The story below is from our July/August 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
Artificial limbs, like those from Virginia Prosthetics, are giving victims a new and rich life.
Dan Smith
Chelsea Patsel works on a new foot.
You have to wonder how you would react, having just been T-boned by a car on your motorcycle, lying on the highway looking at the grille of the car that hit you and seeing your dismembered foot lodged there.
Elijah Lawson, an automobile mechanic from Christiansburg, had that opportunity a while back and he took the philosophical long-view. He had suffered the loss of his foot, a lanced spleen, a broken second foot, a broken hip and an injured bladder. He was not in good shape.
There was an attempt to re-attach the foot, but that failed. Still, two months later, he got an after-market foot from Virginia Prosthetics in Roanoke and discovered, as he suspected, his life was not over. “I drove home from the hospital,” he says, smiling.
Dan Smith
“I drove home from the hospital.” -Elijah Lawson
The 29-year-old’s new “learner foot,” as he calls it “took some getting used to. There was a little learning curve. Adjustment is just practice.” He’s back to hiking these days and running is on his to-do list. He’s riding a new 900-pound motorcycle, as well. On the way home from the hospital, he stopped at Shelor Mitsubishi to ask if his job was still there. It was.
On the day of the Roanoker interview, there was another sign of re-adjustment. “I’ve been dating this girl,” he says, “and tonight I’m going to ask her to be my girlfriend.” Life, he insists, “hasn’t changed a whole lot, but my tap dance career hasn’t taken off yet.”
According to Pro Medical East, 2.1 million Americans have lost limbs and that will likely double by 2050, primarily because of diabetes, which is all but epidemic (285 million cases today could grow to 435 million in six years). There are 185,000 amputations a year in the U.S. Vascular disease is responsible for 54% of them, backed by trauma—like Lawson’s—at 45%.
The average cost for fixing this broken body is between $5,000 and $50,000. It is also worth noting that 30% of those who lose limbs suffer depression, post traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. Men account for 75% of amputations and 70% of prosthetics are below knee.
There are ongoing studies involving stem cells that could regenerate lost limbs and other studies linking the brain with a computer for limb control.
Doug Call leads Virginia Prosthetics these days and has since 1991 when he bought it from his father-in-law, Fred Murko, the 1966 founder. He’s worked there since 1983. There were seven employees at the beginning and that has been as high as 70 but is 59 now. Call sold the company to Ossur of Iceland in 2018 but remains as the president.
“We had researched with Ossur for years,” he says. “There was a lot of vertical integration.”
Patients are provided by physician reference (including the Veterans Administration in Salem) and Virginia Prosthetics has a significant presence in this end of Virginia with eight locations from Richmond west. Excel’s Hangar Clinic in Roanoke is also a major player. “It’s a neat thing we do,” says Call. “We help a lot of people.”
Call says delays in payment from insurance companies was primarily responsible for the sale of Virginia Prosthetics. “Three to six months was not atypical,” he says. “We sold just before COVID and kept everybody employed throughout.”
Dan Smith
Doug Call (left): “You don’t get into the field to get wealthy.” Phillip Call: “There is a lot of business in what we do.”
The concentration with the prosthetics is on comfort and safety, but, says Call, “As a body ages, it changes and prosthetics wear out and have to be replaced. Each of the prosthetics is custom-made in Virginia Prosthetics’ plant on Williamson Road in Roanoke.”
Call dates the development of prosthetics to the Civil War. “All wars have helped develop technological extrusion,” he says. Now, micro-processors are beginning to be used, especially in knees and hands. “They are very expensive and experimental, but they are out there. Upper extremity prostheses are only about 2-3%, but the opposing thumb is now unique, fitting hands and being bionic. We’re closer to playing the piano than to just pointing with the index finger.”
Call’s 31-year-old son, Phillip, a certified prosthetics and orthotics specialist with a new MBA (from Virginia Tech), has been working for his dad for a while, mostly on the financial end. “There is a lot of business in what we do,” he says.
“But you don’t get into the field to get wealthy,” says Doug Call.
“If you don’t fight those [financial] fights,” says Phillip, “you don’t help people. We design, fit, evaluate, get impressions to have devices fabricated using computer imaging.” That’s all very high-tech, but “some of our technology is older than me.”
Dan Smith
T.J. Rothmeier's American eagle-themed leg.
Virginia Prosthetics works “with the person to re-learn how to walk, talk, go to the bathroom, navigate inside and outside the home. When we bring in new amputees, they often roll into the office and walk out. That is the most gratifying part of the job. It reminds us of why we got into it.”
The product is ever-changing with new technology and materials delivering “no real reason people should be able to tell you are disabled,” says Phillip. “It increases what [the amputee] can do. We provide the tools to manage symptoms to help get through the day.”
Although, says Phillip, “plaster of Paris still has a place,” Doug says, “We’ve gone from artistic to scientific.”
The experiences of the region’s amputees have been vastly different, but most have dealt with the lower extremities.
George Heimiller of Bedford County lost his right leg below the knee to an infection in his foot, which climbed his leg. “They gave me the choice of losing my toes, which meant I’d have a lot of trouble walking, or the leg below the knee. I chose the leg” for the balance it allowed. He got the leg in 2018 and learned to walk on it in a month. A further four-and-a-half months of therapy led him to “do what I gotta do. I climb ladders, drive a [potato chip] truck, put up Christmas tree lights, cut the grass.
“In the summer, I wear shorts. There’s not much I can’t do that I used to do.”
Like Elijah Lawson, 67-year-old T.J. Rothmeier was the victim of a motorcycle accident, and like him, she’s enthusiastically back on the bike, a Harley Electric Glide. She even has a fancy, American eagle-themed leg.
She owns and operates a home for retired military veterans, Restin South in Roanoke County. In 2010, she fell asleep while riding her motorcycle (with sidecar) on a vacation trip. “I was comfortable and told myself I’d take a short—very short—nap. A couple of seconds. My foot was mangled and my choice was remove it or have surgeries for years.”
Her mother immediately flew from Washington state to Roanoke to care for her and her sister showed up to help shortly thereafter.
She “went public [with the amputation] from the get-go: wearing skirts, showing off my new leg. People are curious. They look at my leg.”
But her life goes on. “If I want to do aerobics, I do. If I wanted to run, I could. I get as much exercise as I want. Nothing is kept from me.”
Almost Natural
Breast prosthetics take some of the emotional pain out of mastectomies.
Dan Smith
Rebecca Whitehill: “We give them something that helps their clothes look good on them.”
Melinda Doss had not had a mammogram for a couple of years and she “got a letter from the breast cancer center telling me I needed to come in.” When the result came back this time she was told, “Something’s not right.”
Ultimately, “I found out I had cancer in both breasts … I was scared.” She requested a double mastectomy, performed at the same time because “I didn’t want to go through that [surgery twice].”
There had been no cancer in her family or even among her friends, she says, and “it was frightening. I thought, ‘This can’t be happening to me.’” This was Thanksgiving 2019, and she had her radical surgery in February of 2020.
The 56-year-old First Baptist Church pre-school teacher was deeply concerned that the surgery would leave her feeling like “something other than a whole woman.” But she had the support of her husband, Curtis, her friends and family and, ultimately, the professionals at Second to Nature, the small business that fit her with breast prosthetics.
Doss had implants at the time of her surgery but decided to have those removed and employ prosthetics instead.
Second to Nature was “so amazing. They welcome you, take all the time in the world. … I feel like a woman again, like I am somebody, that cancer won’t define me. People don’t even know” she wears prosthetics.
Second to Nature is one of two breast prosthetics centers in the Roanoke Valley and has recently doubled its space on Peters Creek Road. The other is Lourine’s Breast Prostheses & Wigs in Salem, owned by Kathy Cruff. Lourine’s was founded in 1977 and Rebecca Whitehill set up Second to Nature in 2010, moving to the Valley from Missouri. She and husband Scott run the business; he concentrates on the financial side.
Whitehill says prices for prosthetic breasts range from $379 (off the shelf) to $4,215 (custom) and Medicare/Medicaid cover the lower end. They also pay for several bras, which hold silicone prosthetics, per year. Many commercial insurance companies also cover prosthetics and several bras per year.
The products, says Whitehill, “have come a long way over the years.” A lot of that advance has to do with attitudes about prosthetics, which are much more accepted these days. “Sometimes [clients] cry because they are so happy,” says Scott Whitehill. “They come in wearing big T-shirts and they leave” proud of how they look.
“We give them something that helps their clothes look good on them,” says Whitehill. “In the past, bras were bulky and the prosthetics heavy, but “technology has skyrocketed. There is more comfort, more choices, more colors.” And there are bathing suits.
Prosthetics are for more than mastectomies. Breast reduction surgery often employs them, says Rebecca Whitehill. Fitting for a double breast removal is easier to do because of balance issues.
Where will technology and acceptance take the business? “I wouldn’t have thought we would be where we are 20 years ago” and the surgeries “are so much better” and less intrusive.
Says Doss, “Everything is so natural. The team at Second to Nature reassures you and takes care of you. They even let me model” at a show.
The story above is from our July/August 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!