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TUESDAY 13 MAY 2014 • [email protected] • www.thepeninsulaqatar.com • 4455 7741 inside Neighbors MARKETPLACE grabs top spot • Wyndham Grand Regency Doha wins Leading at box office Conference Hotel award P | 4 P | 8-9 BOOKS • How to Be Well Read: Enjoyable literary list P | 6 RECIPE CONTEST • Send in your best recipe and win a dinner voucher for two P | 7 HEALTH • Trendy workouts rejuvenate old fitness tools P | 11 CARVING OUT TECHNOLOGY • Gmail’s leaked overhaul is radical; A NEW FUTURE more like Google Plus Setting out to defy what society thinks P | 12 about what is possible, Lacey Phipps carves out a new life. Before she chose Learn Arabic to amputate her feet, Phipps had to use • Learn commonly a wheelchair and was incapacitated with used Arabic words painkillers. Failed surgeries had left her and their meanings with no ankle bones. P | 13 2 PLUS | TUESDAY 13 MAY 2014 COVER STORY In pain and stuck in a wheelchair, young woman opts to amputate her clubfeet By Caitlin Dewey prostheses, Phipps, 24, bikes to school, birth defects and traumas. who either didn’t know about the cast- goes rock climbing on weekends and “The way we look at it now is more ing method or didn’t believe it would or most of her teens, Lacey plays forward in the intramural soccer about function,” says Chris Attinger, work. On one occasion, a surgeon Phipps couldn’t get out of league at Texas Tech University, where a plastic surgeon and specialist in operated on her without anaesthesia, her wheelchair, afflicted by she is a senior. She Irish dances with limb salvage at MedStar Georgetown giving her a flour-filled medical glove Ftwisted, deformed clubfeet so a local troupe and hits the gym three University Hospital in Washington. to squeeze for the pain. On another, a severe that 11 surgeries failed to fix times a week. “We ask the patient: What do you want doctor joked to Phipps that he’d just them. She saw orthopedist after ortho- Far from an anomaly, Phipps is one to do?” cut her legs off while she was knocked pedist. She downed pain pills and went of what doctors and other experts say By all accounts, Phipps’ case out — causing Phipps, then just a small under the knife for corrective surgeries is a growing number of young, active shouldn’t even have gotten that far. girl, to cry so hard the surgery had to that never helped. Then, in July 2012, patients who are changing the way Clubfoot, a common, congenital birth be postponed. she made a radical decision that would medicine sees amputation. defect that twists the feet out of posi- Each failed operation only made scandalize her family and change her Historically, doctors have sought to tion and makes it difficult to walk, Phipps’ condition worse, further life. preserve limbs at any cost. But as pros- affects roughly one of every 1,000 new- deforming her feet and forcing her, “Chop them off!” thetics have advanced, spurred on in borns. In the United States, more than little by little, from crutches to a Phipps said of her feet. “I got tired of part by injuries incurred in the wars 95 percent of cases are cured in infancy wheelchair, where she says she spent sitting in a wheelchair — really, really in Afghanistan and Iraq, and as young without surgery, using a series of plas- 99 percent of her time. By the time she, tired, “ she says of that moment, in the patients demand treatments that ter casts called the Ponseti Method her mother and a twin sister moved to slight lilt of rural Ireland where she will allow them busier, more athletic that gradually realigns the foot. the United States in 2006, Phipps had was grew up. “I got tired of watching lives, the emphasis has shifted. Where But Phipps, who was born in Fort no bones left in her ankles. Her tibia everyone else go out and not be able to elective amputation would have been Worth, Texas but grew up in a remote, sat directly on her heel bones, grinding do anything myself.” anathema 10 or 15 years ago, it’s now Gaelic-speaking region of Ireland, together whenever she moved. Now fitted with two below-the-knee seen as a viable option for a range of endured repeated surgeries by doctors PLUS | TUESDAY 13 MAY 2014 3 The pain was excruciating. At age 13, Phipps began a daily dose of mor- phine that would make her sleep for 13 hours a night and force her to nod off in class. That was only the first in a long, ever-rotating line of medica- tions: baclofen to relax her muscles, Lyrica to dull nerve pain, metoprolol and gabapentin to counteract the vari- ous side effects and complications she developed. “If you [had gone] to my house, it [looked] like a dispensary,” she quips, with “20 bottles [of different medi- cines]. Bottles everywhere.” Phipps has a wry — some would say odd — sense of humor. She collects socks, though she has no feet. She loves inventing unlikely stories to explain her amputation: a bear attack, for instance, which “people always believe.” A short, slight girl with boyishly cut black hair and wire-frame glasses, Phipps could be an unassuming presence — if not for her jokes and her all-neon wardrobe. On the day we meet, at the office of her prosthetist in Northern Virginia, she’s wearing blindingly pink and yel- low sneakers and a matching backpack. That somewhat contrarian spirit served Phipps well in her quest to walk again. Amputation had circled around in her mind for years, since that first insensitive doctor mentioned the pos- sibility when she was a girl. But her Reed, as well as at other government- trickled out into the civilian market- materials and methods that came on grandmother said no man would marry funded facilities and private companies, place, where they benefit patients such the market only in the past few years. a woman without legs, and her mother made huge advances in prostheses: as Phipps. The finished socket connects each of sobbed at the very thought. stronger socket materials that didn’t Phipps had her right foot and lower Phipps’ stumps to a prosthetic lower Amputation isn’t as simple as lopping become brittle or break with use; gel right leg amputated in July 2012, then leg, ankle and foot. off a leg and putting a prosthetic in its liners to sculpt to uneven bone; sophis- the left in mid-December of that year. It took Phipps more than 37 days place, explains Attinger, the MedStar ticated knees and ankles loaded with Performed at a hospital in Texas, the to recuperate after her amputations. Georgetown surgeon. A huge range of microprocessors and gyroscopes to surgeries were relatively uncompli- But in Hattingh’s clinic, she learned factors, including the length of the stub mimic the action of natural joints. cated and sparked no last-minute to walk again in three. From there, it left after the surgery and the structure “The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan hesitation: two clean cuts, a week in was only a few months until she was of its bones, affects how a prosthesis left a lot of soldiers with lost limbs,” the hospital (visited often by college scrambling up a rock wall at Texas will fit. Once a patient receives one, said Attinger, the Georgetown special- friends) and a month in a rehab center Tech. In late February, she tackled Palo it requires lifelong adjustment as the ist. “The progress in prosthetics since getting used to her prostheses. But her Duro Canyon’s most difficult trail with stub changes size and shape. then has been astounding, especially new legs weighed too much and fit too her twin sister and older brother, who Fortunately, both amputation and below the knee.” loosely, tripping Phipps whenever she also live in Texas. They made the 300- prostheses have come a long way in Many of those advances have since tried to get out of her wheelchair. foot descent in just over two hours. the past 10 years. Phipps says recent Phipps had heard about a Leesburg, “I am setting out to defy what advances in the field didn’t influence Virginia-based prosthetist named society thinks about what is possible” her decision to amputate, but there’s John Hattingh, who — like TV’s Dr is how Phipps put it on her “Feet Are no doubt they affected her treatment House — specialises in difficult cases, Overrated” adventure blog, which is and how doctors responded to her and she got in touch with him. On filled with updates on her mountain request. Facebook, he was promising free biking and trail hiking. Before the wars in Afghanistan prostheses if a patient had run out of “If she didn’t have the determination, and Iraq, amputations primarily were options elsewhere. Phipps discussed it never would have worked,” Hattingh performed on the old and infirm, fre- her situation with him — the repeat said. “It’s a joint effort.” quently diabetes patients. But the surgeries, her continuing struggle to Phipps was back in Leesburg last soldiers who had lost legs to roadside walk — and soon she was selected for December for adjustments to her bombs or other injuries were young, the prostheses. In July of last year, prostheses. She’s so active that she and they wanted more from their pros- Hattingh and his wife flew Phipps keeps breaking them. thetics than traditional patients did: up from Texas and installed her in Sitting in a wheelchair in Hattingh’s the ability to walk.

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