Grandma of 4 Paralyzed After Freak Dunk Tank Accident During Family Outing: ‘Now I’m a Paraplegic’ 

What should have been a fun family outing turned into an EMT grandmother’s worst-case scenario.

On July 6, Dena Suihkonen was spending the day with her four grandchildren — ages 2 to 8 — at the annual Breitung Township Picnic in Minnesota.

Public service representatives, including Suihkonen, who is the Tower Area Ambulance Services Director, were taking turns in the dunk tank. After the police chief finished his turn, she climbed in.

“I was dunked a couple of times before they were having issues,” Suihkonen, 59, of Tower, recalls. “So they asked me to move.”

As she did, she says the seat suddenly sprang up, throwing her backwards more than six feet into the air before she crashed to the ground.

“My rear end hit the ground, and it ended up bursting my T 12, which took out my spinal cord,” the EMT supervisor says.

Although most people in the crowd didn’t realize right away that she was badly hurt, Suihkonen knew instantly this was far more serious than a simple mishap.

As the supervisor for the medical crew at the event, she immediately requested an air ambulance. When another EMT asked why, she replied, “because I can’t feel my legs.”

“Then things got real,” she says.

Her husband of 40 years — who had been reluctant for her to get into the dunk tank at all — witnessed the fall and rushed to her side. “He was so scared,” she says.

The first responder team quickly transported Suihkonen to the nearest Level 1 trauma center, Essentia Health–St. Mary’s Medical Center in Duluth.

There, doctors told her she had suffered multiple spinal fractures, resulting in a T11 complete spinal cord injury. She underwent emergency spinal fusion surgery and spent a week in intensive care before beginning more than 40 days of intensive inpatient rehabilitation.

She is now paralyzed below the level of her injury and is dealing with long-term complications that go far beyond the loss of mobility.

Scans done in the ER also revealed multiple brain aneurysms that were unrelated to the accident but still required urgent attention.

Her daughter, Ari Picard, says her mother has already undergone one surgery to stabilize an aneurysm and will need additional procedures.

“I went from extremely active to now I’m a paraplegic and learning new ways to be active,” Suihkonen says.

One of the hardest parts, she adds, is no longer being able to serve her community as a first responder. “Living in a small town, too many times I knew my patients, so it was helping people I cared about,” she says. “Now, it’s hard because I know these calls are still going on and I can’t be there to help.”

Another major challenge, Suihkonen says, is adapting her home to her new physical needs. She says she was recently placed on unpaid work furlough by the city of Tower because of her injuries, which has made paying for modifications even more difficult.

“My big thing is that we live in a very old house, on a 59-feet hill,” she explains. “We were very proud that we paid off our house, but I can’t get upstairs to the bedrooms and my kitchen isn’t set up for me to use… the house doesn’t really work for me now.”

To help cover the cost of accessibility changes, the family has launched a GoFundMe campaign, which has raised more than $9,000 so far.

“There are so many people that are there for me between my family and friends, and this town has rallied around me,” she says.

Suihkonen says she has retained an attorney who specializes in personal injury and workers’ compensation cases.

Tower Mayor David Setterburg did not respond to multiple requests for comment about Suihkonen’s potential future with the city or the allegation that the insurance company rejected her workers’ compensation claim. The nonprofit that supplied the dunk tank also did not respond to an email request for comment.

Meanwhile, the Breitung Township board of supervisors said they are “holding her in our hearts, our thoughts and our prayers every day.”

Although Suihkonen says she’s not naturally suited to a life that requires so much dependence on others — “I try to stay positive,” she says, “but it stinks” — she’s focusing on the joy of having everyone home for Thanksgiving, including her four grandchildren, who have handled the situation better than she feared.

“They actually saw me get taken in that helicopter,” she says. “They pretty much saw everything.”

No matter what comes next, her daughter Gabby Gross, 27, says her mother’s strength has been a guiding force for the entire family.

“We all thought we were going to be the ones to help her cope, but she’s been our strength through it,” Gross says. “Some days are really hard, but making so much progress has been fun to see. She makes us all super proud of her.”