“Neurosurgeon coming into my room and telling me the news, that I’d never walk again,” Ron Gold remembered. “That was the hardest thing I’ve ever heard”
It’s the aftermath of a casual bike ride Ron Gold replays in his head every day.
“With a few miles to go, all of a sudden we looked up and there was an SUV heading right at us,” he said. “She hit my friend first and sent him flying then she hit me head on.”
It’s four years this Thanksgiving, but the questions and anger still linger.
“For the life of me I’ll never understand how someone can fall asleep behind the wheel, in the middle of the day,” Gold said. “I’d go to sleep at night crying myself to sleep thinking I’m going to wake up and it’ll all be a dream, everything will go back to the way it was.”
It hasn’t and for awhile, his attitude about it negatively affected the people around him.
“I was worried that I was losing them,” he said about his family. “And I knew that I needed to re-engage as a father and a husband in order to reconnect with them.”
So Ron found a new ambition, helping connect caregivers to families looking for personalized help.
“I was struggling for awhile with okay what am I going to do next and how am I going to make use of this experience and this knowledge and what I’ve been thrown into and the perspective that it’s given me to make a difference,” he said.
He founded ‘Lean On We‘ in 2014.
“It’s a very expensive system, home care, and if we can do something to make it less expensive, not only cheaper but so they can choose who’s coming into their home with information about who’s coming into their home, that’s tremendous,” Gold said.
Each caregiver goes through an extensive vetting process.
“We take all their information, we upload it to our website,” he explained. “What we want to do is provide is the same piece of mind that you can get if you’re best friend recommended somebody.”
While things are much better health-wise for Ron, don’t ever tell him this happened for a reason. But he is grateful something positive has come out od his tragedy.”
“I am thankful that I found a purpose,” he smiled.
