The keeper of hundreds of heartbreaking stories, Julie Hudak sees her job as ensuring happy endings. Cut to Margie Kondrich. When her daughter, Chloe, was born with Down syndrome, it rocked her world. Margie, then 40, was in complete shock since several ultrasounds had not detected any problems. “Margie would cry on my shoulder,” says Julie, a licensed physical therapist and mother of three, who’s often the first professional to visit a family in their home when they have a child born with a disability. “I consoled her, put her in touch with the right resources and gave her perspective. I was able to tell her that Chloe would be able to walk one day. It’s my responsibility to make the family whole again. The mom of a disabled child can’t help her child unless she feels whole.”

Julie says she’s more than a physical therapist to many of the families she works with. She’s also often counselor, expert and friend. “Margie looked forward to my visits,” Julie says. “It’s hard to get out of the house with a newborn, especially a newborn with conditions like low birth weight, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, fetal alcohol syndrome or autism. Some moms are at risk for depression. But when these moms watch me treat their baby with love, that makes a difference.”

Early intervention can be critical to helping babies with special needs, Julie believes, as well as kids who are experiencing delays reaching key milestones. Julie helps bolster a family’s attitude and confidence level, and describes her work as “giving families the fishing rod, not the fish.”

Her goal is to make sure these children get the support they need so that by the time they reach kindergarten they can fit in with their peers.

Following a Dream
Today Julie runs TEIS (Therapeutic Early Intervention Services), in Pittsburgh, with Tara Deringor, who’s also a licensed physical therapist. Their company provides services in the home to help parents learn how to care for their children with special needs or developmental delays. The partners see only the most challenging patients themselves, spending the bulk of their time overseeing their 21 physical therapist employees. “I love knowing that twenty-one people are out there making a difference, and I’m helping them make that difference,” Julie says.

A typical workday includes getting referrals from ACHIEVA, a nonprofit provider of early intervention services, and forwarding those referrals to TEIS employees. Julie and Tara also pay bills, handle employee benefits and answer phone calls from therapists who have procedural questions.

Julie took a slightly circuitous route to her current career. She started out as a pharmaceutical sales rep after graduating from Miami University in Oxford, OH, in 1990 with a marketing degree. But a skiing accident that tore a ligament and sent her into physical therapy had already planted the seed for her ultimate career change.

“I loved the interaction with my physical therapist,” she says. “I was so debilitated and saw how much the rehab was making a difference in my life. I thought it would be great to make that kind of difference in the lives of others.” Julie took a leave of absence from her job to take the prerequisite courses she needed for enrollment at Chatham University in Pittsburgh and graduated with a master’s in physical therapy in 1999. Soon after, at her first job at the Children’s Institute, Julie met Tara. “We shared an office and hit it off right away,” Julie says. “We have a lot in common. We’re both type A personalities who are out-going and social.”

In 2001, Julie, like Tara before her, became an independent contractor to provide physical therapy services. Julie and Tara then decided to make use of their business backgrounds and experience as physical therapists by launching their own physical therapy practice.

They began doing research in the evenings at a local university’s small-business development unit, where they got free counseling on how to write a business plan and incorporate. “That was invaluable, but it was also one of the most challenging years,” Julie says. “I had just had a baby, and Tara was pregnant with twins.” Ultimately, Tara and Julie approached ACHIEVA to discuss their new venture. “We had good business relationships with key people there,” Julie recalls. ACHIEVA signed on in 2004 and today represents 40 percent of TEIS’s early intervention business.

Family First
Julie manages her full life by focusing on work while her son, Benjamin, 6, is at school and her daughters, Lillian, 4, and Sarah, 2, are at child care three days a week. On Mondays and Fridays, when the girls are home, she juggles babysitters or works in her home office during the girls’ naps and gets them involved in an activity like drawing when they’re awake so she can make business calls and respond to email. “Sometimes, these are the most stressful days,” says Julie, who often feels guilty when she can’t give the children her undivided attention. “The girls tend to get frustrated when I get a phone call or when I’m answering emails and expect them to be quiet. This is when they act out for attention.”

It would certainly be easier to put the girls in day care five days a week, Julie says, but she enjoys the additional weekday time with them, as well as being there to carpool for afterschool activities such as soccer and dance. To stay on top of things, she occasionally works after the kids are in bed to make up for time she missed during the day. And she relies not only on her partnership with Tara (who lives on her street and shares her home office) but on her partnership with Dan, her husband of ten years. “We’re definitely both team players when it comes to taking care of our family,” says Julie, who shares with Dan responsibilities like laundry, cooking, cleaning, bathing the kids and putting them to bed.

Falling in Love
Julie and Dan, an archivist and writer, met on their first day of college in Ohio in 1986 while Julie was sunbathing with friends outside her dormitory. When they discovered they were both from Pittsburgh and played tennis, they quickly bonded. They dated on and off during their freshman year and then moved on to being best friends. After graduation, they started dating again— and married in 1998.

At first, Dan says, it was hard for him to believe how caring and genuine Julie was. He was also instantly attracted to her fun-loving approach to life. “She never took her-self too seriously and could laugh at herself in almost every situation,” he says. “And she had this little leopard-skin bikini—at least I remember it as such, even though she says she never owned one—that drove me absolutely cuckoo.”

Julie says that while she and Dan are very different (“He is a type B personality”), every time she saw him on campus she got butterflies in her stomach. “He had the most beautiful blue eyes,” she says. Dan adds, “For the most part Julie and I serve as great complements to one another. When she yins, I yang, and vice versa. Despite our differences, there’s a mutual respect that plows through the disparities that might keep most couples apart.”
Exercise is one of the things that Julie and Dan both enjoy. Julie plays paddle tennis, runs, uses an elliptical machine and does yoga. Dan plays tennis and basketball. They belong to a club where they go as a family every Saturday, putting the kids in child care while they work out, then taking them swimming afterward. “Exercise is a big part of our family life,” Julie says.


Making a Difference
Julie enjoyed her earlier sales career but ultimately felt unfulfilled. Today, however, she’s passionate about the families she serves. She wants working moms to know that if a baby or toddler needs intervention, it can be free as well as convenient: In many counties, it’s federally funded, and services can be provided at home or at day care, on weekends or evenings. But some moms hesitate to bring up worries. “They’ll say, ‘I’m not feeding her right,’ not ‘She has feeding issues,’” Julie says. “If you have concerns, talk to your physician about an early intervention evaluation.”

For Chloe Kondrich, who turns 5 this month, family involvement was key to her ability to thrive, Julie says. Chloe’s brother, Nolan, who was 4 when she was born, participated in every therapy session. “He helped his parents encourage her to practice my therapy recommendations when I wasn’t there,” Julie says. Chloe made such an impact on her dad Kurt’s life that he took an early retirement option from his job as a police officer to care for her and returned to school for a master’s in early intervention. “Kurt saw the difference early intervention made in Chloe’s life,”
 
Julie says. “Now he’s going to have the chance to make a difference in the lives of other families with children who have developmental delays or disabilities.” Yet another happy ending.
 

For more resources, go to earlyinterventionsupport.com