Chris Killoran crossed the finish line of The Ottawa Hospital Foundation’s Ride astride her three-wheeled Alinker walking bike, her friend Fiona Amanya on one arm and Ride volunteer Janet Mantler on the other. Tears streamed down her face.
“I didn’t plan to do that,” Killoran said as she dried her eyes after her one-kilometre circuit of Tunney’s Pasture on Sunday morning. “I would never have believed that this was something I could do.”
Six years earlier Killoran had a ruptured aorta. She was rushed to the Montfort Hospital, had three more heart attacks before she was stabilised, and was transferred to the University of Ottawa Heart Institute. She endured twelve hours of surgery and spent a month in hospital before going home. “I’ve been getting better ever since,” she said proudly.
“My right leg started to give out on me toward the end and I thought, I’m not going to make it. And then this lady appears out of nowhere on my right. My friend on my left. And they helped me through. It was a team effort and I’m thrilled.”
Killoran was among 700 riders in The Ride along the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway, which raised $1.07 million for health care and cancer research at The Ottawa Hospital. While the two-wheelers set out on circuits of 50 and 109 kilometres, 50 riders pushed themselves along the shorter one-kilometre course on their Alinkers — the first time the mobility devices had been used in The Ride. They were part of a team from LiquidGym.
LiquidGym founder Karen Snyder had one client on an Alinker and knew at once that the gym needed a fleet of them. “Anyone with a mobility challenge — a hip replacement, a knee replacement, MS or cerebral palsy — can use one. We’ve got one guy who fell and broke his neck. Or someone with weight issues. It’s great for doctors to say lose weight, but if they can’t move it’s very hard for them to lose weight. This gets them moving.”
Inventor Barb Alink, who took part in the Ride, developed the bike to help her stubborn Dutch mother. She is, as far as she knows, the only woman to have designed and built a bike entirely on her own.
Most medical devices are designed for a body that has a problem, Alink said, not for the way people want to live. “Why are they emphasising the disability? That’s not right. I set out to make something so cool that people will want to use it.”
Alinker riders sit upright with a straight posture, at eye level with everyone else. It is a subtle difference, and a meaningful one for people who would otherwise be in a wheelchair or hunched over a walker.
“It has been life-changing,” Killoran said. “It takes me places I couldn’t go before and hadn’t been for years. It changes the way people look at you. They look you right in the eye now. You get a little bit more respect and a lot more function.”