When a car accident threw a young Jefferson couple’s life into chaos, it was the support of friends and neighbors, and the pair’s resilient sense of humor, that helped them pull through.
Chandra Hall, 34, her fiancé, Dylan Tavares, 32, and their seven-month-old daughter, Madison, were hit head-on by a driver blinded by the sun and driving in the oncoming lane while he attempted to pass a line of cars on Rt. 17 in Chelsea last November.
Hall was in the passenger seat and took the brunt of the damage from the crash. She suffered a serious head injury, two broken feet, a broken left thumb and her left wrist “wasn’t stable – the hand kept flopping off,” she said.
She was complete immobilized for weeks following the crash.
“In the beginning, things were so dire,” Hall said.
In the time since the accident, Hall has made a significant recovery; she’s down to only a support boot on her left foot and the pins will be taken out of her feet and hand soon. She still has occasional memory lapses and is being treated for nerve damage in her hand and foot: “We’re trying to avoid spinal injection therapy,” Hall said.
Despite the trauma of the previous two and a half months, an interview at the Jefferson home they rent on Feb. 3 was punctuated with frequent laughter and cheerful play with Madison.
“You either have to find a way to make fun of yourself and laugh about it, or it’s going to drag you down,” Hall said.
Some of their joy on Feb. 3 seemed to be a release of financial tensions; Hall had just heard that she was cleared to return to work at Renys part time, and Tavares had just been hired at a restaurant in Augusta.
For weeks prior to that, neither had been able to work. Hall was on maternity leave at the time of the accident and unable to walk after it; Tavares was working part time at Hannaford’s in Damariscotta at the time of the accident, but lost his job shortly thereafter.
After the accident, caring for Hall and their three children – Madison and Hall’s children Jordan Murphy, 9, and Aaron Hall, 17 – became a full-time job for Tavares, and it became impossible for him to make his shifts at the supermarket.
Just before he was let go, he applied for family medical leave but was denied because he wasn’t working enough hours to qualify.
With all of their income stripped away, they turned – albeit reluctantly, the couple and several people who know them said – to support from friends and neighbors to stay afloat.
“We’re very lucky to live in the area we live in,” Hall said. She has no living relatives, but her Renys co-workers have been a major source of support.
Before the accident, Renys hired Hall when she was seven-months pregnant. “They knew I had a shelf life,” Hall said. “Renys is just fantastic.”
Though she had only been working there for a few weeks, her co-workers surprised her with a baby shower. After the crash, they brought her meals at home and collected donations, which Hall and Tavares used to pay for snow tires for the used car they bought with the $2300 they received from insurance.
Jefferson resident Trudi Hodgkins heard about the couple and took it upon herself to do what she could to help.
“We had never met Trudi,” Hall said, “but she got in front of her church – I think it’s only about 23 people – and encouraged them to give; and now we have heating oil.”
They received a check from a couple that Hall helped once sometime ago. She stopped to jump their car in the rain one night. The couple heard about Hall’s accident through a prayer group, and sent what they could.
“Chandra is extremely generous, and I think that’s why people have been stepping up to help,” Tavares said.
Hall recovered from the crash at a nursing home/rehabilitation facility in Whitefield. “I was discharged from the hospital four days after the crash, and sent home,” Hall said. “It was horrible.”
Unable to care for herself and with Tavares struggling to keep everything together, she moved to Country Manor and stayed there for a month.
At the nursing home, she was comfortable and had a private room, but “I had an 80-something-year-old man standing outside my room, scratching on the door with one finger and whispering, ‘Jelly bean,'” Hall said. “The people working there live there all the time; they’re wonderful. I don’t know how they do it.”
When Tavares’ mother gave Hall $50 for her birthday, she bought the employees at Country Manor a DVD player because she knew they would use it.
“When you have an opportunity to do a good deed, you do a good deed,” Hall said.
Hall receives MaineCare, but with a $30,000 hospital bill, a more than $7000 bill for the nursing home, ongoing costs for her rehabilitation and treatment for a hand condition that Madison developed after the crash, she quickly exceeded their limit.
“That’s what you get a lawyer for,” Hall said. The other driver’s insurance will pay a certain amount, but Hall and Tavares could be responsible for the rest of the bill if MaineCare doesn’t accept a settlement for the amount the insurance company will pay, Hall said.
“They can’t take what we don’t have,” Hall said, “Plus, the more they take, the more we qualify for MaineCare.”
For now, they’re thinking one day at a time and hoping that with both of them working they’ll be able to get back on their feet.
Ignoring the possible hospital bills, “we have bills, but we don’t have bills,” Hall said. “We do our best to stay with what we have.”
They’re still well behind on their rent, but they don’t have cable or car payments, and they don’t have credit cards. “We don’t spend $2 a roll on toilet paper, we spend 79 cents,” Hall said. “We were poor to begin with, and we’re poor now.”
The help they’ve received to this point has kept them going, and they are thankful for what they’ve received. They were very concerned that people know that everything they’ve received has been put to good use.
“We’re still pretty uncomfortable with asking people for help,” Hall said. “People like [Hall’s Renys co-worker, Joanie Rhoda] and Trudi have stood up in front of their churches and people they know – they’ve done so much to be our voice, it’s our responsibility to be our voice too. If people like Joanie and Trudi are willing to help us, we need to be willing to help ourselves.”
According to Trudi Hodgkins, “any group or individual interested in donating can do so by making a check out to the Chandra Hall Fund, made payable to St. Giles Episcopal Church. Please put on the note line: Community Relief Fund/CH. St. Giles is at PO Box 34, Jefferson, 04348.
Anyone interested in more information or contributing can also call Joanie Rhoda at 691-4765.
