Tricia Donnell is “used to being the one that helps everyone else.”

An EMT for 18 years this June, Tricia said “there wasn’t a time when that siren went off that I didn’t drop everything and go.” That siren is the one in Sugar Grove, where Tricia was born and raised, and has lived all but seven years of her life.

“It’s home and it always will be home,” Tricia said of what’s, for most, a simple stop between Warren and Lakewood, N.Y. “It takes a community to make a community,” Tricia said. And it’s her community, along with her family, who’s behind the benefit that will be held in her honor on April 15.

In May of 2014, Tricia went to see a neurosurgeon for back issues, and the response was that he couldn’t fix those issues until he fixed the problem with her hip.

“What’s wrong with my hip,” was Tricia’s response, to which her doctor replied, in so many words, that essentially Tricia had no hip. Because, she and her doctor now believe, of her rheumatoid arthritis, the joint was eroded over the years to the point of bone on bone friction. The situation called for a hip replacement.

Which went, comparatively speaking, swimmingly. There was a small infection afterward, Tricia said, but she was in and out of a hospital in Pittsburgh in two days for the whole thing.

But her back still ached.

So on August 20 of 2015, Tricia had back surgery at Hamot in Erie. Two weeks after her surgery, her incision opened and, her doctors told her, she was “full of staph.”

Tricia was given a Wound Vac, (a device that allows patients to conduct Negative Pressure Wound Therapy, allowing for circulation and blood flow to all areas of the wound while reducing the influence of swelling and promoting rapid tissue granulation, or formation).

The doctors weren’t sure whether what she was “full of” was regular staph or MRSA, an aggressive, contagious, and antibiotic resistant form of the infection that can be difficult to treat. They also let her know that she had one of the worst hip fractures they’d ever seen. The cup that held the ball of the prosthetic hip she’d been outfitted with had been dislocated inside her body and needed to be replaced.

But they wouldn’t even consider it until the staph was cleared up.

In October, a hematoma – a collection of blood outside of a vessel – at the site of her incision burst. When she went back into the hospital to have that problem dealt with, on December 21 of that year, her treatment team was ready to remove her prosthesis, and the artificial hip that had failed her was replaced with cement board spacers. Spacers are the standard of care in cases of chronic infection, a process known as revision and removal, in which antibiotic-laced cement spacers are placed after the removal of a prosthesis and a course of intravenous antibiotics is seen through. Once that is finished, the prosthesis is replaced in the delayed second stage of the procedure.

By January 2, Tricia was told, she had yet another infection, this one hard to catch and harder to get rid of, not to mention relatively uncommon. In the next nine days Tricia had two more surgeries to remove the spacers that had just been placed, wash her system of the infection, and place yet another, fresh, set of spacers.

For two months Tricia was on a course of intravenous antibiotics at home. Those drugs, she said, without insurance would come at a cost of $159.87 per day. By the end of last year, Tricia an her husband Brian, without insurance, would have owed a total of $105,000 plus. They paid $5,500 of that out of pocket, thanks to their health insurance, Tricia said.

That’s still not a small sum for a woman who’s been out of work for two years and in bed because her hip won’t support much more for half of that time.

“My husband is my rock,” Tricia said of Brian Donnell, who she said has stepped right up to the plate, along with her 15-year-old son Ben and 10-year-old daughter Faith, to help with the house and to assist her with the daily needs of living life from one room of that house, more or less. “I can’t say enough,” Tricia said, about her husband’s or her children’s help and support.

But she’s had help outside the home as well. Neighbors, friends, family, and even the parents of her childrens’ team and clubmates have donated gas money for the family’s many trips to doctors in Erie and Pittsburgh, and even created Facebook funds to deliver meals to the family three times a week for months at a time.

Above all, Tricia said, the thing that’s kept her above the overhwhelm of it all is simply her choice to stay above it. “It is what it is. You can’t change it, but you can choose how you deal with it. One way or another,” Tricia said,” I won’t let it define me and I won’t let it get me down.”

A benefit for Tricia will be held at the Sugar Grove VFD at 3 p.m. Saturday, April 16, until, as Tricia said, “the food’s gone.” There will be a spaghetti dinner, a Chinese auction and basket raffle, and a bake sale.