‘Just keep moving’: Couple deals with wildfire loss on top of disability

Knoxville News-Sentinel (TN)

Dec. 17--MORRISTOWN -- From her Cobbly Nob home the night of Nov. 28, Jackie Waddle could see the flames closing in.

But husband Ray, 65, paralyzed from the waist down, uses a power wheelchair -- and the wheelchair-accessible van she drove whenever they went somewhere together was in the shop.

The combination of fast-spreading fire and high winds meant staying put wasn't an option. Nor was there time to call for help -- if help even was available. Jackie Waddle had to come up with a solution quickly.

She ran to her Volkswagen Jetta station wagon, parked at the base of the 500-foot driveway, jumped in and backed it up to the door. Then she quickly put her husband in a sling attached to the manual hydraulic lift she used to move him from bed to chair and back, pushed the lift out the door, opened the hatchback and crammed him in the back -- all 6 feet, 6 inches of him.

"I didn't even know if he'd fit," Jackie, 58, said. "We'd always had our van. I was so scared ... he's so big. I had to push him down a little to get him in."

She jumped in the front seat and yanked the sling, still under him, to slide him as far forward as possible. Then she got out, slammed the hatch, jumped in the front seat and took off, trees falling around her and flames close behind.

"I said, 'Don't panic -- just keeping moving, don't stop!'" Ray Waddle said. "'You don't want this car to catch fire!'"

Four hours later, they reached the Red Cross shelter at Gatlinburg Community Center with nothing but her purse, which had been next to the door, and the clothes on their backs.

The next time she saw their three-story Vixen Run cabin, there was nothing left but the stone chimney and ashes.

She didn't have his medication -- or hers, for that matter. The power wheelchair custom-fit to his bulky frame, the lift and other specialized equipment that allowed her to keep him at home and care for him -- all were gone, along with the Waddles' family photos, mementos and wedding rings.

"I thought about going back in, but it was pitch-dark" with the power out, she said. "And I knew we had to get in the car and get out."

The Red Cross had a shelter set up at the community center, but volunteers there told the Waddles that Ray's medical needs were beyond their scope. They sent them on to LeConte Medical Center in Sevierville.

"They said, 'Go to the hospital -- they'll take care of you there,'" Ray Waddle said. "And they did. They brought us sandwiches and something to drink, put us up in a room ... treated us like we were kings and queens."

A social worker at the hospital called around for vacancies in nursing homes and found a room at Life Care Center of Morristown. The Waddles will stay there while they wait for their homeowners' insurance to put a handicapped ramp on a "temporary" furnished house in Pigeon Forge, where they can stay up to six months while deciding where they'll live permanently.

The Waddles first met in the mid-1980s, when both worked for Petroleum Helicopters Inc. in Louisiana. But since Jackie worked on shore as a flight dispatcher and Ray off-shore as an aircraft mechanic, their paths rarely crossed. Four years later, he asked her to join him for dinner, he said, then they went dancing, "and that was it," Ray said.

"We've been together ever since" and married since 2002, Jackie said.

A Kentucky native, Ray had purchased the Vixen Run cabin in 1991 intending, as many of Cobbly Nob's then-residents did, to rent it out while he was younger and live there in retirement. Though both Waddles worked for PTI in Louisiana, they worked 14 days on and 14 days off, leaving plenty of time to both travel the country and enjoy the cabin.

"We traveled all over the United States, but we always ended up going to Gatlinburg," Ray said. "It was going to be our retirement home."

Ray had been retired just two years in 2014 when he had a stroke while the couple was on a "rescue run" to Pennsylvania for the Blount County Humane Society, dropping off animals to be adopted. He collapsed in a hotel room in Erie, Pa., where they were spending the night, and spent two months in a hospital there.

Along with the stroke, Ray had a life-threatening blood infection. When that cleared, he was paralyzed from the waist down. Multiple rounds of powerful antibiotics left him with kidney disease, and he had other medical issues. Jackie left work to care for him full time, and he also has a part-time caregiver, Tina King, from a home-health agency.

"She's become like a sister to me," Jackie said.

In fact, King opened up her home and her closet to Jackie, who hasn't had time to shop for clothes as she checks off a long to-do list: calling Carr Rehab to get a loaner power chair for Ray while they wait for his to be fitted, getting their prescriptions, ordering new eyeglasses from a local optometrist who's been making replacement glasses for fire victims, transferring utilities to their temporary house, arranging for Medicare and TennCare to replace the medical equipment he'll need, including a lift and a hospital bed with a mattress designed to prevent bedsores.

And listing everything that's gone. King accompanied Jackie on her first trip back to Cobbly Nob, where she stood in a foot of "muck, from the ash and the rain," and "tried to forage for some stuff." The fire was so hot, it melted the sliding glass doors; the only thing she could identify was a ring of her mother's, badly charred. She's worried now about going back because the heavy stones on the 35-foot chimney, all that's still standing, are beginning to fall. She still hopes her cats escaped through the door she left cracked for them.

Last week, Ray was in the dining room with other Life Care residents and noticed some of the older ladies wearing single strands of shiny Mardi Gras beads. He thought he'd bring them some of the years' worth of beads he and Jackie had collected and kept in their upstairs bedroom -- then remembered the beads, and the bedroom, were gone.

"It's hard to believe that you wake up the next day after something like this, and all your 'memories' are gone," Ray said. "And then you stop to think, the only thing we really had were the memories. All that stuff around us was ephemeral -- it doesn't matter. What we had is still here."

The Waddles probably will resettle in Newport or Cosby, Jackie said: "We like it too much here to leave."

But even knowing the nature of "mountain people," Jackie said, they've been surprised at the help they've received. At donation centers and other places set up to help fire victims, "all the people there are just giving, giving, giving, giving of everything," Jackie said.

They're one of many newly needy Sevier County families who will receive help from the News Sentinel's Empty Stocking Fund. On Thursday, various organizations -- including some Sevier County businesses -- will pick up food baskets to distribute to residents of the counties around Knoxville. On Friday, individuals who applied for the baskets, or for toys for their children, can pick them up at the Jacob Building in Chilhowee Park.

The Waddles have gotten a lot of support from their tight-knit church, Hill's Creek Baptist in Pittman Center.

"They've been our family, because neither of us has family here," Jackie said, though their family members also are trying to help from out of state.

Jackie said the relief of knowing Ray is well cared for at Life Care while she spends all day doing the errands necessary to piece their lives back together is priceless.

"This is not a quick fix -- this is another life change" on the heels of adjusting to Ray's disability, Jackie said. "I've got my days when it's overwhelming. Then you just got to sit back and cry, release it.

"And then, you make me laugh," she told her husband.

Ray said the couple has survived several hurricanes and other tests, along with his illness. The fire won't break them, he said.

"She's the angel I always knew I had, she's always in my corner, and we made it every time, no matter what," Ray said. "We're not in a hurry. We have a long row to hoe, as they say. But we'll get it done.

"Because that's the kind of people who are here in Tennessee. They're get-it-done people."

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