Inside Vancouver
Leg Work
By Colleen Friesen published Jan 1, 2009
Nothing - not doubters, not amputation - gets in Sarah Doherty's way
Sarah Doherty jumps out of her car, balancing on her single leg as she hauls out her crutches. Weaving between the tables in a café near her Roberts Creek home, gripping a latte, she's already talking about her newest crutch design. "I feel like I'm stretching myself beyond my abilities. Right now I'm describing the mechanical aspects of this for the patent search, and I only just realized there are standards and names for each density of rubber. I was just writing things like ‘kind-of-soft rubber.' " Doherty, 49, who's become an amateur expert on rubber's Durometer index over the last few months, hops briefly on her left foot while pushing her crutches under the table. She tries to settle into her chair, but she is without the cushion that compensates for the missing part of her pelvis. "This is, without a doubt, the hardest mountain I've had to climb."
Doherty, a petite brunette who works as a pediatric occupational therapist, has climbed enough real mountains to know what she's talking about. She is the only one-legged woman to summit 6,194-metre Mt. McKinley, a feat she accomplished in 1985 with the help of an ice pick attachment she invented. In 2004, she finished a 720-kilometre walk on the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain. But the Boston-born Doherty feels this latest undertaking is the hardest she's faced since her marriage ended in 2002. "I was in freefall and suddenly there was this hole-not only with Russ gone, but when it was his turn to take the three kids."
To fill the quiet, she turned her attention to her crutches. "Mt. McKinley had been the last time I'd really adapted anything. The idea was always in the back of my mind, but my life was so busy. I started to remember that I used to dream big.
