Servers at Montana Mike’s steak house will donate their tips all day Tuesday to help a former co-worker who was injured seriously last month in an accident near Noel, Mo.
Cameron Lindow sustained a broken neck when she and others jumped off a short bridge into the river where they had been canoeing.
Lindow, who formerly worked at the Emporia restaurant, graduated in May from Emporia State University and had accepted a job with Big Brothers Big Sisters in Wichita, co-workers said. She was to marry Steve Stone in August.
“It was so totally flukey, it shouldn’t even have happened,” said Lindsay Revenew, one of the Montana Mike’s employees who accompanied Lindow on the trip.
“It was our first day actually on the river,” Revenew said. “We had gone down four miles. We had four miles left to go.”
The canoers came upon a bridge where about 20 others were jumping into the water from the bridge, and the Lindow group joined them, she said. Lindow evidently hit her head on a rock when she landed.
“She was just laying in the water, face down,” Revenew said. “No one even knew what was going on.”
John Schierling, also of Montana Mike’s, was set to jump in after Lindow jumped. Instead, he became a one-man rescue party.
“He jumped in the water and flipped her over,” Revenew said. “She was kind of dead to the world. They brought her over to the side. They kept her in the water until the ambulance came.”
Lindow was life-flighted to Joplin, Mo., where she has been hospitalized since. She has undergone surgery to fuse her fifth and seventh vertebrae.
“Right now, she’s pretty much paralyzed,” she said.
Lindow is able to feel light touches to her legs and is gaining better movement in her hands, Schierling said. He and Revenew will visit Joplin again this weekend.
Lindow is wearing a “halo” that is suspended to hold her head in place and soon will be fitted with a vest to hold the halo, he said.
When she is able — and friends believe that will be soon — she will be transferred to a Lincoln, Neb., rehabilitation hospital.
Money collected on Tuesday will be used to help defray medical expenses, Revenew said.
“All of our tips we’re donating to her fund-raiser that day, and whatever we can collect from the money cans around town,” she said.