A car crash devastated a Colorado farming family. Amputation turned it around.

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Words by Sue McMillin, Special to The Colorado Sun. Photos by Hugh Carey, The Colorado Sun.

PLEASANT VIEW — At the dinner table the night before she died, Judy Rohwer told her daughters and grandson that they were all working too hard on the family farm. They must stop working seven days a week, take breaks and do fun things.

“She wanted us each to come up with two things we wanted to do away from the farm,” Angela Rohwer said.

About 12 hours later, they were forcibly torn from their work when their pickup was struck head-on as they traveled May 21, 2022, to the Durango Farmers Market from their southwestern Colorado farm hauling a trailer full of seedlings and produce. 

Judy Rohwer, 73, died at the scene. Her daughters, Angela and Heidi Rohwer, and grandson Zackery Berg were loaded into ambulances and taken to Mercy Hospital in Durango. Angela was released from the hospital that evening, but she’d be back for shoulder surgery within weeks. Zack had four spinal fractures but was soon released in a full torso brace that restricted his movement for three months while he healed.

Heidi had the most severe injuries and was flown to Swedish Hospital in Denver with a broken pelvis and her right hip and ankle shattered.

Heidi joked wryly that the idea of “getting away from the farm” did not include time in hospitals or at doctors’ appointments.

“I was running him (Zack) to appointments, Heidi to appointments, myself to appointments and every time I had to drive past the spot where we crashed,” Angela said. “The stains from oil and automotive fluids were there for a long time. It was all I could smell for weeks.”

Dozens of volunteers — friends and strangers — stepped in to help keep the farm afloat.

Angela, Zack and Heidi longed to get back in the fields and pasture — to dig in the soil, pull weeds, open and close greenhouses, harvest crops, shear the sheep, pack produce for the market. And, for Angela and Heidi, to return to their jobs with the all-volunteer Pleasant View Fire Protection District, where Angela is the chief and Heidi is the EMT captain.

In recent weeks, the setbacks, pain and uncertainty that has plagued Heidi’s recovery has been replaced by the sense that things have finally turned around and the future is bright.

That turning point came in late January, when Heidi’s right leg was amputated below the knee.

The first market of the season in Durango is a bit like a family reunion and a bit like a grange hall meeting — lots of hugs and warm greetings and sharing how things are on the farms. 

At the Rohwer’s Farm stand, people also wanted to know how Heidi was doing since the amputation, which had been shared in the family’s monthly newsletter.

“How’s our girl?” one customer asked Angela.

“She’s here — over there,” Angela replied, pointing across the rows of produce and seedlings. “She’s a foot shorter.”

The customer chuckled. “I was going to make a joke but thought maybe it was too soon.”

“Nah,” Angela said, laughing. “It’s not too soon.”

The line was Heidi’s response to her sister as she was wheeled into surgery for the amputation after Angela said, “see you on the other side.”

“I’ll be a foot shorter,” Heidi said she told her sister, noting that she’d been waiting for that moment to say it. And now the line — in past tense — was putting customers at ease as they inquired about her leg.

Talk of her prosthesis — “I’ll be getting my leg in a couple weeks” — was interspersed with talk of seedlings — what they had this week, what was coming, what they lost when a greenhouse roof blew off.

Zack, who joined the farm team in 2020, roamed quietly, ensuring everything was in its place and assisting customers with seedlings.  

Volunteers staffed the produce table and Angela bounced between chatting with customers and offering people samples of their smoked onion flakes. 

“They’re amazing women,” said Carol Bartolino, who helped the Rohwers with packing for the market on Thursdays and at the market for many years before the crash. “It was rough for a little while because they couldn’t do anything. But we only missed one market and that was for technical difficulties.

“They’re so resilient.”

Sisters Emily Hageman and Sara South, who grew up about 2 miles from the Rohwer farm and still live nearby, are also regular volunteers — Emily at the farm and the market and Sara mostly at the market.

“It’s amazing how well the community came together to help them,” Sara said. “I am thankful to live where I live.”

Although chilly, the sun poked through at the first market May 11, bringing out customers hungry for farm-fresh greens and asparagus, which were snapped up quickly. 

Bin after bin of bagged greens were emptied and when they began packing up at noon, only four bags of mixed greens remained.

“We need one bag for dinner,” Heidi called out as Angela negotiated a bargain for the remainder as the May 11 market wrapped up.

She balanced on one leg against the seedling table and consolidated the trays. “We didn’t sell a lot, but it’s a little early. People aren’t planting yet.”

The wind picked up and the clouds threatened as Angela pulled the farm trailer up to load the seedlings on shelves. The canopies came down and the tables were folded and loaded. 

It had been a good first market and about seven hours after they arrived for setup at 6 a.m. they headed out for the 70-mile drive to their Montezuma County farm, about 15 miles from the Utah state line in the rolling hills near the Dolores River and McPhee Reservoir. And past the crash site.

When Heidi was released from the hospital on June 4, 2022, she was ecstatic to be home on the farm, and hopeful that her shattered ankle would mend.

There were referrals to other doctors and differing opinions in the first months, and she was frustrated with the communication. What she did know was almost constant pain and that her ankle was crooked.

In September, she had a teleconference with the surgeon. He told her he couldn’t line up the bones properly because the cartilage was smashed, and he said she would need another surgery, something that was supposed to have been relayed again by the local doctor but wasn’t.

The surgery happened in December, about seven months after the crash.  

Heidi tells a story of doctor visits, physical therapy, pain that wouldn’t let her put weight on her leg, anger and frustration, sometimes backtracking to add a salient detail. 

A fellow firefighter’s wife who is a physical therapist was at the farm two days after the crash to assist Angela and Zack, and she stepped in to help Heidi, too. 

She rearranged things in the house so Heidi could get around on her own and had volunteers put Heidi’s bed on the floor so she could get in and out of it from her wheelchair herself.

And she helped Heidi with something else: her anger.

“I have a lot of anger,” Heidi said, tears welling in her eyes. 

The therapist edited Heidi’s questions to the doctor, homing in on medical issues, softening the anger and frustration.

She was not regaining range of motion in her ankle and was still in pain when she returned to the surgeon in June 2023. He said it’s not coming back and the cartilage is continuing to deteriorate. He suggested fusing her ankle. 

“I didn’t want to do that because I wouldn’t be able to be a firefighter or a farmer,” she said.

A month later, she was feeling a little better and hope returned. But by September she could not work for more than three hours at a stretch.

On Sept. 11, 2023, she talked with her doctor about fusion or an ankle replacement, neither of them good options in her mind. She learned that the cartilage was nearly gone, the bone was collapsing and one of the screws had slipped into a joint space.

“He answered all my questions — again I had two pages,” she said. “And I said ‘How is any of this better than a prosthesis?’”

And they talked about amputation.

First, they would remove the hardware from her ankle to reduce the pain. That happened on Sept. 19, her 41^st birthday.

“I have all my hardware,” she said, laughing. “There were 18 screws and two plates in my ankle. I’m going to do something with them sometime.”

The idea of amputation was jarring.

“I knew then I needed to talk to someone, and I prayed for God to send someone,” she said. 

She had a feeling that someone would show up at the market.

A couple of weeks later, she was chatting with a customer who asked her “what’s next” for her recovery and she began relaying the story. Another woman lingered nearby, then, after apologizing for eavesdropping, said her daughter had just gone through a similar process after a rock-climbing accident and suggested they talk.

They did. And the woman, a 20-year-old from Albuquerque, gave her a lot of information, including about organizations that assist amputees.

“I hung up the phone and I lost it,” Heidi said. “What am I thinking, I thought. That’s when my emotions kicked in.”

Since then, the tears come often. Leaking, she calls it. 

At an October appointment, her doctor told her to take her time in making a decision on amputation. Three months maybe, he suggested when, ever impatient, she asked, “How long?”

She got connected to more amputees and Angela was doing research on what insurance would cover, state laws and firefighters who had returned to work after an amputation. 

“I was firm in my mind that this was what I needed to do,” she said. “I just couldn’t accept it.”

The holidays were approaching and because Christmas is a big deal in their family, she tried not to let her decision interfere. “But it did.”

Instead of going to the Christmas farmers market, she went to a class for firefighter instructors, determined to stay as current with her certification as she could.

But Angela worked the market and learned about another amputee — a Denver woman who had lost her husband in a crash in which she also was injured. She went to Swedish Hospital. She had the same surgeon as Heidi, and she’d had an above the knee amputation.

“We had the same anger issues, too,” Heidi said.

“I asked God for people to talk to and he sent nothing but amputees,” she said. “No people with (ankle) replacements that came skipping into our booth. Nobody with fusion. Just amputees.”

She was back in her surgeon’s office on Jan. 8. He answered all her questions, affirming that he used the Ertl procedure to bridge the leg bones for a more secure platform, that he reconnected nerves to other muscles to lessen the impact of phantom leg syndrome. 

And then he waited silently.

“It was the hardest sentence I’ve ever said in my life,” Heidi said, her eyes again leaking tears. “’I guess I’m ready to proceed with amputation.’”

“It’s tormenting,” Angela said of the decision process.

It was tough walking into the hospital on Jan. 29, where the surgeon again asked if she was ready.

Heidi responded: “I guess so.”

“And he said, ‘There’s no guessing. You have to be sure.’”

She said she was.

Heidi said she knew immediately after the surgery that she’d made the right decision, and although emotions and impatience with healing crop up, she’s fiercely determined to be out farming and firefighting. And kayaking and hiking.

“We were going backward with her ankle for so long that it’s good to be going forward,” Angela said. 

They’ve both done research and learned much from the amputees they’ve met as well as from the Amputee Coalition and the Limb Preservation Foundation. They know that a new state law requires insurance to pay for a second prosthesis for employment, so Heidi will eventually get a proper leg and foot combination for firefighting — one that she’ll leave in her turnout gear because it’s much quicker to strap on a leg that’s already in the boot than get a prosthesis into a boot and pants, she learned from other firefighters.

But first she’ll have to learn to walk with a prosthesis, figure out what works and what doesn’t for farm work and other things she wants to do. Those lessons began in late May when she received her trial leg.

Angela returned to her role as chief of the Pleasant View Fire Protection District about four months after the crash — after she had surgery to repair multiple tears in her shoulder. Her surgery came just as Zack was released without restrictions from his back brace.

Heidi too has done work for the fire department, keeping EMT training going for other firefighters and ordering and maintaining EMT supplies. She has gone on some calls, helping where she can. 

Ironically, the first calls that each of the women went on after their crash were head-on collisions.

“I was pleased with how well I handled it mentally,” Angela said. “I realized I could still do this.”

Their new skills include understanding what crash victims are going through, especially if they’re trapped in a vehicle as Heidi was. At one scene, Angela crawled into a car to comfort victims while the extraction equipment ripped the vehicle apart.

“Extraction training is the most fun because you get to rip things apart,” Heidi said. “But it’s the worst call you can go on.

“When I was in the truck and heard the noise, I was OK with it because I knew I was going to get out of that truck.”

Farms don’t wait for people to heal from injuries and the Rohwers know that without community support and volunteers they might not have much left to bring back. 

The CSU Extension Offices for La Plata and Montezuma counties led the efforts to get volunteers onto the farm to weed, open and close greenhouses, pick produce, shear sheep and plant cover crops on fields that would not be planted, among other things.

Darrin Parmenter, who was then the La Plata County Extension Office director, said the goal was for the farm to earn enough money for the family that they could plant the next year if they were able. He wanted to give them time to grieve, heal and figure out what they wanted to do.

“Because of the community buy-in they were able to continue to farm,” said Parmenter, now director of the Western Region of the CSU Extension Service. “The thing the Rohwer family taught us is that we’re all part of this bigger family of agriculture. The Rohwers exemplify that.”

The family is working to get the farm back to where it was before the crash, gradually increasing the crops, Angela said, noting that they have been overwhelmed by the volunteers and community support over the last two years.

Sitting in their living room on Mother’s Day, she and Heidi began to tick off names — Celia, Caroline Ower, Jennifer Daves, Emily, Carol, Sara, and then stopped, looking stricken.

“There’s no way we’re going to remember everybody,” Angela said. “I mean, we use only a wood burning stove to heat and we’d just have loads of wood showing up. It was the community stepping in, the fire department and our faith in God.”

People who planted the trees they had purchased for a wind break the week before the crash; people who planted cover crops; people who harvested potatoes and onions; people who didn’t farm but could pull weeds. The list goes on and on.

Stories of the farm before the crash intermingle with stories of recovery, and the sisters often riff off each other to finish a story. Their sometimes irreverent banter belies their enduring faith and intense emotions that surfaced in the aftermath of the crash.

The Arizona driver who caused the crash after he fell asleep at the wheel was sentenced in January 2023 to two years’ probation after the Rohwer family agreed to a plea deal. The statement Angela read in court said their mother believed strongly in forgiveness, according to a story in the Durango Herald.

The insurance battles are ongoing, but Angela said an attorney is handling those issues because the at-fault driver had only basic insurance. Heidi’s medical bills alone have topped $1 million.

One battle erupted when their insurance would pay only the $11,000 needed to get their truck out of storage nearly a year after the crash. They hadn’t been able to retrieve any of their belongings because of the court case. But insurance wouldn’t pay the $11,000 for the farm trailer — and the storage lot wouldn’t release one without the other. 

The other driver’s insurance paid the $11,000 and also paid for a new trailer — and that’s about all it’s covered to date, Angela said.

Fortunately, she said, their mother had her affairs in order and the farm the family moved to 24 years ago — when Heidi was 17 and Angela was 19 — passed on to them. Zack, 22, moved to the farm in 2020, finishing his senior year of high school remotely as the pandemic set in.

Now, he’s an integral member of the farm and is honing his baking skills after discovering his grandmother’s recipes. Judy Rohwer was the chief cook and they dearly miss seeing dinner on the table when they came in from the fields after a long day of farming.

“He figured out her dinner rolls,” Heidi said with a bit of astonishment. “They taste just like hers.”

And a strawberry pie, Angela chimed in. He and a visiting cousin pored through grandma’s cookbooks and decided on a recipe based on the amount of flour crusted on the page.

Stories of their mom in the kitchen, on the farm, at the market bring laughter punctuated by tears from the pain of their loss.   

In the year before Judy died, it seems she often asked if they knew how to do things if she wasn’t there. Like canning. Sure, they’d say, but now realize they didn’t know all the tricks. Still, they canned 200 jars of tomatoes in 2022 without her.

“I’d give anything to hear Mom say ‘get out of my kitchen’ again,” Angela said.

As they work to bring the farm back to where it was before the crash though, Angela said they are heeding their mom’s message from the night before she died. They’re not thinking about any expansion.

“We’re going to take some time for ourselves, go camping, things like that,” Angela said. “We’re not going to overwhelm ourselves 24/7.”

Dateline:

Pleasant View

Type of Story: News

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.