Winslow Town Councilor Lee Trahan, shown Monday at his new wheelchair-accessible apartment in Winslow, is home following a four-month stint in the hospital. His sister Jean Hood says, “There were probably a dozen times where the doctors said they didn’t expect him to make it.” Rich Abrahamson/Morning Sentinel

WINSLOW — Lee Trahan says he’s learning how to be a quadriplegic again after being released from a Waterville medical facility last week.

Trahan, 53 and a Winslow town councilor since 2018, was already partly paralyzed from the chest down as a result of an auto accident more than a decade ago. Yet things got worse after he fell into a coma in April when a pump supplying medicine to control muscle spasms became contaminated and caused an infection. He began slipping in and out of a coma shortly after.

“I was so close to dying and I didn’t even know it,” Trahan said. “Entering a coma, I just don’t even remember. I know that I was in and out of a coma, that I had fluid on the inside and outside of my lung, and that I was on a ventilator three different times.”

Trahan was taken in and out of emergency rooms, ICUs and rehab facilities over the course of nearly four months as he made several small recoveries and suffered numerous setbacks.

Now, still recovering, he’s back at home, having moved from rehab into a wheelchair-accessible apartment in Winslow, and back attending council meetings.

It was a long road for Trahan and his loved ones.

‘TAG TEAM’

After having the infection diagnosed in Augusta, Trahan was transported to Bangor for an emergency surgery. One of his lungs collapsed shortly after being admitted to the emergency room at Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, prompting another emergency operation and a stint in the hospital’s intensive care unit.

Trahan’s hospital stays and recovery, which he says is still ongoing, were aided immensely with the help of his three sisters: Jean Hood, Rose Trahan and Patricia Marceau. Each of them took different roles as Lee faced repeated recoveries and setbacks, Marceau said.

“We would basically tag team it,” she said. “One would be more medically involved, one would be financially involved, and the other would be supportive, kind of like the mothering person. We would take turns going to Bangor every day, going to Portland.”

With Lee Trahan left incapacitated by falling in and out of a coma, his sisters provided him a steady presence through turbulent times. Marceau made sure bills were paid, Patricia coordinated with doctors and Hood kept a physical log of Lee’s physical and mental wellbeing through it all.

“We tried to keep a journal, just to keep track of what was going on,” said Hood. “Because I had a sick husband for many years, I just knew how important it was to know what was going on.”

Several times, Lee was released from the ICU only to face a life-threatening complication within hours.

In Bangor in May, Trahan again began slipping in and out of a coma. A breathing tube was inserted into his lung to provide air and he was eventually placed on a ventilator, he said, while being sent back and forth from the emergency room to the ICU each time he recovered and fell ill again.

“There were probably a dozen times where the doctors said they didn’t expect him to make it,” Hood said. “It’s nothing short of a miracle from God that our brother is still here.”

He was eventually transported to Portland after making a steady enough recovery, but the doctors had removed the contaminated pump that prompted Trahan’s first surgery. Without the spinal medicine it provided, Trahan began suffering withdrawal symptoms as he lay recovering in a Portland hospital bed.

“It was almost like a perfect storm. Almost everything that could have gone wrong went wrong,” Trahan said.

COMMUNITY SERVICE

For over a month as a result of his illness, Trahan was sidelined from his duties as a town councilor.

He says little else is as gratifying to him as civic service. It was a value he was taught as a child by his father, Leo Trahan, who was a two-term Winslow councilor in the 1970s and commander of the Maine Veterans of Foreign Wars.

The desire to represent his community through municipal government didn’t just inspire Lee to run for office; he says it also helped empower his recovery from a near-death experience.

“I lost my dad when I was 14, but I kept that in the back of my head: You belong to your community, you do service for your community,” Trahan said. “It drove me harder, just gave me more motivation to get up, get back in there and make my vote count.”

While Trahan recovered, other Winslow councilors sought his medical information and raised doubts about his place on the council due to the number of meetings he had missed.

Councilor Fran Hudson questioned whether Trahan could “vote legally possibly due to medication” while Mike Joseph requested a list of medications he was taking in private emails to Town Attorney William A. Lee, Town Manager Ella Bowman and all councilors except Trahan.

For months, Trahan’s sisters kept him up to date on Winslow town politics, drama and all, while maintaining his physical and financial wellbeing.

Hudson and Joseph maintain that they were not looking to remove Trahan from his seat. Trahan publicly forgave the duo at a June 10 Town Council meeting, the first he was able to attend since being hospitalized.

While the Trahan sisters’ opinions occasionally differed on political matters and Trahan’s treatment plan, Marceau said they always worked together to take care of their brother while he worked to recover.

“There were very few days when one of us wasn’t there, for four months,” Marceau said. “It’s been a long process. You do what you need to do for family. Always.”

‘FRIENDS AND STRANGERS’

Trahan was eventually cleared last week from Waterville’s Oak Grove Center, where he had been in rehab for about a month, ending his four month spell in medical facilities across Maine.

The same day he was released from rehab, Trahan moved into a wheelchair-accessible apartment in Winslow for which he had been on a waitlist for nearly three years, he said.

While Trahan’s recovery and discharge from rehab gave him freedom for the first time in months, his new apartment has given him stability for the first time in years.

“There are only three accessible apartment buildings in all of Winslow, and I wasn’t moving because I want to be on the council,” he said. “It’s my space. Now that I’m home, I should be able to make strides a lot faster and make larger gains all at once.”

Trahan faces a long road to recovery even though he has been released from rehab. He estimates that he’s “80% of the way there,” but still has lots of progress to make.

He can still only sit in his wheelchair for a few hours at a time, as his muscles deteriorated extensively during his months in hospital beds. He is working through physical therapy, doing exercises and stretches to strengthen those muscles and incrementally lengthening his time out and about in his wheelchair each day.

“Long story short, I had to learn how to be a quadriplegic again, but the progression is a lot more accelerated this time around,” he said.

Trahan said his recovery this time around was easier because, after living more than a decade with the results of his car accident, he better understands his physical limitations and the process of recovery — though it is still not an easy process.

“If you had told me five months ago that I was going to have to learn this all again, to go through all this, there’s a good chance I would’ve told you ‘It’s not worth the trouble,'” he said. “I want to give all the credit to God. We had prayers from friends and strangers in the community and around the country, and I don’t know if I would have made it without them.”