SAINT PETER
Clinician’s career is about helping amputees overcome devastating loss.
Idon’t know what a saint looks like, but I think I know what they do. They dedicate themselves to helping others. I recently visited the Hanger Clinic in Fort Myers and met a local saint, or at least somebody I consider in that category. Peter DiPaolo is Hanger’s chief clinician in Fort Myers, a prosthetist and orthotist. I didn’t know the terms, but discover it means they’re board certified and state licensed to fit upper and lower limbs and manage patient care.
DiPaolo, 41, pleasant looking with a very bald head and a big smile, greets me and his client, Steve Oliver, 74. Oliver is fit with a prosthetic right leg, beneath the knee. His walking motion seems quite fluid.
We follow DiPaolo into a small white room to perform a followup with Oliver, whose leg was amputated in 2015. “I had fusion surgery performed but then it formed a cyst,” Oliver tells me. “I was immobilized for two years, and the doctor said he didn’t see much point in doing another fusion. The bone had died.”
Fortunately, Oliver’s leg surgery was performed with an eye to fitting a prosthetic limb―and that is where the Hanger Clinic came in, a company started in 1861 by James Edward Hanger, a Confederate soldier whose leg was lost to a cannonball. He was also the Civil War’s first amputee. Hanger fashioned a wood replacement leg from barrel staves and patented an advanced device in 1871. At his death in 1919, the J.E. Hanger Co. had American and European offices. Today there are some 750 offices, 53 in Florida. The company rightfully gained some recent fame for fitting a Florida dolphin with a prosthetic tail. Oliver was fitted in New Hampshire, but connected with DiPaolo for the winter season. “Oftentimes, we work with patients who have been involved in traumatic accidents, and those fittings can be much more complicated,” DiPaolo says as he conducts Oliver’s examination.
Lee Oliver, Steve’s wife, broke into tears when her husband spoke of his relationship with Hanger. “The two clinicians I have
worked with, Paul Jenkins up there [New Hampshire] and Peter down here, have both been terrific. I am extremely happy with the result,” she says.
Her husband, she says, even brags about passing a driving test a month after being fitted. “He was in constant pain,” Lee says, wiping tears, “and now he is functioning like a normal human being!”
DiPaolo credits his family for steering him into the field. “I always knew I wanted to help people,” he says. “My mother taught me that. But I wasn’t exactly sure how. I went to UConn [University of Connecticut], and while I was studying there to get into physical therapy, I happened to do research on performance and custom sports braces. While I was doing this research, someone suggested I look into this field and, well, that is how it happened.
“I love what I do, and we have a saying around here, ‘Your success is my success,’ and that is how it works with our clients. On a technical level,” he says, “there are three aspects: the interface, which is what touches the skin, the socket itself, and the external component [in this case the foot]. But that is just the physical side of the fitting. A lot of what we do depends on attitude, and this is really where feeling the needs of our clients and doing our best to make their new limb as lifelike an experience as possible becomes our ultimate goal.”
I had come into this story naively, thinking that getting an artificial limb was kind of like buying a new TV at Walmart. You bought the device, put it on and that was it. But there is a lot more involved than simply purchasing a physical body part. The fitting is actually a process, and can take months or years, and sometimes it doesn’t work out.
DiPaolo may not be a sanctioned saint in the technical sense, but those like him, striving every day in the health service field to give damaged people a better life, are pretty darn close.
DiPaolo may not be a sanctioned saint in the technical sense, but those like him, striving every day in the health service field to give damaged people a better life, are pretty darn close.