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Her Courageous Life Was On The Money

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By HELEN O'NEILL

The Associated Press

Published: June 27, 2008

WASHINGTON - He thinks of her every time he gazes at the painting - a blazing orange sun she drew a few years after the tragedy. It is the only splash of color in his tiny K Street office and it gives him great joy, and a stab of sorrow.

He thinks of her every time he plucks a new $5 bill from his wallet and sees the large purple numeral emblazoned in the corner. It reminds him of how he used to sort her money: $1 bills in one envelope, fives and tens in others.

He thought of her last month when a federal appeals court ruled on a case that could result in the redesign of U.S. currency. It was one of the great victories of 53-year-old lawyer Jeffrey Lovitky's career, and he wishes she could have been there to share it.

But had she been there, it might never have happened.

For the lawsuit filed on behalf of the American Council of the Blind was never just about discrimination or changing the currency so the blind can distinguish a $1 bill from a $20.

It was about a brilliant, gifted woman who changed so many perceptions and overcame so many obstacles that those who knew her never doubted her ability to continue inspiring enormous change, even from the grave.

It was about the memory of a smile.

A Vague Outline Of Disability

In his second-floor office, Lovitky sifts through a well-thumbed photo album. "Here's a Sandy smile," he said, plucking a picture from the page.

The pictures show a petite brunette.

His eyes mist at the memory - Sandra Welner, the brilliant physician whose dazzling smile and tenacious spirit stole Lovitky's heart.

He found her after placing a personal ad in a Jewish newspaper - or really, she found him. He remembers the letter she wrote - not the words, but the tone. She sounded so intelligent, so lively, so interesting, and yet there was some obscure reference to a disability.

"I really must meet this person," he thought.

Their first date was in an Irish pub in April 1994. She was seated when he arrived, and he felt an instant attraction to the woman with the gentle brown eyes and tumble of dark curls.

They talked for hours. She told him about her practice as a gynecologist, running a clinic for women with disabilities; about her parents - Holocaust survivors who had created a life and family in Pittsburgh; about her travels in Europe, Australia and Israel.

But there were things she never mentioned in those first few hours. He had no idea that she couldn't see his thinning hair and clear blue eyes, that she could only barely make out the shape of his face.

It was only when they were preparing to leave, when she stood unsteadily and asked for help getting a taxi, that he realized that she had difficulty walking. She held out her arm. Grasping it, he sensed they would be together for a long time.

Their dates were simple: walks in the park, petting horses at a stables near her Silver Spring apartment, takeout Thai dinners and occasional splurges on extravagant chocolate desserts at the Willard Hotel.

Gradually, he learned what had happened in those terrible days back in 1987.

She was 30, already a leading expert on fertility and women's reproductive health. She had a large circle of friends and colleagues, a thriving career as a micro-surgeon and no shortage of suitors.

Traveling alone on vacation in Europe, Welner fell ill - so ill that she checked herself into a hospital in Amsterdam. Her family is not certain what happened next except that she went into cardiac arrest and suffered a serious brain injury.

Welner's mother, Barbara, 81, still sobs at the shock of seeing her comatose daughter in a foreign hospital. Even if she survived, doctors said, she would be lucky to regain the ability of a 2-year-old.

"No!" the mother cried. Not my brilliant, beautiful daughter, who could paint portraits that belonged in galleries, who played the violin so exquisitely that she was offered music scholarships in high school, who graduated from medical school at the age of 22.

Now doctors were saying she should lock her away.

So, for 16 days in Amsterdam, she read medical journals and newspapers and played classical music for her lifeless daughter. She talked to her and caressed her - anything to trigger a response. She got none. "The doctors thought I was delusional," she said.

Back in the United States, doctors offered the same grim prognosis.

So Barbara and Nick Welner took their child home to New Haven, Conn. They read to her. They fed her. They taught her to count, to swallow, to sit up. They cried with her. Hour after hour, for years.

It wasn't a miracle, her mother said of her daughter's steady, excruciating recovery. It came of a determination so powerful that it burst from her broken body with a force that nothing could hold back.

But there were moments that felt like miracles. The day Sandy took her first tentative steps. The day a friend phoned from Israel, where Sandy had worked, and she began speaking in fluent Hebrew.

"I was in awe," her mother said.

Discovering New Perspectives

Years later, as Lovitky heard those stories, he too was in awe. But not just of the woman he had grown to love. He was also awed by the older woman.

"Sandy had such spirit and such courage," Lovitky said, "but her mother did, too."

This was a woman who had fled the Warsaw ghetto with false papers as a girl, who with the help of the Red Cross found her way to nursing school in England and married a fellow Polish refugee in the United States. Both had families who perished in concentration camps.

The Welners raised four children, two boys and two girls.

But Sandy was always the star. By the time Lovitky met her, Welner's vision was severely damaged, her hands shook, and she walked with an unsteady gait. But her speech and mind were clear.

Lovitky marveled at her defiance. She refused to use a wheelchair. Instead she would push it. Or she would use a cane.

She was dependent on others - students she paid to help her read, and write and file, on strangers to help her catch a cab, or spend money. Yet, Lovitky said, "she was more independent than anyone I knew.

"If Sandy wanted to do something, nothing was going to stop her," Lovitky said.

But the hardest challenge she faced was professional - being accepted back into the medical world.

Alan Decherney, a leading gynecologist and obstetrician, remembers the young woman with the cane shuffling into his office at Yale University to ask for his help.

In a residency, years earlier, he had considered her smart and promising. Now she just looked pitiful.

You can't go into practice, he told her, knowing how harsh he sounded but trying to be honest. You are legally blind and you are spastic.

But Welner pressed on. Something about her courage moved Decherney to let her join him on patient rounds.

She astounded him. This woman isn't just smart, Decherney thought. She's brilliant.

Dreams Understood

For the rest of her life Welner called Decherney her hero. With Decherney's help she landed a job overseeing a clinic for women with disabilities at Washington Hospital Center. At the time, there were few resources for disabled women who wanted to get pregnant.

"Doctors simply didn't want to deal with a woman in a wheelchair who wanted to have a baby," said Trish Day, one of Welner's first patients who became a close friend. "Sandy didn't just understand the complications of a disabled body," Day said. "She understood my dream."

A year and half later, after watching another surgeon perform an emergency Caesarean section, Welner was the first person to hold Day's newborn daughter, Diana.

Then, in 1997, Welner's clinic was closed because of cutbacks. She was devastated but accepted reality and moved on.

She hurled herself into her work - applying for research grants, writing a book on medical care for women with disabilities, becoming a faculty member of Georgetown and Maryland University medical centers, speaking at the United Nations, lecturing around the country and the world.

"She just never stopped," says Lovitky. He worried sometimes about how hard Welner pushed herself, rarely getting more than a few hours sleep a night.

And then, in an instant, everything stopped. It was Oct. 8, 2001. The call jolted him awake a few hours later. "There's been an accident," said Welner's neighbor. "It's serious."

Sandy was barely recognizable. She had third-degree burns over 70 percent of her body.

She had been lighting a memorial candle for her late father when the flame caught her nightgown. The neighbor had broken down her door and pulled her from the fire.

The next 13 days were a blur of suffering and sadness as Lovitky and Welner's mother and brother waited, willing Sandy to survive.

She died Oct. 21. She was 42.

Honoring Her Memory

In the months after Welner's death, Lovitky felt bewildered by grief and regret. He couldn't work, couldn't eat, couldn't sleep.

And then Lovitky remembered the envelopes, how he would sort Sandy's money before she went on trips - putting the $1 bills in one envelope, the tens and twenties in others. He remembered her frustration at having to trust strangers for the right change.

And he realized that there was something he could do - something that could both celebrate Welner's legacy and affect the lives of millions. Elsewhere around the world, accommodations are made for the blind - different sized notes or tactile features such as raised markings.

Why not the United States?

In May 2002, Lovitky sued the Treasury Department on behalf of the American Council of the Blind, arguing that its failure to design a currency that is accessible to blind people is a form of discrimination.

In November 2006, the court ruled in favor of the council.

"Plaintiffs have demonstrated that they lack meaningful access to U.S. currency," Judge Judith W. Rogers wrote in the ruling, which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld in May. "Even the most searching tactile examination will reveal no difference between a $100 bill and a $1 bill."

The Treasury Department, which argues that a redesign of the currency would be too costly, has not said whether it will fight the latest ruling.

For his part, Lovitky says he feels a strange detachment about the outcome. He understands it was never about winning. Or about money.

It was about commemorating the spirit of the rare and beautiful woman.

It was about love.

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