A day with meaning for pair of moms
After tragedy struck, Pasadena woman leans on family to get by
Decades after watching her only child take her first steps as a toddler, Theresa Rohrs spent the past year helping her adult daughter relearn how to walk.
Christy Borck, 34, was critically injured in August when she was shot in the head in her Pasadena home by her ex-husband, who then turned the gun on himself. Rohrs quit her Delaware job, started a new physician assistant job in Maryland and moved in with her daughter and three young grandchildren to support Borck through her eight-month recovery and the five life-saving brain surgeries in between.
Rohrs, a caretaker by trade, completely changed her life around to care for Borck. Nearly a year later, they’re learning how to cope and heal, together.
The mother-daughter pair are celebrating Mother’s Day by the beach a week before Borck’s sixth cranioplasty surgery to replace a piece of her skull. Borck’s recovery has been remarkably fast, she said, in part because of her need to be strong for her children in the wake of the family tragedy. She’s out of a wheelchair, back to work part-time and relearning how to tie her shoes and brush her teeth while teaching her 3-year and 5-year-old children to do the same.
Borck was thriving, healthy and weeks away from completing her master’s in hospital administration when she was hurt.
She hasn’t regained mobility in her left arm but believes with conviction and practice she will one day. Recovery time can be painfully slow and for a previously active 34-yearold. On frustrating days of folding laundry and cooking dinner with one hand, Borck reminds herself to be proud of how far she’s come from almost dying.
“There’s no Hallmark card that fits this situation,” Borck said. “There’s no book on how you’re supposed to handle this, how you’re supposed to talk to your kids about this. But I think we’re doing a pretty good job.”
Borck was able to return to her Pasadena home in December for her son’s birthday and for Christmas. In a year of nerve-wracking surgeries and grief-filled days, the love and support Borck receives from her family motivates her to get stronger every day. Rohrs, 55, advocates for her daughter’s medical needs and takes care of her grandkids and her kids while her husband makes dinner and cleans bottles.
Borck’s father drives her to doctor’s appointments. Borck’s 14-year-old daughter helps her with therapy exercises and changing medical devices.
“It’s definitely a team effort” Borck said. “My kids see how much our family has come together in light of this terrible tragedy ... and that they know they have a family that will without a doubt drop everything and be there for whatever they need.”
For Mother’s Day, Borck said she wishes she could give Rohrs a day off.
Rohrs describes days, even the most challenging, as a gift to be so closely involved in her daughter’s life. Rohrs works full time neurocritical care, using her expertise to come home and assist Borck’s physical therapy.
“It’s a calling. Maybe it’s an expectation. But there was never a doubt in my mind the right thing to do was just to pick up and come do what we had to,” Rohrs said.
Borck’s intensive medical needs has created a silver lining.
As the director of patient experience at Medstar Harbor Hospital, Borck intimately understands and anticipates the needs of patients after herself requiring hospital care for weeks at a time. Since returning to work she emphasizes treating patients with empathy and to see them as individuals, instead of seeing them by their injury.
“No one takes care of me like my mom and my dad do ... so it’s ‘How do we make sure that providers see patients as people?” Borck said.
As a mother of perceptive children, Borck keeps a positive attitude so they learn by example. Some days she doesn’t know how to answer her children’s questions about the tragic event. Other days she can’t stop crying. But Borck has worked hard to get to a place where she can feel OK, so that her children can too.
“I don’t have another option but to be strong,” she said. “Everything I do is for my kids ... I will walk through hell forwards and backwards so they don’t have to have day of sorrow.”
Rohrs feels the same way.