Three Local Men Overcome The Challenges Of Losing Limbs
by Tim Wood

            Jon Vaughan sat on the bench in front of Yankee Ingenuity, the downtown Chatham gift shop he’s owned for more than 30 years, and began unfastening the right leg of his pants to provide a view of his prosthetic leg.  A woman with a small gaggle of children slowed as she walked by. 

            “Bet you can’t do this with your leg,” he said to one of the children, a boy of about six.  Vaughan took his gun-metal grey leg and twirled it 360 degrees.  The boy stared, apparently not sure whether to smile or run away.

            Having a “ghoulish” sense of humor has been an important factor in dealing with the loss of his leg to cancer, said Vaughan, who lives in Harwich.  Humor and the support of friends and family have helped Vaughan and two other local men through the trauma of losing a limb.

            “Friends were very key,” said Scott Hagan, also a Harwich resident.  The owner of Al’s Body Shop on Enterprise Drive, he lost his lower right leg after a motorcycle accident last April.

            Chatham resident Brian Phillips lost his lower left leg after a motorcycle accident off Cape two years ago.  He remembers waking up in the hospital and seeing “a bunch of people standing over me.  They told me what happened and they were trying to save my leg.  I just remember it was the worst feeling in the world, not knowing what was going to happen.”

            All three men have now returned to something close to a normal life thanks to prosthetic limbs.  Learning to function with a manufactured limb takes time and effort, but an even bigger factor is determination, said Brewster resident Michael Kennally, a physical therapist at the outpatient rehabilitation clinic at Liberty Commons in North Chatham.  He should know; Kennally lost his left leg above the knee after being shot while in the Marine Corps in 1996.  An athlete before the amputation, he was able to work his way back to play NCAA division two lacrosse using a prosthetic, and today has legs that allow him to walk, run and even scuba dive.  But he couldn’t have done it without a support system.

            “That’s huge, having that outside assistance,” Kennally said.

            There are nearly two million people living with some form of limb loss in the United States. According to the Amputee Coalition of America, 185,000 amputations occur annually, some 80 percent of them the result of a vascular disease.  Rates of amputations for cancer and trauma have declined by one-half over the past 20 years, according to the Coalition.

            Getting used to living without a limb can be a long process, but it doesn’t have to be, Kennally pointed out.  While it can take time for an amputated limb to heal enough to accommodate a prosthetic, a person’s motivation is an important factor in how long it takes to become functional.  It’s a lot of work, requiring physical therapy sessions two or three times a week at first.

            “You kind of have to retrain your mind that you need to use different muscles to do the work” of those that were lost, he said.

            All three local men had strong motivation to overcome their newfound handicaps.  For Hagan, it was getting back to work.  That’s why he chose to have his lower leg removed. After the accident, which happened at the corner of Enterprise Drive and Stony Hill Road, just up the road from his auto body shop at a corner he’d taken “millions of times,” doctors tried to save his foot.  The loss of a piece of bone just above the ankle complicated matters.  He could go the route of multiple surgeries over the course of up to six years, all of the time in a wheelchair and with no guarantee he would walk again, or have the foot taken off and be walking on a fake leg in five months.

            “I didn’t want to sit in a wheelchair for six years,” he said. “That was a bad option.”

            He still had to endure six weeks and 15 surgeries to repair damage he’d done to his leg, which included numerous skin grafts, from which he still has pain.  “It took forever to heal, and it’s still healing,” he said. 

            He had a taste of the challenges facing amputees when he arrived home and couldn’t navigate the house’s single step.  That first week home was the worst, he said, “Sitting on the couch, watching TV, looking down and seeing I’ve got no leg, what am I going to do?”

            He got his prosthetic, a “plain jane” carbon fiber limb made by a firm called Next Step, the first week in September.  He had to learn to balance all over again, and the scars from the skin grafts were painful within the snug fit of the prosthetic. 

            “But I’m better than yesterday and not as good as tomorrow, is what I keep telling myself,” he said.

            Phillips also endured multiple surgeries to repair his damaged leg, and it took several months for it to heal before he could be fitted with a prosthetic, which he also got from Next Step.  He set himself a goal of being able to walk with a cane by the time he was set to start classes at the University of North Colorado in Greeley. 

            Like Hagan, the initial period after coming home from the hospital was the most difficult. “The months or so right before I got the prosthetic leg were the darkest. You don’t really know what’s going to happen, if there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.” After enduring the long process of getting fit for the leg --- which involves making a plaster cast of the residual limb, out of which a perfectly fit mold is made, he was ready.

            “I was really determined to come out to school here,” Phillips said by phone from the campus, where he is now a junior.  “I spent the winter with no leg on Cape Cod and I was really, really bored.”  He didn’t worry about the pain or the challenge.  “After not walking for three or four months, I didn’t care any more.  Nothing was going to hold me back.  I was so excited to have a leg again, to be able to walk, that nothing bothered me.”

            A high school athletic, Phillips is working with his university’s sports department in the hopes of being part of a study which will include fitting him for a running leg, the cost of which is much higher than the $15,000 prosthetic he now has.

            Vaughan’s experience was different in that he had time to prepare for the loss of his leg.  He had been diagnosed with a form of soft tissue sarcoma in the lining of his knee, “so rare that only 20 people in the world, five people in the United States, get it every year,” he said.  Radiation therapy failed to kill all of the cancerous cells, and he was given the choice of more aggressive radiation therapy, which probably would have left him unable to walk temporarily if not permanently, or amputation.

            A landscape photographer who regularly hikes in dunes, forests and other terrain, he knew that with a prosthetic he’d at least be able to have a “relatively” normal lifestyle.  “I just didn’t want the uncertainty of radiation,” he said.  “And I wanted the leg 100 percent functional.” Amputation also offered the bonus of completely excising the cancer, which had not spread beyond his knee.  Five days after making the decision, he underwent the surgery.

            “I was glad it was like that,” Vaughan said.  “It gave me a very short amount of time to even think about it.”  He did ask the surgeon if he could have his leg after the operation --- his ghoulish sense of humor coming out again --- thinking he’d make a lamp or table leg out of it.  Alas, the limb was needed for research because of the rareness of his cancer.

            To prepare for radiation treatment, Vaughan had been practicing yoga and stretching regularly.  When it came time to learn to walk with his meticulously fitted Next Step prosthetic, he was fortunate because he was limber and his muscles were toned.  Even after physical therapy, he does nearly two hours of exercises and yoga every morning to keep in shape the muscles he’s learned to use to walk with his nine-pound leg.

            While he’s still working on his gait, Vaughan is learning how to adapt to things like walking in sand, which his leg, though controlled by a microchip, has a hard time responding to.  He’s also had to make some adjustments to his photographing regime, such as carrying equipment in a vest rather than a backpack, using a light-weight tripod and being careful to avoid water.  He expects he’ll be able to continue photographing much as he always has, though with at least one exception.

            “I don’t think I’ll be doing any rock climbing,” he said.  He’s had to learn to be conscious of where his foot is all the time and finds the town’s uneven sidewalks a major challenge. 

            “Walking Chatham’s sidewalks is like walking a minefield,” he said. “It’s good practice for being out on the trail.”  He also has to remember to plug is leg in to recharge it every night.

            Vaughan figures he’s at about 80 percent of his pre-amputation activity.  Kennally said it’s possible to return to most activities following a lower limb amputation, “but what happens is you redefine what your 100 percent is,” he noted.  Prosthetic technology, driven recently by the many amputees returning from the Iraq War, keeps getting better and better; nine years ago, he was the first U.S. veteran to be fitted with a computerized leg.  Now they are routinely given to returning servicemen.  But as much as the hardware can help, recovery levels are up to the individual.

            “It’s a real team effort,” Kennally said. “I can only do as much as the patient will let me, and visa versa; they can only do as much as I give them.”

            Like Vaughan and Phillips, Hagan hasn’t let the loss of his lower leg slow him down, now that he’s past the initial trauma.  This summer, his friends painted the bottom of his boat, got it in the water and helped him get to the outer beach. He plans to go snowmobiling up north as soon as there’s snow. And on an elevated platform in his garage sits the partially reconstructed Harley Davidson motorcycle on which he took a spill that April day.  Asked if he plans to get back on the bike, Hagan responds, “no question.”

            “It wasn’t the bike’s fault,” he said, “it was my fault.”

11/29/07