbyterian College in North Carolina, a school ahead of its time in terms of accessibility for disabled students, which proved to be an education for Rothrock and those he encountered.

"Rock was always just one of us," said John Kline, one of Rothrock's roommates at St. Andrew's and a longtime friend who now lives in Richmond. "I don't think you get accepted the way Rock did without having the personality he has, and I don't know how you maintain that personality throughout the accident and recovery. It's just who he is."

To this day, Kline said whenever he is faced with a problem he asks himself: "What would Rock do? How would Rock get through this?"

That personality caught the attention of Jane Noonan, a graduate student from Connecticut visiting Fishersville for a six-week training class. However, she acknowledged there was something slightly troubling about Rothrock, a graduate assistant helping with the program: his Southside Virginia accent.

For the first few days, she thought his name was Jeeee-immm. But when she got past the way he talked, they got along just fine. They essentially dated for six weeks, going to dinner and football games, and by the time Noonan headed home to Connecticut she had decided to break up with her boyfriend of five years, though she cried all the way up the East Coast fearing she would never see Rothrock again.

She walked into her house to find her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend waiting for her. Her mother asked for a word in the kitchen, and her first words after not having seen her daughter in six weeks were: "Who is Jim Rothrock and why has he called 10 times?"

Noonan's response: "He remembered me!"

Rothrock and Noonan were married less than a year later, in August 1978. Ask what attracted her to Rothrock in the first place, and she will say it was his eyes, his smile and his humor. They still laugh easily as they talk about those early days.

"I just don't know," said Jane Rothrock, now vice president of Psychological Consultants Inc. "It was just Jim."

What about his wheelchair?

"I didn't even notice it," she said.

Whenever Rothrock wheels around the grounds of the center he is seldom alone, rarely speechless and right at home. He chats up students and staff, asking questions, telling stories, trying to make the place as influential for others as it has been for him.

The center, operated by Rothrock's agency and financed with state and federal funds, still provides medical and vocational rehabilitation services, but the population it serves has changed considerably.

Opened in 1947 in an old military hospital, the center for many years concentrated on serving those with physical disabilities and was best-known for its in-patient rehabilitation. But as health care and insurance payments changed, and more medical centers developed their own physical rehab units, the center has altered its emphasis. A majority of those being trained and treated there have cognitive issues - autism, brain injuries, learning disabilities - or a combination of diagnosed disabilities, said director Rick Sizemore.

There are typically about 300 people involved in the center's programs. Some stay for days, others for months. Depending on the program, they learn everything from how to cook their own meals to how to operate a forklift. The idea is to send the students home equipped with skills for independent living and tools for getting a job. They learn how to get along with co-workers and how to build kitchen cabinets. As in years past, those involved gain intangible benefits from living and working with one another, Rothrock said.

On a recent visit , Rothrock was the keynote speaker at a graduation ceremony for students in the Life Skills Transition Program. The graduates spoke of the confidence they had acquired after nine weeks of living and learning at the center and how they were looking forward to going home, helping others and finding jobs in their chosen fields: nursing, animal care, auto mechanics, food service. Their families stood, some in tears, and said how proud they were.

Rothrock rolled to the podium and told the gathering that he knew what it was like to be viewed differently and, worse, to have others show little faith in his ability. Low expectations, he said, can do as much harm as physical barriers. But persuading others to believe in you begins with yourself.

"The real key to being successful in life is having high expectations for yourself," he said. "Wake up each and every morning with an expectation to succeed."

wlohmann@timesdispatch.com (804) 649-6639 bbrown@timesdispatch.com (804) 649-6382