Lawyer's lost love fuels money redesign quest

Dr. Alan Decherney, a leading gynecologist and obstetrician, remembers the young woman with the cane shuffling into his office at Yale University to ask for his help. In a residency, years earlier, he had considered her smart and promising. Now she just looked pitiful.

You can't go into practice, he told her, knowing how harsh he sounded but trying to be honest. You are legally blind and you are spastic.

But Welner pressed on. And something about her courage moved Decherney to let her sit in with other residents and join him on patient rounds.

She astounded him. This woman isn't just smart, Decherney thought. She's brilliant.

"I had to tell her not to answer all the questions all the time," Decherney said, chuckling.

For the rest of her life Welner called Decherney her hero. When no one else in medicine would answer her calls, he made them on her behalf. With Decherney's help she landed a job overseeing a clinic for women with disabilities at Washington Hospital Center. At the time, there were few resources for disabled women who wanted to get pregnant.

"Doctors simply didn't want to deal with a woman in a wheelchair who wanted to have a baby," said Trish Day, one of Welner's first patients who became a close friend. "Sandy didn't just understand the complications of a disabled body," Day said. "She understood my dream."

A year and half later, after watching another surgeon perform an emergency Caesarean section, Welner was the first person to hold Day's newborn daughter, Diana. It was one of the proudest moments of her career.

But Welner did far more than encourage her patients. She designed and patented a special examination table for disabled women — lower and more maneuverable than the standard ones. She lectured on the need for disabled woman to get regular gynecological checkups and mammograms, something some avoid because the equipment isn't adapted for them.

In a particularly sweet triumph, she returned to the nursing home in Connecticut and lectured the doctors who had once declared that she would function no better than a 2-year-old.

Then, in 1997, Welner's clinic was closed because of cutbacks. She was devastated. And yet, Lovitky says, as she had so often done, Welner accepted reality and moved on.

She hurled herself into her work — applying for research grants, writing a book on medical care for women with disabilities, becoming a faculty member of Georgetown and Maryland University medical centers, speaking at the United Nations, lecturing around the country and the world.

Few knew that Welner's masterful hour-long PowerPoint presentations were memorized by heart. She couldn't see her own slides.

"She just never stopped," says Lovitky. He worried sometimes about how hard Welner pushed herself, rarely getting more than a few hours sleep a night.

'There's been an accident'
And then, in an instant, everything stopped. It was Oct. 8, 2001 and the country was still reeling from the shock of the Sept. 11 attacks. Lovitky and Welner had talked about it by phone that night. It was the last real conversation they ever had.

The call jolted him awake a few hours later. "There's been an accident," said Welner's neighbor. "It's serious."

Lovitky grabbed a Bible and raced to the hospital. Swathed in bandages, a breathing tube in her throat, Sandy was barely recognizable. She had third-degree burns over 70 percent of her body. But she smiled and mouthed "I love you," and blew a kiss.

She had been lighting a memorial candle for her late father, when the flame caught her nightgown. The neighbor had broken down her door and pulled her from the fire.

The next 13 days were blur of suffering and sadness as Lovitky and Welner's mother and brother waited, willing Sandy to survive, clinging to the belief that she might. After all, this was Sandy — invincible, irrepressible Sandy. She had come back from near death once before. Surely she could again.

On Oct. 21, Lovitky whispered his last words to the woman with whom he had planned to spend his life. He doesn't even know if she heard.

She died 10 minutes later. She was 42.

In the months after Welner's death, Lovitky felt bewildered by grief and regret. He couldn't work, couldn't eat, couldn't sleep.

He went to Israel, trekked to all the most dangerous parts. Family and friends feared he had a death wish. There were times he wondered if he did.

At his darkest moment, Lovitky talked to his rabbi.

What can I do, he cried.

Do something good that will contribute to her memory, the rabbi told him.

And then Lovitky remembered the envelopes, how he would sort Sandy's money before she went on trips — putting the $1 bills in one envelope, the tens and twenties in others. He remembered her frustration at having to trust strangers for the right change.

And he realized that there was something he could do — something that could both celebrate Welner's legacy and affect the lives of millions. Elsewhere around the world, accommodations are made for the blind — different sized notes or tactile features such as raised markings.

Why not the United States?

In May 2002, Lovitky sued the Treasury Department on behalf of the American Council of the Blind, arguing that its failure to design a currency that is accessible to blind people is a form of discrimination.

In November 2006, the court ruled in favor of the Council.

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"Plaintiffs have demonstrated that they lack meaningful access to U.S. currency," Judge Judith W. Rogers wrote in the ruling, which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld in May. "Even the most searching tactile examination will reveal no difference between a $100 bill and a $1 bill. The secretary has identified no reason that requires paper currency to be uniform to the touch."

The Treasury Department, which argues that a redesign of the currency would be too costly, has not said if it will fight the latest ruling.

Not about the money
Lovitky visits Welner's grave several times a year — when he travels to Pittsburgh to visit her mother. They rarely talk about the lawsuit, though they know Sandy would have been proud.

For his part, Lovitky says he feels a strange detachment about the outcome. There is little of the personal satisfaction or pride he has felt with other legal victories. He understands why. He understands the long hours he poured into this case — all the research, all the briefs, all the consultations with other lawyers — was never really about winning. Or about money.

It was about commemorating the spirit of the rare and beautiful woman who changed his life.

It was about love.

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