When Rocky Rivard’s longtime friend, Bruce Ritchie, landed in the hospital two weeks ago for an emergency leg amputation, he did not hesitate to organize forces to help renovate Ritchie’s Auburn house to make it more accessible. Never mind that Rivard was on his own journey with chemotherapy for a repeat bout of cancer.

Rivard put the word out on Facebook and gathered a team of volunteers, many of whom are professional contractors.

The team of 15 volunteers has been busy ripping out sheetrock and pulling up damaged flooring since Saturday. They installed a new ramp, new subflooring, and new sheetrock. They have plans to install a walk-in shower in the 100-year-old home Ritchie and his wife, Vivian, have lived in for the past 24 years.

“Rocky works hard, sometimes too hard,” Brad Deprey said, who has worked for the 69-year-old Rivard on and off over the years. “He’s old school. He doesn’t know what to do unless he’s working.”

The Ritchies’ home is on the banks of the Androscoggin River. They have been told they are not technically in a floodplain. But on Dec. 18 the river rose and flowed through their home. According to Vivian Ritchie, there was well over a foot of water on the main floor of their house.

“(My husband) woke me up early that morning, and he’s yelling up the stairs, ‘Vivian, you got to get up,'” she said. ” I looked out the window and, my God, the river was already over here. It was coming fast. I grabbed the dogs, grabbed my purse, and drove next door.”

In the weeks that followed the flood, Ritchie had started working on his house to repair the flood damage. In a cruel twist of fate, an infection that doctors say had been raging unnoticed in his body for over six months landed him in the hospital. To save his life, doctors amputated his leg.

“They say things come in threes;” Rivard said, “I want the three to be a good thing.” He has been busy making sure the third “thing” in the Richies’ life is this renovation.

Vivian Ritchie has been spending as much time as she can in the hospital with her husband as he recovers, while Rivard has been working on making the house suitable for his friend to come home to.

“He’s been asleep all this time: 13 days,” Vivian said about her husband, “When he wakes up, we’re going to have to explain all this to him. He better wake up. That’s all I got to say.”

Rivard begrudgingly took Monday morning off from the renovation project to go to his chemo treatment, for a cancer that has stubbornly returned. Later that afternoon, he showed up at the Richies’ house toting a portable chemo pump, to make sure everything was progressing.

“I was like, ‘Rocky, you need to go home and rest,’” Vivian Richie said. But Rivard would hear nothing of it. “I’m not one to sit around,” he said.

Rivard does not think of himself as special. “There’s a lot of people that need help,” Rivard said. “I’m just another person.”

As the day’s work got going Friday morning, Rivard gathered up some old flooring from the living room where Brad Deprey had been ripping it up.

“Be careful with that, Rocky,” Vivian Richie cautions, “Some of those nails might be rusty.”

“That’s OK,” Deprey quips, “Rocky’s a little rusty too.”

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