Helping mobility patients get back on the trail
Patrick Walsh was new to the wheelchair, an unwieldy black contraption that clearly annoyed the amputee. And sure enough, at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, it was obvious why: The chair caught on the petting zoo’s wire fence, holding up dozens of
people in line behind Walsh.
His assistant, a physical-therapy student, had to kneel down and detach the part that was stuck. It was the leg rest that Walsh didn’t need, for the leg he no longer had.
It had been only a month since a bone infection forced surgeons to amputate Walsh’s left leg just below the knee. Now Walsh, a former courier and taxi driver in his 50s, was a rehab patient learning to navigate the world in the most basic ways.
Five other physical rehab patients from Quentin Mease Hospital, plus a support team of a dozen
or so people, roamed the rodeo with Walsh on March 10. The motley crew resembled a hospital jailbreak.
For them, the rodeo wasn’t just fun. It was a challenge.
Outings like this let patients practice navigating the world beyond the hospital’s flat floors, explained Jorge Neira, the physical therapist who supervised the rodeo trip. At places like grocery stores, museums and Astros games, each participant pursues treatment goals such as steering through crowds, improving endurance and wheeling over uneven surfaces.
Now, the rodeo was presenting Walsh with all sorts of obstacles. Uneven surfaces. Speed bumps. Children and the occasional adult staring at the place his left leg used to be.
His wheelchair disentangled, Walsh wheeled himself in.
Multiple benefits
Besides offering rehab patients new experiences, Neira said, outings to places like the rodeo have another important benefit: new motivation.
By the time that patients reach physical rehab, Neira said, it’s common that long hospital stays have left them feeling isolated, frustrated and worried they’ll never be able to function in the real world.
For Walsh, the real-world, real-life test would come soon. Only 12 days after the rodeo outing, he’d check out of the rehab hospital. And just to go home, he’d have to navigate the stairs to his family’s second-floor apartment.
To pay the rent for that apartment, his wife is working double shifts at a Tex-Mex restaurant. Walsh, once a taxi driver, likely won’t be able to drive again until he gets a prosthetic leg; depending on how his therapy progresses, Neira said, that could take as long as a year.
Simply getting around town will pose new challenges. Jay Blazek Crossley, a mobility advocate who formerly led the Houston Tomorrow group, knows that firsthand: In 2014 and 2015, a rare neurological condition temporarily robbed him of the ability to walk. For the months that he used a wheelchair or cane, the activist who’d campaigned for better sidewalks felt their importance even more acutely: “I actually understand what a total transportation failure our policies are for people with disabilities.”
The average sidewalk was broken, cracked, interrupted by gaping holes or otherwise unusable, Crossley said. “There are vast areas of Houston that you’re essentially not allowed, that are not available to you if you’re not an able-bodied person.”
Bustin’ out
Inside the petting zoo at last, Walsh traversed yet another a surface he’d never rolled over before: animal bedding. When an assertive pygmy goat lodged itself under his seat, a petting-zoo attendant nervously tugged the animal away. Walsh laughed, his broad shoulders shaking under a baggy orange T-shirt.
In short order, a sheep plopped its front hooves on his left thigh, not far from his stump. Walsh’s assistant looked ready to rush him out of the petting zoo. But Walsh just brushed the animal away. Goats and sheep were not his biggest fear.
At the pig races, Walsh volunteered as a cheerleader for the pig who ended up winning. That victory earned Walsh a cheap prize meant for kids: a plastic pig snout on an elastic band.
First he wore it over his own nose, drawing laughs from the hospital staff members. A few minutes later, he took it off his face and put it instead on his bandage-wrapped stump.
“I’m having fun with it,” he said later. “Some people say I’m stupid for it … that I’m using laughter and jokes to hide from it.”
He was solemn for a moment. But at mutton bustin’, where 5and 6-year-olds clung to sheep sprinting across a dirt arena, Walsh’s enthusiasm returned. Most of the young spectators walking by his wheelchair gaped at the sheep, not Walsh’s amputated leg.
Walsh cheered for the sheep riders, sometimes letting out a loud whistle.
Over time, a pattern emerged. He applauded the kids who made it across the arena and got high scores. But he cheered even harder for the ones who had rough rides, whose sheep dumped them unceremoniously or tossed them in painful-looking tangle of limbs.
For those kids, his clapping hands, pale from weeks stuck indoors, reached over his head.