Solidarity is stitched into quilts, stirred into meals, and raked up with autumn's leaves and pine needles. That's how the Voorheesville Teachers Association defined it when colleague Mary Teresa McCormick went into the hospital for minor surgery one year ago and came out an ovarian cancer patient.

To complicate this devastating diagnosis, McCormick left the hospital unable to feel or move her left leg. She said a retractor used in surgery was inadvertently placed on a nerve near her femur, flattening it.

"I came home in a wheelchair," said the music teacher. "Then I had a brace on my leg and a walker."

When Voorhesville TA President Kathy Fiero, a remedial math teacher, heard the news, she came into school with the attitude that "I had to do something."

She went to the logical place to go for troubles: the school nurse. Fiero and nurse Colleen Brackett decided they wanted to make a quilt to keep McCormick warm during day-long sessions of chemotherapy.

"Then we laughed," Fiero said. "Between the two of us, we have no domestic skills." But as a local union president in Albany County, Fiero has learned organizational and leadership skills.

In fact, she spent time the past two summers with a group of colleagues at NYSUT's coalition-building workshop for local unions, the Local Action Project.

Picture-perfect

Fiero organized a photo of the school population outside the elementary school. Custodians set up a giant ladder so the volunteer photographer could fit about 600 kids and teachers into the photo.

The photo was scanned and printed onto fabric for the centerpiece of the quilt. A community volunteer made the blanket, bordered with musical notes, and gave it to McCormick. She wrapped herself in it on the long ­days of chemotherapy.

More was in store. "We got a group of people together on a Saturday to do raking and general fall clean-up at McCormick's house. The school nurse got us surgical masks so we could go into the house," said Fiero.

"It gave me an opportunity to see people," said McCormick, who was housebound at the time. When she told the group that her neighbor was also going through cancer treatment, "they raked that lawn, too."

First-grade teacher Dawn Mancuso's mother made a quilt to help raise money to offset McCormick's medical expenses.

Teachers sold raffle tickets for the blanket, which was won by Carol Relyea, a member of United Employees of Voorhesville, after raising $2,000.

Voorhesville TA members also formed a team for a local run/walk fundraiser for ovarian cancer research, sponsored by Caring Together, Inc., and won an award for having the largest team in 2007.

More than 100 people, including the girls' high school basketball team, walked as "MT's Troupe." Computer teacher Mary Anne Milano took photos and a scrapbook was made for McCormick.

Union members signed up to make meals for McCormick and her teacher-husband, Dennis. He worked with her daily to regenerate the nerve in her leg, using his skills as a physical education teacher and former personal trainer.

"My husband would carry me to the basement and spend an hour stretching my leg," said McCormick, who also worked out on a recumbent bike. "The neurologist said I'd never run again and I'd walk with a cane."

Rehab successful

She eventually lost the cane, and she recently walked in the Caring Together September fundraising event herself, just days after returning to school for the first time in a year to a standing ovation from faculty.

The next day, the 2008-09 school year officially began, and when McCormick heard the buses pull up outside her classroom window, she wept with gratitude.

"I never realized what a family teaching is, and being a member of NYSUT," said McCormick.

— Liza Frenette