By Jill Porter
Philadelphia Daily News (Pennsylvania)
Copyright 2007 Philadelphia Daily News
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
The battle began seven years ago on the cold, hard floor of City Hall, where paramedic Mary Kohler slept for two weeks to call attention to the plight of rescue workers with hepatitis C.
She was weak, sick from the blood-borne disease she knew she’d contracted somewhere along the way - delivering babies, giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, bandaging wounds - during 11 years on the job.
But the city was refusing to acknowledge the work connection to the illness, and Mayor Street famously ignored the frail woman camping outside his door.
The sickness is worse now.
But yesterday, Mary Kohler finally won the battle she began years ago.
The city granted her a disability pension, recognizing that her illness had been contracted on the job.
She wept.
Kohler was at home in her meticulous Northeast apartment when she got the news.
“I was elated,” she said later, sitting on the sofa at the firefighter’s union hall, celebrating with union officials.
They hailed her as a hero - and an unlikely one at that.
“They thought I was a meek, mild somebody from Podunk, West Pennsylvania,” Kohler said with a smile.
“We had no idea of the lion that roared within,” said Local 22 President Brian McBride.
Kohler, 44, was running out of sick leave when she began her vigil in December 2000 to protest the city’s denial of injured-on-duty status to firefighters with hep C.
Her demonstration became an international cause, with cards and letters from all over the world. “It took on a life of its own,” she said.
With her health failing, Kohler went home after 15 days, weeping with what she believed was defeat.
Hardly.
“How many lives did Mary save by bringing international attention to this issue?” said David Kearney, union recording secretary. “How many people got tested and got early intervention?”
Kohler’s dramatic sleep-in also propelled state legislators to pass a law a year later classifying hep C as a work-related illness for rescue workers.
Still, union officials said, the city pension board has continued to resist, forcing workers with the disease to battle in court for disability pensions.
Indeed, yesterday’s pension-board vote was 5-3, with the city’s representatives voting no.
The city still doesn’t recognize that Kohler’s disease is solely a work-related injury, said mayoral spokesman Joe Grace.
“The city respects her contributions to the Philadelphia Fire Department and to the citizens, and wishes her well. But we have to take the positions we take because we have a fiduciary responsibility to every pensioner and every survivor of every pensioner.”
Sigh.
Kohler is in constant pain and chronically exhausted from the deadly virus and the treatment she’s getting for it, including five hours of chemotherapy every two weeks.
Until late last year, Kohler hung on to her job - using hours donated to a sick bank by other firefighters - hoping someday to come back to the work she loved.
She came to realize that that would never happen. In December, she retired.
With a regular pension, Kohler would receive a taxable portion of her pay. Worse, her medical coverage would end in five years.
What company would provide her health insurance with her condition? How would she survive on about $18,000 a year, before taxes, when her treatment costs that much, if not more?
The disability pension will provide her 70 percent of her former pay, tax-free - about $38,000 - and lifetime coverage for her hep C medical costs.
It’s the least the city could do for the woman firefighters consider a hero.
“I don’t look at it that way,” she said of the accolades. “I just did what I had to do to bring the issue to light.”
And no, she holds no bitterness towards John Street.
“In his heart and soul I think he’s happy for me at some level,” she said. “He’s a Christian man who knows what is right and what is wrong, and I know he knows this is right.”
The mayor told Daily News reporter Mark McDonald yesterday that he remembered Kohler, but said he didn’t know “whether she should get a pension or not. I don’t follow that.”
No matter.
Mary Kohler has won the battle she began seven years ago. And she can rest far easier than she did on that cold, hard, City Hall floor.