Carl Peradotta is a firm believer in helping others.

A retired road supervisor for the Perry County Highway Department, Mace’s theory is “helping others is helping yourself.”

Last year, he gave 500 volunteer hours through the Retired Senior Volunteer Program in Steeleville, Illinois. He worked at a local food pantry, picking up groceries from a St. Louis warehouse and helping box and distribute them. And he plays the keyboard in nursing homes, providing free entertainment for the residents there.

But last fall, Carl was the one in need of help.

Late one afternoon, as Carl was preparing for a show with his band, he was struck by a severe pain in his back. He laid down on his couch, and as the pain continued to get worse he called his band leader to tell him he wouldn’t be able to make the show that night.

After laying on the couch for an hour or two, Carl tried moving to a nearby chair, only to collapse on the floor. He was transferred by ambulance from the VA hospital to St. Louis, where doctors attempted to find the cause of his pain.

Initially, it was thought he had a pinched nerve in his back. But while he waited for a diagnosis, Carl’s condition continued to deteriorate. Though he wasn’t completely paralyzed, he had lost motor control in both sides of his body. He was also unable to swallow food and had to be sustained through a feeding tube through his nose. “I was a basket case,” he said.

Eventually, a nerve conduction study found that Carl had been struck with Guillain-Barre syndrome. Guillain-Barre is a rare neurological disorder that causes the body to attack its own nervous system, leading to increasing weakness and, sometime, paralysis.

Fortunately, people afflicted with Guillain-Barre stand a good chance of recovery if given the proper treatment. So after being in intensive care for almost two weeks, Carl needed to be transferred to a rehabilitation center for the next phase of his recovery.

“They wanted to send me to rehab way out on in the west of Missouri, and I told them I wasn’t going there. It was too far for my family to drive.” Carl knew about the Acute Rehabilitation Center at Herrin Hospital because he was a patient there after a knee surgery several years earlier. “I knew it was a great hospital and they had the rehab that I needed. So they agreed to send me there instead.”

Physical therapist Shay Wiggs remembers when Carl was first admitted to acute rehabilitation. “When he got here, he couldn’t move his lower body at all, and he could barely move his upper extremities. He had basically no range of motion.”

“The difficulty with his therapy was that, unless you have a certain amount of strength, we can’t do any exercises on the lower limbs. So at first, we worked on thing like his sitting balance. Then we eventually did a standing frame, and when he started getting his strength back, he progressed very quickly,” said Wiggs.

“In three days, they had me up from being flat on my back to walking,” said Carl. “We started by walking from my room to the nurse’s station. The second day we went half-way to the gym and the third day we made it all the way to the gym.”

Carl quickly became known for his feisty, good-natured attitude.

“I remember when he first came in, I handed him a wash cloth and asked what he could do on his own,” remembered Sheila Grider, occupational therapy assistant. “And he looked at me and said, ‘I thought I was coming here so you could do everything for me!’”

But Carl knew the work was mostly his to do. “I’m impressed with the vast improvement I made here at Herrin Hospital, with the help of the therapists, nurses and doctors.”

With the help of the medical staff and his family, Carl was ready to be discharged after about a month. The staff at the Acute Rehabilitation Center normally help patients prepare to leave by making sure their home environment is safe for the physical limitations that they might have. But for Carl, the staff had to take things a little further.

Carl and his wife, Virginia, love to camp and belong to several camping clubs. They have a big fifth-wheel camper with three steps, and Carl needed a handrail in order to safely climb into the vehicle. He wanted a certain kind of rail, and needed his therapists to help secure just the right one. “I’ve never had anybody need me to call the camper supply store for home discharge needs,” said Wiggs.

Between his band, his volunteer work, camping, and his family, including a wife, three children, eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild, Carl has a lot of reasons to not let Guillian-Barre slow him down.

“I’ll be 76 this year. It’s time I put myself to good use,” he figures.

There is no doubt that he will.