Hail, Mary

By Lauren Fritsky
Times Staff Writer

The woman stands in the glass-encased vestibule of an apartment complex in Mayfair as she waits for someone to let her in.
Mary Kohler sits in the lobby calmly watching the woman, who stands in a space that is not quite on the outside, but still a few steps shy of the inside. Kohler braces herself as the woman asks a tenant to buzz her in.
"The buzzer’s really loud," Kohler warns, still watching. "It lasts really long."
The bell blares like a horn on a ship that is approaching shore. It is a sound of simultaneous acceptance and arrival, and it rings even after the woman has walked inside.
Kohler doesn’t cover her ears at the sound. After all, she experienced a no less audible advent last month when, after a seven-year period of limbo, her bell finally rang.
On April 19, the city’s Board of Pensions awarded a partial disability pension to Kohler, who believes she contracted hepatitis C, a blood-borne, liver-attacking disease, while working as a city paramedic.
"It’s the end of a seven-year fight," Kohler, 44, told the Times last week.
In December 2000, Kohler staged a two-week sleep-in outside Mayor John Street’s office to demand he acknowledge the more than 200 city rescue workers that had hepatitis C.
Street’s disregard of the disease as an occupational illness prevented infected rescue employees from receiving workers’ compensation benefits, according to officials from Local 22, the union representing city firefighters.
In 2001, the state legislature passed a law classifying hepatitis C as a work-related illness. But the city did not budge on its stance that while the high number of sick rescue workers seemed odd, the disease should be more attributed to lifestyle risk factors than to on-the-job duties. Many sick workers sought disability pensions in court.
But Kohler remained diligent both in her fight for her pension and in her struggle to bring attention to hepatitis C as a widespread illness. Her plight garnered both local and international attention that lingers to this day.
"I go out to the grocery store and people say, ‘I remember you from TV,’" Kohler said.
Despite growing sicker during the harrowing wait for justice, Kohler said she long ago stopped asking how — and why — she contracted hepatitis C.
"It’s like putting your hand in a beehive and figuring out which bee stung you first," she said. "You just give it over to God.
"It’s just too much exhaustion (to wonder). I can’t spend the energy. Every day’s a struggle."
Because hepatitis C is transmitted through blood, the general public has long stigmatized the disease as being prevalent mostly among promiscuous people and drug users. Today, there are an estimated 4.1 million (1.6 percent) Americans with the virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"It affects more people than AIDS," Kohler pointed out.
Perhaps the more disconcerting aspect of hepatitis C is that 80 percent of its victims show no signs or symptoms — which include jaundice, nausea and fatigue — for a long period of time. In Kohler’s case, doctors believe she contracted the disease in the early 1990s.
In December 2006, Kohler officially retired from her job after 17 years. She stands to get 70 percent of her former pay tax-free and lifetime coverage for her hepatitis C medical costs. But she won’t see any money for another month, she said.
And after all those years of saving lives, Kohler is now fighting to save her own.
Days are spent in bed and at doctor’s appointments. Kohler, who carries a petite frame and wears her brown hair in a pixie cut, said she’s unsure of her prognosis — she failed to respond to four rounds of Interferon, one of the more common treatments for hepatitis C patients whose livers aren’t so ravaged that they need liver transplants. Kohler just recently began trying chemotherapy.
"I have joint pain. I’m tired all the time. I’m weak all the time," she said.
Though it’s 2 p.m., Kohler admits that she got out of bed only an hour before.
A native of Georgia, Kohler moved to Philadelphia in 1989, and lived in Morrell Park before moving to her current residence three years ago. She has no family here.
In the years since she began her fight, her marriage has broken up — it’s a topic she refrains from discussing — and in 2005 her beloved mother died in her sleep at age 64. Prior to her passing, Kohler had arranged to move out to Kentucky to live with her.
"She’s the first person I wanted to call when I found out (about the pension)," Kohler said.
But Kohler has carried on, and she has found love again. She says she and boyfriend Jerry Ott are "soulmates."
"He’s wonderful. He takes me where I need to go," she said.
On good days, she volunteers for U.S. Rep. Bob Brady’s mayoral campaign and meets with a group of ladies in her apartment complex. On weekends, Kohler and Jerry sometimes go out of town to visit his children and 8-month-old grandson, Benjamin.
"I think he’s going to skip the crawling stage and go straight to walking," Kohler says, showing a wallet photo of the rosy-cheeked boy.
As she closes the door on her personal fight, Kohler hopes that the city opens the door on an extensive discussion of hepatitis C. She advocates pre-employment testing for those in lines of work where they are exposed to blood.
"The city needs to take many steps to recognize it as an in-line-of-duty disease," she said.
In response to claims that she is a hero, Kohler says there’s a bigger picture and purpose.
Still sitting in her apartment lobby, looking, quietly, from the inside out, she says, "It’s not about me. It’s about the hepatitis C." ••
Reporter Lauren Fritsky can be reached at 215-354-3038 or lfritsky@phillynews.com