The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
‘Hey, you never know’
Doctor performs surgery on his former high school science teacher
STAMFORD — One moment inside Arleene Ferko’s science class at Greenwich High School in the late 1990s turned out to be remarkably prescient.
The Advanced Placement Biology teacher asked all of her students where they saw themselves after graduating from college. As Ferko tells it, a student by the name of Sam Taylor said he wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon.
Ferko, who at the time had already had two hip replacement surgeries, responded, “Well, if I need an orthopedic surgeon and you’re still in the area, I’ll look you up.”
Students laughed, as Ferko remembers, but she told them, “Hey, you never know.”
Fast forward to 2021, when Ferko underwent a total reverse shoulder replacement surgery to fix a damaged right shoulder that had limited her everyday activities for three years.
Her doctor and surgeon: Sam Taylor.
“I’m just so proud of Sam for what he set out to do and he accomplished it,” Ferko said in a phone interview. “As a teacher, you hear kids say ‘I’m going to do X and Y’ and you may run into them 10 to 15 years down the road and they’re not even in the same universe of what they said they were going to do. Here’s a kid as a junior who said what he wanted to do and there he is doing it.”
Taylor doesn’t recall that day in Ferko’s class quite like his former teacher does. He remembers wanting to be a surgeon, and being immensely interested in medicine and anatomy, but doesn’t recall expressing a desire to work in orthopedics at that stage in his life.
What he does remember is Ferko’s class, which he described as formative.
“She’s somebody who
touched my life,” he said. “For me to have a positive influence on her mobility means a lot to me.”
The reunion of the former teacher and student may not have happened if not for a trip Ferko took to the Hospital for Special Surgery, or HSS, in New York City about seven years ago. She was there to visit a friend who was a patient. At one point, Ferko was looking at the names of the surgeons who worked there, spotted Taylor’s name, and made a mental note.
However, when she first sought help for her injured shoulder, she went to a different doctor. The diagnosis she received was something called “frozen shoulder,” which is essentially a stiffness and pain in the shoulder joint that can be relieved with physical therapy.
Ferko, who taught for almost 40 years, including 20 years at Greenwich High, spent months trying exercises to lessen the discomfort and pain she was feeling, to no avail.
She couldn’t sleep comfortably at night. Putting on a shirt was a chore, as she had to slide her right arm into the right sleeve and pull the rest of it on using only her left hand. She couldn’t reach for objects above her head, throw a ball or even open a kitchen cabinet with her right arm.
Inside her right shoulder, the ball of the humerus bone — the bone itself extends from the shoulder to the elbow — had essentially collapsed, and the muscles around the area atrophied over time.
Getting no relief, Ferko thought back to her visit to HSS
and remembered her former student. She looked up Taylor and was delighted to find that he was seeing patients at the HSS location in Chelsea Piers in Stamford. Ferko, a Stamford resident, made an appointment and a few months later, went to see him.
While she was fully prepared to reunite with her former student, Taylor had no idea he’d reconnect with his former teacher.
When he walked into the room to greet her, he only focused on her first name. Taylor said he usually doesn’t pay much attention to the last names of his patients, which is why he hadn’t made the discovery that his new client had a familiar surname.
“Hey Arleene, nice to meet you,” he said.
She responded, “I remember you from biology.”
It didn’t take long for the two to pick up where they left off.
“It was like no time had passed,” said the jovial and upbeat Ferko. “He still has the same twinkle in his eye and that great smile.”
After reminiscing, Ferko explained her condition and Taylor ordered X-rays be taken of her shoulder. As he examined the images, Ferko noticed something about Taylor’s body language that brought her back to the days when she was his teacher.
“He was always engaged and he had a way of looking at whatever was on the board or whatever question I had posed, he would tilt his head and you could see the wheels spinning and then the hand would slowly come up and then he’d ask his question,” she said.
As she sat in his office 25 years later, Ferko watched as Taylor looked at the X-rays and she saw his head tilt yet again.
She said he took out a piece of paper and drew a diagram of her shoulder to explain the surgery he wanted to perform. That surgery would eventually take place in October 2021 at HSS Orthopedics with Stamford Health at Stamford Hospital.
At her first physical therapy session afterward, Ferko said she was able to move her hand over her head.
“I hadn’t been able to do that for three years,” she said. “I did a happy dance in my brain.”
Every subsequent session seemed to deliver a new victory.
Now, she can cross her arm across her front and back and even scratch the middle of her back. And she was even able to throw a ball to her grandson overhand.
“In an X-ray it may not look like a normal shoulder, but as far as I’m concerned it sure behaves like one,” she said.