"We started the process after lunch. I posed in a sitting position pretending to hold a newspaper, and two students started at my
feet and began wrapping the gauze around me. The plan was to work so far, and while the gauze was still wet, to take scissors and
cut the cast off in sections, and then remold it back together."
However, things did not go exactly as planned.
"We didn't think the plaster would harden up as fast as it did," says Katie. "By the time they had wrapped it up to just above my
knees, the gauze around my ankles was already stiff. We didn't' know what to do. They tried using scissors to cut it off, but that
didn't work, so we decided to just keep going and take the entire cast off when we were done."
"They kept wrapping the gauze all over my entire body up to my neck--I looked like a mummy," she says. "I remember the wet
plaster was so cold, my teeth were chattering and I was shivering and shaking inside, but when I looked down nothing on the
cast was moving. When they wrapped the gauze around my chest, they didn't leave much room for me to breathe. It was
hardening up really fast and getting difficult for me to breathe, and we were all getting concerned."
The students called the hospital for advice and were told to bring Katie in immediately.
"I was helpless. I could not move, so they had to carry me out to the parking lot. They tried to get me into a couple of different cars
but I wouldn't fit, so they decided to get a van. They had brought a chair and sat me on it, so there I was in a body cast sitting on
the chair in the parking lot with the arms locked in the air while they got the van. They had to put me in the back of the van, still
sitting in the chair, but when they turned a corner I tipped over."
At the hospital, it took a doctor around an hour and a half to cut off the cast. "At first, I could not even walk. I was numb and weak.
Since my clothes were stuck to the cast, someone went back to the dorm to get clothes for me. They got me dressed and carried
me back to the dorm and put me in the bathtub to get warmed up, and then I was okay. By then, it was early evening. Fortunately,
I had no ill effects, other than some tiny nicks where they cut off the cast."
"The parts of the body cast were taken back to the studio, and a few day later I went down and all the pieces were back together,"
she recalls. "I think I may have got an 'A' on the project. Someone had also stuck a bowling pin in it so it looked like it had a head.
Later, I sold the cast, though I am not sure what the person was going to do with it. I just wanted the money I had spent for the
gauze."
For a while, Katie's experience was the topic of conversation around campus. "Here I was this quiet, naive, shy little farm girl, and I
remember the saying on campus was 'BV girl gets plastered.'"
Besides spending a lot of her time in the art and pottery studios, Katie, an art education major, was involved in backstage work for a
couple of student plays at BV. After graduating from BV, Katie married and put her career on hold to raise two sons, but finding
time to practice her art in a corner of her kitchen. "As they grew older, I was able to create more artwork and began to enter area
art shows," she says.
When the family moved to Terril, she became involved in the area arts council and worked at a gallery in Spencer. Today, she
teaches art in the Spencer Middle School and continues her painting, winning a number of awards for her work. Her art can be seen
on her web site at www.artworksbyanita.com.
Copied from BVU Briefs, spring 2005, vol. 6, no.2. Written by Steve Herron Photograph by Jennifer Felton
