“It was awful,” recalls Andrea. “One minute I was on my way to work, the next I was down on the ground. I couldn’t move. And I was surrounded by paramedics.”
She spent several days at the hospital, where her leg was cast up to her hip, and she was monitored to ensure the head injury was healing. Doctors said it wasn’t guaranteed that she would regain full function of her leg. “I panicked when they told me this,” she says. “Much of my work is physical – Assisting clients in and out of the shower, holding their arm when we go for a walk. Helping them in and out of chairs.”

When she returned home after being released from the hospital, she applied for the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) to cover at least part of her loss of income. She was told the approval process could take months, if not years, for some. “It wasn’t nearly enough to live on, but I couldn’t even access it right away anyway,” she says. As a private sponsored worker for only a year at the time of the accident, Andrea wasn’t eligible for unemployment insurance.