The Will Sergeant
The outpatient spinal cord gym at the Kessler Institute of Rehabilitation in West Orange feels nothing like a hospital. Handsome wood beams run across the high ceiling of the enormous space, and sun spills in from many windows. It’s more like a state-of-the-art fitness gym, outfitted not only with athletic equipment — treadmills, stationary bikes, parallel bars, floor mats, and colorful exercise balls — but a staff of experienced physical therapists as well. They all wear polo shirts and khakis, but one stands out from the rest with her cropped, white-blonde hair, icy-blue eyes, tattoos, perma-smile and booming voice.
“Come on, squeeze! Use your belly muscles!” physical therapist Sandra Wojciehowski bellows to a patient one morning in July.
Wojciehowski (who has gone by “Buffy” since age 12, when a friend at Girl Scout camp marveled at her buff canoeing skills) is trying to motivate the patient, a middle-aged man, to sit up on his own for a full 60 seconds. The man started coming to Kessler in 1975, after a bullet paralyzed him from the waist down. “Buddy, you’re weebling and wobbling all over the place,” she says.
Her patients often call her a drill sergeant, but they don’t really mean it. She has a boisterous personality and intense athleticism, sure, but she also has a softer, empathetic side. She knows how to joke without offending, console without pitying, and push without straining.
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